SCIENCE FAIR (A PROJECT COME TRUE) AT SCHOOL

Here I share a compelling experience I have recently had with some of my students.

I will start by thanking the whole staff that made this possible; however, I am going to tell my own plot about the development of this incredible work. Now, I am going to narrate what we did.

We developed an action project that contained a five-chaptered framework over which the students focussed on writing based on a fact conditioned by UNO ´s yearly planning. We extracted four aspects to delimit the topic of interest according to the resolution available. For example, we chose the Year of Mountains and the students mentioned a possible theme to work with. We considered the variable object of study, the focus to give to that variable and then, space and time.

We also worked on the general features that an action project commonly has. As an illustration, we had progressive workshops on which a problem was talked about and created the goals to achieve and offer some dable solutions and recommendations. We also went deeply into the topic and researched about it for a quite long time and mentioned the type of research, materials and procedure. This project had a quantitative approach with which we discerned an acceptable methodological process.

The students also prepared outstanding replicas of impeccable pieces of atifacts, such as a water purifying filtre or solar panel. Conversely, they took the idea of a research project like a documentary research and made models of Mount Everest and explained the campsites for turists and how COVID-19 pandemic affected turism in the area. I can solely say they were deemed a great job by viewers in the event.

To finish, families were keyed up and they applauded their kids. The satisfation is really big and there are no words to express how fulfilled I felt that day. To mention some thanking thoughts, I will add the names of some amazing teachers that made that day a heyday, Aura, Kelly, Erika, Isabel, Willian, Emily, Raylet, Alejandro, Elba, María and many others. Let´s attach some evidence on this.

_{IDEA SCHOOL / NAGUANAGUA, VENEZUELA}

By Eduardo Becerrit

Pre-reading activities 2

This time, let´s talk a little bit about Skimming!

Skimming is a complex strategy used by C1 and C2 readers of any language. It is taught after all kind of pre-reading skill because the reader needs to search for specific data, such as: format, title, topic sentence, supportive sentences, etc; thus, this can glance through the text quicker. Here, it is also important to have awareness of lexical units and abilities to look for main ideas. Additionally, it is a nice strategy to develop and be more fluent in reading thanks to the awakening of background knowledge and specialised knowledge of the general framework.

On the other hand, Scanning is a less complex technique that is used to locate a datum of interest in a text. It is recommended for beginner, intermediate and upper intermediate learners, You search for a date or name that reminds you about other linking factors in your brain in regards to the content.

The preview techniques go from general statements to specific ones. I am going to show you an image of what the British Counsil says about this topic:

I am pretty optimistic that pre-techniques can trigger on a better performance. The last one, but not least is the Research Question Technique, which considers reading as a social practice that happens when students´background knowledge is activated. It is suggested to be provided in the initial part before combining any other pre-technique.

In the next publication, I will write about While-Reading Techniques, so stay tunned!

Pre-reading Activities

Before choosing a pre-reading activity, consider the text itself first!

1. Some have genre patterns we can identify easily.
2. Some titles are clues or illustrative.
3. Some others need deeper knowledge to discover what they are like.

Pre-reading activities: Word Associations, Discussions, Previewing, Predicting, Text Genre, Reviewing Familiar Stories, Scanning and Skimming are some of the great load of fun activities we can use to develop good reading skills.

Let´s check what they are about!

In pre-reading, we can use word associations to brainstorm or free-write or even sematic-map content.

*Brainstorming consists of letting the flow of ideas come out and jot them down as they come up.

*Free-writing consists of writing everything that comes to your mind as soon as it happens and avoiding those ideas to disappear in a determined period. Here, grammar and spelling don´t matter as they are irrelevant stuff at the moment.

*Sematic mapping is a technique that consists of unifying units of discourse to form new units with same or different meanings. It is very uselful to draw upon new ideas and be creative with language expansion.

Other thingswe must take into account are the pragmatic criteria of author, text topic, audience, context, etc.

So, here is where Anticipation Guidelines are to support us. It is a funny method that considers true or false statements to see what others know about a topic.

*Previewing is a high-speed-reading skill that allows us to have a quick once-over of the text to gain some clue of what it is to come. It is similar to a forshadowing. With it we examine the structure and identify key parts or ideas of the text.

*Predicting is to guess through language so as to know what is to come while you read a piece.

Things to deem about in a text are title, pictures, photographs, statistics, tables, graphs, words from the text, charts, etc.

In pre-reading we commonly come across some basic text genres, such as: literary genres; detective stories, epistolary novels, elegiac poetry, suspense stories, science fiction, dialogues, fables, fairy tales and non-fiction genres; newspaper articles, charticles, editorials, research reports, reader´s digest articles, philosophical treaties, biographies, etc. This is to name some.

In the second part, we are going to talk about the rest of the pre-reading techniques.

RHETORICAL PATTERNS IN TEXT PRODUCTION

Incredibly, there is vast amount of rhetorical patterns used in English literature. However, depending on other important factors, we can deinitely say we´ve got sort of writing. Let us remember this is only one aspect of a text.