Along this year, we have considered including these aspects in our daily lessons.

Summarizing skills: We still find quite difficult to work on this skill at this age. However, we have tried to introduce it by retelling stories, films, anecdotes, etc. What we found rather useful was to show them some drawings related to the beginning, middle and end of a story (as a visual aid), so then they could make a clear picture of what it was about and the “summarizing” became easier.

Logical & creative thinking skills: we have the feeling that students are gifted by nature at the time they have to solve a situation. We have noticed that they are capable of facing a problem without the adult´s intervention and they can even provide an answer to an inquiry.

As regards “creative thinking”, we have worked a lot on creating songs and stories. It´s incredible to see how their imagination flies and how they can create on their own. Sometimes, we really feel that we are immersed in their own “fictional world”.

Communicative skills: the most enriching moment of our lesson was the “Assembly time”. Particularly, this year both groups were eager to participate and make important contributions to the lesson.

We worked systematically with functional language, in which most of the times we used puppets. They all were willing to participate!!

Reflective thinking: throughout the year we have working on this skill, especially when they misbehave. In both groups we had “naughty boys”, this implied stopping the lesson and having a word with the group or the child. After the second part of the year, we had the intervention of 4^th formers who came to the classroom everyday to ask for the goal of the day (it was usually related to behaviour or classroom rules) and at the end of the day they came back to check if they achieved the goal or not. It has a sort of effect the first weeks but then it vanished.

Bringing the world into the classroom: one of the projects we worked on was “The world cup is coming”, in which we “travelled” around some countries participating in the world cup and we learnt some cultural aspects of each one and we compared them to our culture.

Collaborating with other teachers: This year, in order to carry out the literary circles we have introduced “Centres” as an important routine in our lesson.  Since, at this stage students are not autonomous we counted on Miss Lau´s help. She was there 3 times a week, so as to assist students working on the centres while we carried out literary circles successfully. 

Miss Yesi & Miss Yami

Let´s share some activities!

As teachers one of the most challenging tasks is to help students grow as critical thinkers. This is not an easy task at any stage. 

It would be great to share some activities we all use so as to develop critical thinking in our group.  With the little ones we usually use an activity that is very interesting. We read part of a story and we ask st to imagine how the problem can be solved. It is amazing to see that most of them have lots of ideas, usually more than one ending. There are also students who cannot produce any solution, they need extra help, and they usually get an ending based on what others have said. This is clear evidence that we need to work harder with those st. This is just an example, one activity, but  we have to bear in mind that we have to prepare challenging  activities, activities that will make them think, reflect imagine, every day.

I know that most of us will agree with the importance of critical thinking, but it would be interesting to think what we can do so as to walk them through this process and compare it to what we actually do in the classroom every day. Critical thimking is not only for students!!!