Page 33 - 彩虹橋 第四十三期家長通訊

Q2. How can we cater English language learning
to different kinds of learners and keep them
engaged?

Learners are individuals, first and foremost, and should always be
regarded through this lens. For students to truly be invested in language
learning, it is important to ensure that they feel connected to the process
and the material.

I like to remember that different types of learners respond best to different
approaches. When I teach in a large class, it is not always easy to identify
a learning style that caters to all my students, so I try to incorporate as
many kinds of different activities as possible.

For example, in the “Little Artist”
unit with the K2s, we were
focusing primarily on shapes
and creativity. Initially, this topic
seems the most plentiful for visual
learners, given that we recognise
shapes visually before we interpret them with our other
sense. Creativity is also all about seeing ordinary things
in fresh, original, and inventive ways. It felt natural to do
visual activities, like play guessing games with images, go
on a scavenger hunt with shape-detecting glasses, and
experiment with tangram puzzles.

That said, it was important to keep other types of learners engaged
and find ways to help them absorb the material effectively. For the
kinaesthetic learners, we went outside to go fishing for some new
and unfamiliar shapes. Afterwards, we challenged the students to
use gestures and poses to represent these shapes. For the auditory
learners, we learned some rhyming poems to identify the names of
the shapes and compare characteristics like the length and number
of sides. For the read/write learners, we recorded our observations
on paper, using context clues to complete our information. We
then incorporated some target sight words into different activities,
such as word searches and read-and-draw exercises. Read/write
learners were also able to consolidate the learning by reading The Shape of Things by Dayle Ann
Dodds and writing their own shape stories.

By exposing students to a wide variety of different activities, we are not only able to cater to a
broader range of learning styles, but also gain more insight into which approaches are most
effective for individual students

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