Bringing the Schmidts' and Webers' to Taiwan

A few weeks ago I got this crazy idea in order to show my sixth grades students what life is like for a student living in the USA. Coincidentally, I happen to know two sixth graders that live and go to school in the US. I thought about how cool it would be to involve my cousins, Garrett and Gwyneth, into one of my lessons. Of course, I contacted their parents as soon as I had a some what solid plan, to see if they would be interested. Not to disappoint, they were both very excited to participate!

Each of them created a short five minute video showing what they do on a normal school day. Including what they do to get ready for school, how they get to school, what their school day looks like, how long they are there, and what they enjoy to do after school. This is such a fun experience for my sixth graders here in Taiwan because the student life is so much different from their own. Garrett and Gwyneth put in so much work in order to create top of the line videos, I was looking forward to this day for weeks, and it was finally here!

My sixth grade classes absolutely loved them!! This is such an authentic way of learning, that they will hopefully remember for a very long time. Not all students comprehension level is as high as others, but they were still able to watch and enjoy the pictures while picking up on a few words. After watching the videos and discussing them with the students, I explained how we were going to write thank you notes to Garrett and Gwyneth. With a few prompts, the students were able to write thank you notes to the two telling them what their favorite thing about their day was, what they wished they could do in the US, and more.

I was so excited about this lesson because it stimulated multiple modes of how they are learning English; through watching, listening, comprehension, reading, and even writing. Overall, this lesson was so rich in content, engaging, and super successful. I was so happy that students were interested in watching the videos, and ended up learning quite a bit form them. It is cool to think about students being able to teach other students, very inspiring. Inspiring enough that most of my sixth grade classes want to make videos to send back to Gwyneth, Siena, and Garrett. Most of them put their best work in writing the thank-yous and it was really evident; each student brought contributed weather it was writing, drawing, or directing; they worked together to create something that had little structure for them to fall back on and I am very proud of them.

Below are the two videos that Gwyneth and Siena, and Garrett made. I also included short videos of the students reacting to various parts of the videos and some pictures of them working on their thank you cards!