I have been having a lot of fun incorporating the Winter Olympics into my English ESL classes. Part of the curriculum deals with Canadian culture and this seemed like a great opportunity to explore different areas of the country.
Research
I asked the class how they could find out about the Canadian athletes who are performing on the world stage right now. It was a great teaching moment about finding appropriate online sources.
I then pointed them to the Official Team Canada website and asked them to pick an athlete and click through to their profile page and complete this graphic organizer.
Blog Post
The next step was for them to create a blog post with the information they gathered in their research. They were to include the important information such as Name, hometown, sport, medals won, records set, and any interesting facts they discovered. Plus, they had to find a YouTube clip of them performing and embed that as well.
Team Name Assignment
Connie Wyatt Anderson wrote this amazing lesson plan entitled “Team Names: A Reflection of History” that ties in nicely to the first two activities I did with my class this unit. It requires students to research a Canadian city and then create a fictional sports team with a name and logo that reflect the history of the community.
My plan was to have each student research the community their Olympic athlete hailed from. However, some students picked the same athlete or same hometown. So I had write a list of cities in the board from which they could choose. I didn’t give them the option of doing our city or Toronto. I wanted them to do the research and not rely on what they already knew.
I like how the lesson goes through the history of the CFL in Ottawa. It is very detailed and includes the new team logo.
I then showed the students other team logos and discussed the artistic choices and importance of the names to the community. We looked at other fake logos and I created one as an example for a very small community in Ontario.
This was a great assignment that ties in nicely with what is happening in the world right now. It is definitely something I plan on doing again.
Teaching Tip Tuesday – inspiration, tips, and tricks from my classroom to yours.