Planning and preparing the CLIL Unit

In this entry I want to focus on my reflections on planning and preparing CLIL lessons what I have done recently as one of my practicum tasks. I want to describe thoughts and impressions (positive and negative ones) which appeared during these two demanding processes.

Firstly, I had to come up with the topic suitable for CLIL Unit - it had to be broad area which, among other things, consists of different elements (small topics), has some relations with culture and gives students opportunities to use their thinking skills - lower as well as higher ones. After many hours of thinking I have decided that my CLIL Unit will be connected with HEALTHY LIFESTYLE. 

"I have a topic, but what next" - I thought. At this point, there was a time to plan particular lessons. I don't want to share many details about activities because I will do that in my next posts so as I wrote in the beginning, I will focus on my impressions. Therefore, what can I say?

Planning the CLIL Unit is not an easy task - obviously,  it is demanding and time consuming. I had to take many aspects into consideration while doing this. What I have in mind is that, I had to create various activities connected with the content, adjust them to students age and their language level as well as come up with appropriate language for learning the content. Moreover, what is very important in CLIL Unit is that coherence between the lessons has to be kept and each lesson should be summarized and assessed by the teacher - for me it was difficult because I did not want to use one method for this. Nevertheless, I somehow overcame this challenge by coming up with a few different ways of assessing my students e.g. having a discussion with them  or giving them small pieces of paper where they can draw what they have learned. Last thing that I always have problem with is timing and the number of activities - I have a lot of ideas but during the lesson it turns out that I do not have time to conduct. That is why, I had to reduce my ideas by choosing the ones that in my opinion seemed the most interesting and appropriate for kids - it took me some time but finally I managed it.

When it comes to preparing the planned CLIL Unit, it is even more time consuming- especially when materials have to be created rather than just found e.g. in the internet. As you can assume,  most of the materials like flashcards, things needed for making a poster or planning a healthy day presentation, quiz or aids inevitable during  games e.g. a big paper clock were prepared by me. Of course, I was looking for materials from the sources like pictures, worksheets or books- this,on the other required from me being a reflective and critical teacher in order to choose appropriate  and the most suitable staff.

After planning and preparing the CLIL Unit there is a time for conducting particular lessons. I will write my reflections connected with it in next posts.  So keep fingers crossed for me and wish me luck ;)