CYCLE 2

Action Stage

01 August

I'm in Buenos Aires. I can sense some time issues cropping up in the near future as I’ll be travelling around the country :S…that’s why I’ve been collecting sources for my lessons on Drugs for Year 1. First I downloaded pdfs from Wikipedia about cannabis and drug legalisation. Later I went for YouTube: I got trailers, some news reports about drug decriminalisation in Europe, and USA-LatAm. Then I remembered Amy Winehouse’s Rehab song. It fits perfectly for in their evaluation they said they wanted songs and documentaries. I went back to the results from Year 1 Evaluation Survey and I searched for more short vids about marihuana effects and all that.

As I was beginning to select my sources and think of activities I decided to keep Year 1 feedback at all times as a reminder of what they had said. I thought of adding more reading input but it wasn’t ranked. But because they suggested activities such as ‘summarise and comment orally’ I did include reading extracts from one of the articles.

OK, I decided to start with the song. Reason? To have a cheerful start. I did the usual brainstorming and use her drug/alcohol to introduce the topic. Because they had previously liked the ‘listen and complete the lyrics’, I did the same here. Then, rather than doing the ‘answer these questions’ I gave that a tweak and turned it into a group discussion to report later orally as they also demanded more speaking opportunities.

From there I went to some vocab work. I reread the Wikipedia articles and I decided not to use them because of their appalling quality. I only used one picture which I could link to one vid about a doctor talking about short-term effects. The vid was better than the articles and I could still develop the listening activities they had chosen in the survey. Because the vid is also flawed content-wise, I designed a simple exercise to encourage critical thinking.

For each of the three videos I selected, I did activities like they wanted. I disregarded some of the other news reports and trailers because their English was a little too high and were quite European in treating the topic. I also selected only one bit of a video for it specifically deals with marihuana as a gateway drug.

I ended with a debate-type of activity.

I think that experience, feedback and observations from the first cycle have allowed me to be more selective. Rather than preparing a 9-page handout, now this one has 4 pages. They’re not as crammed as the others. This will take 2 lessons only so that I am fair with A and S.

Nice first attempt! Let’s see what I can get or change during August J