Today’s learner-centered education aims to embrace diverse factors of human development and to optimize all kinds of multiple and socioemotional intelligences.  

The new approach to education made project-based learning important because it enables students to face challenges and situations, both academic and social, optimizing their abilities to solve problems and apply their knowledge in a practical way. In other words, project-based learning allows students to realize that their theoretical knowledge can have practical functions and that they can apply it both in class and in daily life. 

Therefore, applying project-based learning in English language teaching to elementary school children is very advantageous as it motivates them to engage with the language in a proactive and different way. There are a number of English projects that can break the routine and boost children’s interest in learning English, but only two will be discussed: traveling culture and comic book. 

Traveling culture 

This project engages children with language through the cultural heritage of a country, allowing them to discover that culture is not only monuments or ancient traditions but also human manifestations, such as pop culture, music, or cinema. This project will broaden the children’s general culture, use technology to learn how to do research, increase their creativity, and ingenuity to present a topic. 

The project can be developed as follows: 

Designate each team a country to research and present the most important aspects of its cultural heritage (movies and popular songs, outstanding characters, famous places, its national anthem, gastronomy, traditional and modern clothing, official language, among others). This can be presented through illustrations, slides, or multimedia presentations; it can be reinforced by using the clothing of the country studied, presenting a gastronomic sample, reproducing fragments of popular music or films of the region, among others. The idea is to go beyond a traditional school presentation, it is to create an environment that allows children to immerse themselves in the culture of the assigned country. 

Comic book 

The comic book is one of the most efficient projects for improving writing and reading comprehension skills in the English language. It also optimizes children’s narrative skills, through illustration or static images. It can be carried out in two ways: through the traditional method (from the cartoon drawing) or through multimedia design. 

If developed using the traditional method, it is recommended that children work on short stories and use resources such as cut-outs and drawings. The multimedia design method offers several options on the Internet, which makes it possible for children to achieve better graphic results. 

The process can be done in the following way: choose the story you want to tell, it can be an original story or a part of a story based on a movie, for example.  Elaborate the comic, either physically or digitally, using the necessary resources to design the comics. 

It is important to innovate in the way of teaching English to children in order to motivate them and leave behind the routine ways of teaching. If you would like to learn more about this topic, the International Iberoamerican University (UNIB) offers related studies, such as: Master in Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Photo: All rights reserved. Source: 5 creative projects to teach English to elementary school children