Implementation of Time Travel Agency (SOI-ES-40)

The context for the implementation

Learning Past Tense is a vital part of the Primary Education Curriculum for English. Teaching from a book can be rather uneventful for students, so I always try to find other resources to make my students’ learning more real.

One of the best solutions is to use Project Based Learning (PBL) in our lessons. I believe it gives students the chance to be the masters of their own learning processes by letting them choose their goals and the products they want to create. It really makes learning more challenging, meaningful and engaging, so this Learning Scenario was perfect for us.

The learning scenario Time Travel Agency created by Katalin Lőrincz is a project for storytelling. It aims to teach students how to navigate in a virtual museum, uses creative story-telling, ICT tools and a lot of collaborative group work.

Implementing the Learning Scenario

Before starting, I had to adopt Mrs Lőrincz’s learning scenario to my 5th-grade students (age 11 years) since it was created for older students. I must admit that the nature of her scenario made it easier for me to adapt it, and it was also motivating for my students.

Instead of creating a whole trip back in time through Europe, my students decided to create a single trip to somewhere in Europe they chose freely, then create a Back-in-Time leaflet for each of them. Every group chose a different moment in history and different countries to work with.

Apart from creating these Back-in-Time leaflets, they had to present them to their classmates (as if they were a real travel agency) creating a presentation (it’s possible to use Canva, PowerPoint, Prezi…). After the presentations, they voted which of the trips looked more interesting or appealing for them and why. This gave them a chance to practice both their speaking skills and creativity by using English language.

Reflections

We needed more than 180 minutes to implement this learning scenario, not only because of the age of my students (11) but also because if one really wants to rely on the benefits of PBL and cooperative work, we need to be patient and let students do it at their own pace. Instead of three lessons, we needed five to have all the products ready and present them.

It was very motivating for students and they were really creative in their final products. I found this scenario a great opportunity for my students to work with real materials.

I was also really surprised by how well they managed to learn the past simple tense of many verbs! I might not have been able to teach them so well during regular lessons.

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? Why don’t you read about the related learning scenario?

Time Travel Agency created by Katalin Lőrincz

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? You might also like:

• ‘Time Travel Agency‘, implemented by Ozturk Ozgu
• Implementation of ‘Time Travel Agency’, by Daniela Dorcak 
  

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