A good English coursebook will have a text or listening or some other lead-in to introduce grammar or other target language through a natural context. (And if it doesn't, as a teacher, I'll come up with a context.) The book I've been using in a private lesson used an article about houses made of trash and recycled materials to introduce passive voice. We had spent so much time discussing the text (this 10-year-old student is very innovative and had a lot to say about it!) that I wasn't able to get deep into the grammar with him during the time we had.
In the next class, rather than go back to the text we had spent so much time on, as a context to re-introduce and review the grammar, I decided to take the spirit of what it had to say and give my student a mini maker challenge.
As he came into class, I gave him a box full of recyclable materials I'd been collecting. His curiousity piqued, he asked, "What's this?" It was a challenge to make something, within a time limit. He went right to it, picking up plastic cups and paper tubes, observing them, putting them together in different ways. There is always a huge element of play involved in the maker process, and it was fun to watch him go at it.
Because this was just a quick activity and likely not a project he would like to keep, I only gave him tape to mount the pieces together.
In a few minutes he was talking about his building. It was a gate, and he showed how the pieces detached to form a temple. I taught him the word columns--the paper tubes and cups reminded him of a Greek or Roman column, and his imagination took us both to another world.
As he put the finishing touches on his temple, I wrote on the board a few key verbs with prepositions, based on his work: "make/of, connect/by, decorate/with, attach/to." Reviewing the formula for passive voice, object + BE + past participle, I elicited from the student some sentences describing his temple:
- The gate is made of paper cups and styrofoam.
- The columns are connected by a paper bridge.
- The bridge is attached to the columns.
- The columns are decorated with a styrofoam net.
The book also includes an infinitive of purpose in this lesson, so I gave another prompt for him to make a sentence explaining his building's most important feature:
- The pieces are moved to make a temple gate.
This was much more meaningful and memorable than working through the grammar chart. The object was a temporary sculpture made of not-so-amazing materials--just things I had on hand. But it sparked the student's imagination and gave us a meaningful context for grammar review. The sentences we made were relevant to the student because they gave voice to the ideas he had about something he had built himself.
I would definitely consider doing a similar task with a whole class of young people--either as a prelude to the lesson, or as a review. Collaboration is key, and working in groups towards a creative task helps less-confident students see that they can build and be a part of something.
In this lesson, after continuing with the practice exercises in the book, the final task was to use some previously-learned vocabulary for materials (plastic, wood, glass, etc.), along with passive voice, to come up with design ideas for a recycled house like the one in the text. It would have been super-cool to give the kid a real-life opportunity to build an eco-house, but that's a huge task--not doable in a semester, let alone a unit. But having built something already from recycled materials, the student was easily able to brainstorm how his eco house could be made.
It just so happens that Saint Mary's College of Maryland, my alma mater, had shared a photo of an eco house made of recycled materials just that week. It was a huge project put together by both the art and environmental studies departments. My student was curious to see it. It was one more way to see the topic in the book connected to real life.
I know this young person is fully confident that he can build anything he needs or wants to. This is why I am so passionate about the Maker Movement. The end result isn't a cute little recycled scuplture. It isn't even a lesson on passive voice, although that was the goal for that week. I work to develop makers who are always asking how things could be better, who see possibilities in the tools they have at hand, whose creativity is given free rein to solve complex problems in a complicated world.
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