Being a material designer

In my primary teaching practice, I design the materials for each lesson. I found this task really time-consuming but I came to appreciate its many benefits.

As a teacher, it is essential to bear in mind what students already know and try to relate it with the new language they are to learn; in order to help subsumption take place. When you design your own material, you reflect this relation. Since the boys and girls I am teaching have already dealt with places where you can buy food and they are learning some new food vocabulary, this Clasification Task would help them relate the knowledge they have and what they are learning.

In addition, while designing your own materials, you show your understanding not only of the learning process in general but also of the way your students learn according to their age. In Piaget's theory, pupils in the primary classroom are thought to be in the concrete stage. Consequently, they will find it difficult to deal with abstract concepts. While using Flashcards, they have access to concrete objects.

As part of a task-based methodology, in our first lesson young learners were presented with Tasks related to Top Chef, a radio programme. Their final task is to produce a similar programme in groups of four. In the process, they have written ridiculous recipes. While checking their productions, I saw that the organisation of the recipe is not clear for them (name, ingredients and their quantities and cooking instructions) so I decided to make it more explicit by designing both the Empanadas Recipe and the Flan Recipe.

I am still thinking of more practical ways of designing the materials for the lessons. So far, I have used Internet to download images, Paint and Microsoft Office Picture Manager to alter them, Audacity to record a listening, Microsoft Power Point in the presentations I have downloaded from BusyTeacher.org (just as a source of information), and Microsoft Word and Excel to organise materials, eventually exporting them to a pdf format. I hope I go on learning new tools to make my designing more efficient.