Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Olymipics

Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Torch by s.yume.

      I was reading my blogs that I am following on my google reader and I came across my ESL Lesson plan blog here is the link so you can check it out.  It gave a description of the history of the Olympics and talked about how they bring all the countries together.  Then they gave the assignment to watch the Olympics and embrace their new language as their own.  I thought this was really neat to use such an integrated cultural experience into an ESL classroom.  The Olympics exposes many different cultural backgrounds all at one time, this is a great way to introduce your students to both a history lesson and a cultural lesson.  I like how he wants them to speak in their new language about the Olympics, it brings everyday life into rich conversation.  I also think it is great that he tells them to come with questions about words, or culture traditions they have.
    I definitely like how this lesson plan incorporates culture and language.  Knowing the culture helps you learn and understand the language of a country. I feel like this assignment will help them grow in their language learning. What do you feel about it?

2 comments:

  1. The Olympics is great because it unites everyone in the country. There's still those people that don't care and don't tune in to watch, but for some reason the majority of America has tuned and even watches curling as if they're fanatics. Therefore, this is such a wonderful time and subject to incorporate into a class with ESL students.

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  2. I do think that teachers should definitely try to incorporate the olympics into their lessons, at least during the years that we have the olympics. Its hard to talk about the summer olympics, because we are in school then. But we are in school during the winter olympics, and most likely these kids are going to hear their parents or someone talking about who won what in the games, so why not use them in the classroom to study something? If nothing else, we can at least start to expose them to a world outside their own. I know its hard to really grasp the huge-ness of the world when you are so young.

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