This morning I had a refreshing fourth-grade lesson.
After teaching in the Hong Kong local education system for a year, you realize the curriculum is tight and there is a lot of learning that needs to take place (whether the learners decide to keep up or not). Grammar structure upon grammar structure, compounded with vocabulary words, phrases, text types and reading/writing/speaking/listening skills... oh, the life of a 7 year-old ESL kid in Asia.
This morning was a reading lesson. Students went through an interesting story about some kids who went on a school trip to a museum, and then completed a cloze passage to create their own story -- almost like madlibs, but planned.
The objectives of the lesson had been taught. Kids understood the characters, setting and plot. Check. Kids comprehended a parallal text and inserted their own stories. Check. Now, with the reading teacher gone, it was time for my 'general English' lesson, where the pressures of teaching quantifiers, personal pronouns, adverbs of frequency and comparatives/superlatives were on my shoulders. They're being tested on these structures in two weeks and I have't even introduced the concepts to them... how are they supposed to grasp them?
About to change their focus, I reflected on the reading lesson. Students had taken turns to share with their peers about how on their museum outing, they'd flown to the museum by UFO or ridden the last dinosaur around the displays. The kids laughed. It was great. These English Language Learners were reading and listening to stories they'd written, and found humor in the content. Both the author and the audience are affirmed in purpose. I didn't want to just put that to waste.
Screw it.
I whipped out some A3 paper and asked students to draw a comic strip about their newly designed story. In pairs, they discussed their ideas to create a new plot. And just like that, every student was engaged. Every kid had their pencil (or colour pencils) to the paper, and they were excitedly and purposefully speaking English to create a story they had interest in. The room was inundated with imagination. They were in their element, expressing themselves in something as equally important as language: illustration.
Walking around the classroom, I was assured as a teacher that, although it was not a lesson teaching adverbs of frequency or vocabulary words related to the unit, this lesson still solidly consolidated "English" aspects (story mapping, plot, characters, setting, dialogue/quotation marks, connectives,...) and was well-worth it. They may be one lesson behind in the piles of grammar to learn, but at least they got to draw. There may not be as many A, B or C's written on paper, but to step away from the quantitative mindset of learning, I just know they learned something in the process. About life. About working together. About English. About stories...
Drawings are simple. Drawings are powerful. Every now and then, don't be afraid to just let them draw...