COMENIUS REGIO

YEAR 2010/11

FRIENDSHIP Project

Subject: ENGLISH

LEVEL: 1st ESO . These 12/13year-old students have changed from the school to the
high institute this year. This project takes place during the third term , so we will put
into practice most of the contents learnt in this course. We have chosen this topic with
the intention of helping them to build a better relationship among them, because they
do not form a cohesive group. There are different levels: 4 out of 23 pupils have got a
higher-average level; 10 out of 23 pupils have got an average level, they show interest
for the subject and they usually get parental monitoring.
6 out of 23 have got lower- average level, they show interest for the subject but just
when they are in class, they do not usually have parental monitoring and therefore their
individual personal homework is null and void. The other 3 pupils have in common that
they do not show interest at all for the subject.

Functional Objective: Writing an e-mail to a penfriend or a friend.

Learning Objective :
- being able to recognise basic adjectives about personality to describe themselves:
“confident, shy, noisy, quiet, friendly, unfriendly, happy, sad...
- being able to talk about their own and other´s feelings (happy, sad, proud, angry, feel
calm, anxious, nervous), showing respect to differences and understanding other
realities different to theirs.
- being able to talk about physical appearances, describing a person using vocabulary
according to their level: verb to be, to have got, to be wearing, adjectives : young , slim,
fat, curly, good-looking, plain (instead of ugly)….. and vocab related to clothes.
- being able to talk and write about their daily routine.
- being able to produce a descriptive text, a mail.
- being able to recognise different vocabulary related to friendship (acquaintance, best
friend, close friend, school friend, partner, mate, pal…)

Resources:

- Pp about friends.
- Computer with access to internet.
- Printed materials: My feeling diary, e-pals international friends.
- Text book, Energy by Steve Elsworth and Jim Rose, Pearson Longman,2007.

Timing:
In class: Four 50 minute sessions .
Outside the class: The pupils meet together to prepare homework and practise their
speaking about the topic if they consider so. Each student decides when and how long
they need to meet.

Warm up preparation activity:

In the previous session, we have asked the pupils to talk to their parents about
friendship and our purpose with it was to make them participate too. So they have come
to the class thinking about a definition about friends and what features they think must
have a person to be a good friend.

Pedagogical Scaffolding:

Step 1: Getting a general idea about the activity.

At the beginning of this session we explain to the pupils the goal of the project and we
make them clear what they are expected to do and we negotiate together the evaluation
criteria.
All the pupils have clear in mind that there are two things they have to do in this
project: 1st talk and participate; 2nd write an email (we will check many contents we
have previously worked along this year). We all agree in taking active part in the
speaking activities and they agree in doing extra homework if they speak Spanish while
the oral exercises.
Then we will start this session asking general and open questions about friendship, to
check what pupils think about it. We brainstorm on the blackboard, we write the word
friends and ask them to think about two things they immediately think of, when they
hear the word. They do the same exercise with the new words and after twice they have
to build a sentence with the new words. They have to say the sentence they´ve made
and explain its links with the origin word “friend”.

It is important to emphasise that we think in our class we have to use the foreign
language as much as we can and the mother language whenever necessary in the
benefits of communication.
Attention to diversity: With this activity, all our pupils can work , all of them can
brainstorm the words related to the word friend and the higher level ones can explain
the relationship of the resulted sentence they´ve built( they highest level ones can
explain the difference in English and the average level can do it in Spanish).

Step 2: Acquisition of new vocabulary .

We show the pp about friends and colours. We brainstorm on the blackboard about the
different types of friends we´ve got and we get ready for another oral activity.
Pupils have to write in a piece of paper the name of three partners and in the upper part
they have to copy the following questions:
1 Where do you live?
2 What´s your telephone number?
3 What are you like?
4 What´s your favourite colour?
They stand and mingle up asking one another the questions. If the partner they chose is
talking to a different one they have to talk to another free pupil. All of them exchange
information and they can´t use Spanish. We check polite set expressions( such as “can I
ask you some questions?” “please”, “thank you”, you´re welcome” “nice to talk to you”
“excuse me” etc) and encourage them to use them while talking.
When they finish we ask them how they felt when they listened polite set expressions
and with the information they have gathered they have to do a composition for the
following day.
Attention to diversity:
In this activity the lower levels have got the compulsory questions and the higher levels
can add different questions . We tell them they can work in pairs to do the homework.

Step 3: Analysis and sharing.

We correct the homework (they practised orally the questions and they´ve written the
information they got from their partners practising with the 3rd sing. person) and we
share their impressions about the colours from the pp and their partners´ favourite
colours.
The teacher asks general questions to see what they know about email.
We explain briefly concepts like subject, Cc(carbon copy), Bcc (blind carbon copy),
recipient together with ways to start and end an email in English.They work in the
classroom their mails. We hand out photocopies with exercise 2 and 4 for the lower
levels and the rest of the students are free to write their mail knowing as they know they
have to describe themselves, talk about them and their daily routines.

Step 4: Creativity.
The students bring their mails printed,some have decided to write to an epal, other to an
old friend but all of them have something to show .We ask them to use an imaginary
name or nickname in their mails . The lower levels have followed exercise 5 as a model
and they have done something similar but changing the data. They exchange their work
and they have to guess who wrote the mail by reading the information. Through this
game they practise their reading and speaking again.

Step 5: Autocorrection.
They are asked to correct the mails they read and have to guess who the writer is. In this
way, not only does the teacher correct, they can learn from other´s mistakes.We also
comment all the oral activities in general. The students think about what they have
learnt about the topic and their learning process in general.

Conclusions:

• We have motivated students through sharing experiences and information about

themselves.
• They have created their own materials.
• They have used previous knowledge and shared with others
• Team work: They have helped each other, corrected each other and used the
experience to correct oneself.
• Evaluation criteria: it has been shared with the pupils to make them participate.
• This approach allows each level to work according to their own capacity and
limitations.
• The use of audio visual materials and team work reaches every type of pupil
(auditive type, visual type and kinesthesic type) helping all of them engage with
the project.
• This methodology has allowed the students families involvement in their
curricular activities.
• This methodology has finally helped the teachers involved in the projects to get
different feedback.

Araceli Ruiz Guerrero

Profesora de Inglés
IES Bjo Cinca Fraga.