While teaching young learners, course books provide a short glimpse of the cultural info about certain topics. Students tend to ask many questions about English speaking countries and this year when we were talking about Australia in the fourth grade, I encouraged students to write questions of their interest for homework.
Next lesson, students arrived with questions about Australian animals, dangerous species, the climate in Australia, sports but mostly about unusual animals. They also did a little research on their own and printed out photos of the interesting animals. We agreed on creating a special pinboard about Australia with their questions and answers.
I was really happy to see them write in English, and although they had some errors, they managed to do the task brilliantly. When they got stuck they looked up words in a dictionary or Google translate and managed to produce the final results.
One class created a pinboard of interesting facts about Australia, while the other created two posters about Australian sea and land animals.
As it was Easter coming soon, we ended the lesson with Aboriginal dot art and used it to create Easter messages and cards. They used felt tips and tissue paper.
Happy Easter!
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