THE SCIENCE OF VIRUSES

Why not visit the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco? It is a good chance to travel virtually and use the resources from their amazing website   to help your learners explore Coronavirus and the science of viruses, see how they affect us all and also celebrate International Museum Day (18 May). The resources vary from videos, activities and articles.  There are even activities provided by science teachers.  You will be impressed by how much  your learners can discover about viruses. 

“BLOOM Stories of implementation” competition

Since 2018, the BLOOM project enhances knowledge about bioeconomy by providing teachers with ready-to-use material, to engage young people. This year, in collaboration with the STEM Discovery Campaign 2020, BLOOM is organising the “BLOOM Stories of implementation” competition to reward the most innovative classroom implementations of these materials. Join the competition and share your story!

How can your sctudents take part in this competition?

The ‘BLOOM Stories of Implementation’ competition will reward the most innovative classroom implementations of bioeconomy using the materials included in the BLOOM School Box, in four different categories of submission:

[1] Teaching bioeconomy in primary schools (individual work);

[2] Teaching with bioeconomy in secondary schools' STEM classes (individual work);

[3] Integrating STEM teaching with bioeconomy (teams of two STEM teachers of different subjects);

[4] Integrating STEAM teaching with bioeconomy (teams of up to three teachers of different subjects, including at least one STEM teacher and at least one non-STEM teacher)

When?

Teachers can start organising their lessons starting from November 2019 and prepare their stories to be submitted between 1 February and 30 April 2020 at 23:59 Central European Time (CET)!

The winners of each category will be invited to a teacher training workshop in Brussels, with travel, accommodation and meals covered, and the 20 finalist entries will be published on the School Network page of the BLOOM project!

Steps to participate:

1) Choose which BLOOM School Box resource works well in your classroom from the BLOOM School Box collection

2) Think of how you will implement bioeconomy in your classroom and if you will work collaboratively with other colleagues or on your own.

3) Run at least one bioeconomy lesson with your students and think about what evidence you have of your students’ engagement following your lesson(s).

4) Choose the appropriate submission category, double check the competition’s terms and conditions and fill in the submission forms (available since 1 February 2020).

Whether your school decides to take part in the competition or not, the resources this project offers in several languages , English and Spanish included, are really powerful to work on Bioeconomy topics. 

abpi resources for Science/Biology/Chemistry/PSHE, Citizenship and Physics

 This site  is supported by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. It provides teachers and students with high quality, free, curriculum-related, interactive resources containing animations and diagrams which can be downloaded as long as you accept their terms and conditions, which involve using the resources for educational purposes in the original form they are downloaded. Fair enough, I reckon.  

In order to see the topics you may find, you should visit the  list you can access from here . As you can notice, there are resources for all age ranges, from 5-year-olds  till 16+.  

The resources also include  diagrams and animations you can use in your lesson plans  by downloading them. Some topics  have additional worksheets both for teachers and students. These can all be accessed through the Download library. 

In the International Year of the Periodic table, may I suggest that you should try out  this great lesson plan ? 

The  resource above  includes an interactive game and so do many other topics. For instance, you can ask your students to find out about the properties of various materials by carrying out this interactive activity. 

Do you need any diagrams, posters  or animations to embed in your unit? Enter the download-library and filter the type of resource, age range and topic you are searching for. 

I am sure you will agree with me that this is a superb site so on behalf of all CLIL teachers I work with,  I would like to express our gratitude to the  Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry  for  the high-quality resources they provide for free and, above all, for their fight against disease.

Making input comprehensible in CLIL classrooms

As I wrote in previous entries on this blog, there is no doubt that explicit vocabulary instruction is a must in order to succeed at making our students acquire subject-specific vocabulary. The best  results regarding the use of classroom  strategies that facilitate vocabulary acquisition will undoubtedly occur when language teachers and  content area teachers work together. In our next seminar session, which will take place on November 6th, we will talk about your specific schools and the possibility of working as a team .

Right now, I would like to mention four  of  the strategies that any teacher can put into practice and be sure that, if done repeatedly, will have a positive impact on the amount of vocabulary our students acquire:

1)  Keep vocabulary notebooks made up of word maps organized by units.  We will see several examples. This is one for Maths. 

2) Visualize the key  words and concepts which are essential in the unit you are teaching.  Do you know about wordsift? It is a very useful tool both for teachers and students. We will analyze its features together. 

2)  Use charts and tables when students are learning new terms and concepts in your content areas. This simple strategy requires very little preparation and works in all content areas. You can find an example for a Science class here. 

3)  Teach  students how  to pay utmost attention so as to  find context clues that help them to guess the meaning of new terms and concepts. Needless to say that context clues are not always effective to determine word meanings when we are talking about content-specific  academic vocabulary but we need to train students for the occasions when context clues do help. These context clues can be provided by the author in 8 different ways! Would you like to know which ones?

4) Use "Word attack" strategies. Do you like the name?  It sounds promising, doesn't it? Would you like to know a bit more about this strategy? 

I hope you answered "yes" to the questions above and I promise to provide you with the answers in our seminar session on November 6th. 

Happy All Saints' Day to all of you.

PARTICLE FEVER: A DOCUMENTARY FILM FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES

                                 

Particle fever (2014) is a fascinating documentary film that follows six scientists working to see if the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will produce evidence of the Higgs boson, commonly referred to as the "God particle." Although safe for all ages, the subject matter of Particle Fever makes this movie most appropriate for high school students and older. The science presented is top-notch, with complicated physics explained in language that everyone should be able to understand.

Why am I writing about this documentary in my CLIL blog today? Well, I reckon that this documentary conveys in a superb way the passion of some researchers for Science but also the honest attitudes one can adopt to grasp knowledge of our world.  Therefore, I would say that we can make use of this documentary in several subjects: Technology, Maths, Physics, Philosophy or Citizenship. You can follow the official trailer below these lines: 

 If you like the proposal, let me just help a bit with some study questions. You can find them here.

Breakthrough to CLIL for Chemistry and Physics

Cambridge University Press has just released a couple of books aimed at helping EFL students who are learning Physics and Chemistry through English to undertand the content of their subject courses and build the necessary English language skills for those contexts. The book is made up of several units, each of which covers an area of Physics or Chemistry. As for the areas of English language covered in these books, they have been selected for their relevance to understanding and discussing the content areas of Physics and Chemistry.

I  am sure the publications above will be of great help for  those of you teaching Physics and Chemistry through English. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Breakthrough to CLIL team on their great work.