It is astounding how fluent these students are in English. It was explained to me that in such a small country with a language that no one else in the world speaks, it is necessary for students to learn other languages. Swedish is also compulsory for students in Finland. In addition, many students choose to take a third language! Americans are typically barely bi-lingual. In Finland it is the norm to be quadrilingual!
In the grammar class, 2nd grade (11th grade) students were learning about prepositions. In Finnish there are no prepositions! All prepositional information is conveyed by different endings on the nouns (don't quote me on that... I can only speak about 5 Finish words and don't know any grammar).
All the students had a laptop. I was told it was a "Bee-odd" school. No, that does not mean that students are encouraged to be strange. :) That is how the Finns pronounce BYOD or Bring Your Own Device. However a cart of computers was also wheeled into the room for students who did not bring their computers or just wanted to use a school one. It was clear that the school ones took a little longer to power up and log on.
They began by listening to a YouTube video about prepositions. Then they talked a little bit about them. Everyone then went to a site called Opinaika. Students not only take quizzes using this site, but also do other online lessons. They are assigned, in general, to complete a certain number of points on Opinaika - which can include interactive lessons, quizzes, etc. Also, if a student is absent and misses participation points, they can make up for it on Opinaika. From what I can tell Opinaika is a publisher of content for English classes (and a few other subjects). The teachers cannot customize the lessons, but they can pick and choose which units/lessons students see and do. It also keeps track of student statistics on these lessons for the teacher. In addition it compares the students to students in other schools. The teacher said they also use Quizlet and Kahoot in similar ways.
In this class there were 26 kids - but the room had room for up to 35. I was told this was a middle sized classroom. The students were on task and basically stayed on the right site when they used the computers. This might have been partially because the assistant principal and I were at the back of the classroom.
The next class I went to was an oral English class and it was in the "new" classroom - the one I posted pictures of in my previous post. In this class I got to participate in the group work. The students were debating in groups. The text had a list of questions and each group went through and debated as many as they could. I was in a group of three boys. I'm including a picture of the questions below. I was able to participate in some surprising ways. First, and less surprising, I gave input on the statement "It is difficult to be Iranian in the US" - saying that I agreed. Then, there was a statement about how the Finns helped the Karelian refugees after the Second World War. I, surprisingly, was the only one who knew that the government granted farm land to the refugees. The boys said that they were embarrassed that I knew that they they didn't. :) I had only just learned about it in passing the day before. I didn't say that to them though. A German exchange student said, "I am from Germany, but even I am embarrassed!"
Oral English classes tend to be smaller than typical classes. It is an optional course, not mandatory like many of the other English courses. This course was taught in the "new" classroom, the one I posted pictures of in my previous post. It was very well suited to having discussions and doing group work.
No comments:
Post a Comment