Designing a Task Collectively - Present Continuous - A Cultural Tour

 
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I have been hearing about connecting and the power of collaboration over the net, but never before have I felt the strength of a global group of educators willing to share and learn. Taking the Eletronic Village Online (EVO) was for sure a great decision I have made, and I am flabbergasted. Not only did I realize the cultural mix in the group but also the willingness of every and each one of us to implement purposeful changes in our teaching. We all want to be the best teachers we can, and to reach this aim here we are clicking, daring and sharing. Inspired by such a rich environment, I decided to invite teachers to do something I love doing! I thought about inviting people to collectively design a task for our students because I feel that we can do an amazing job.

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 I am describing an activity for teaching the present continuous below, and I added a challenge for  teachers who share my passion for material design and collaborating worldwide. When comes to teaching the present continuous, I usually have textbooks to follow, but I tend to substitute the contextualization part in the book for a hands on, task based approach. I usually use two different pictures. In A there is a girl riding a horse, in B there is the same girl eating an ice- cream. Students interact a little to find the seven differences using a sentence prompt on the board. In my picture the girl/boy (details) is __________. Only after having used the structure do I expose students to discovery questions to realize the rules, I mean verb agreement and form of the present continuous. Eventhough the structure and usage are similar to a verb tense in Portuguese, my students tend to forget to use the verb to be. I go to the practice stage in the book, and move on to personalized practice and further practice before some of them grasp the use of the present continuous. I saw a great movie scene and decided to design a controlled practice. Here it goes:

1. What do we usually see in the street? Watch the video segment and check if anything of what you said appears in the movie. 

2. Check the sentences that are true.

In the scene, the cars are moving.

The man in a suit is talking to his audience.

The boys are running.

The girl is eating.

The old lady is crossing the street. 

The cars are honking.

People are swearing. 

3. Get a blank piece of paper and write as many true sentences about what happens in the scene  as you can remember.

I remember that... The girl is...

 Challenge:

Would you like to help me design a multicultural follow up task? So here is the deal: We could take pictures of us and our families having fun at different places around the world and create a set on flickr under Creative Commons to be used by all of us. Pictures should depict a simple cultural aspect of the place so that students could learn about the cultural backgound, curiosities and geography while practicing language. If  you'd like to give this idea a try,  you could tweet  me your picture @danilyra and tag it #2012evosundaypics and I'll start a set and post the link here. You could also write a link to your picture in the comments area below. Here is an example to help you visualize.

           
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danilyra/sets/72157628966119303/