My CLIL Science Corner

HAPPY THURSDAY!!! Are you familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy ? Today I would like to deal with Bloom's Taxonomy and the verbs you should use in the different thinking levels to help your students go from low thinking levels to high thinking levels. Bloom's taxonomy was created by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. Bloom's taxonomy is a hierarchical classification of the different thinking levels. Bloom's taxonomy should be applied when creating unit objectives.  The first Bloom's taxonomy had the following thinking levels (from low to high thinking levels): -Knowledge -Comprehension -Application -Analysis -Synthesis -Creating In 2001, Bloom's Taxonomy was revised by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwhol. It is a taxonomy for learning, teaching and evaluating. In the revised Bloom's Taxonomy, Synthesis was changed by Evaluating. Let's have a look at each thinking level: REMEMBERING . It refers to recalling facts and basic concepts. Verbs for this level are: copy, defin...

  Hey!  Wednesday already! How's your week going? Today I want to share with you how I am trying to go PAPER FREE. Nowadays there are a lot digital tools which can help us to save paper and help the environment  These are the apps I have started using as a teacher.  Would you like to know how I use them? Keep reading  ☑️ Additio allows me to keep track of the students' attendance among other registers. I also use it to grade my students.  ☑️ Drive  is great for keeping the materials you create using Google docs, Google presentations,...  In addition, I can share folders and documents with other teachers and the students. ☑️ Google keep is the replacement of the post-its and notebooks I used to write my To-do lists  ️. I love it! The best is that you can download the app in your portable devices  ☑️ Since I discovered Google Calendar  , I haven't bought any diary ☑️ And the most recent incorporation: OneNote! These last years I would...

 HELLO! HELLO! 💗 How are my Teacher pals going? Some days ago, I shared the article "How I plan my CLIL units" in my Instagram account. One of the teachers who commented the post, asked if I could explain CLIL Matrix more extensively. I agreed and here I am. Are you familiar with Cummin's Matrix? Since this blog is about CLIL, I am going to tell you about the CLIL Matrix.   Professor Do Coyle (2002) adapted the CLIL Matrix from the Cummin's Matrix (1984). The CLIL Matrix is a tool for CLIL teachers and it can be used to measure the combination of cognitive and linguistic levels of the different tasks. As you can see in the image, it is divided into 4 quadrants:  Activities on quadrant 1 are cognitively easy, but they require a demanding language.  Activities on quadrants 2 and 3 are accessible in terms of language. Cognitively activities are  low to high cognitive demanding ( Bloom's taxonomy).   Activities on quadrant 4 require to master the lan...

  HIYA! How are you doing? It seems that this weird school year  has all teachers more stressed than usual. In today's post, I would like to give you hand. As teachers, many times we think that we have to prepare all the materials by ourselves. That's ok, but teachers are very supportive and we like sharing with our colleagues. Today I am going to share with you a webpage which contains " Ready to use CLIL units ". Yes! You have read correctly: ready to use CLIL units. This units have been prepared by other teachers and some of them have also been supervised by Philip Hood, one of the parents of CLIL. Other units have been prepared by teachers who have been participating in an innovative project of the Generalitat de Catalunya called "Generació Plurilingüe" (GEP). And you may wonder: "What is the name of this fabulous webpage?" Here we go!  The name of this webpage is ARC .  Type  "ARC Departament d'Ensenyament" in the Google bar and ...

  Hi, everyone! Some weeks ago in Twitter and Instagram, I read some tweets and posts by teachers and parents complaining about bilingual education in Spain. They wondered if it was really worthful to teach the contents of a subject (Arts, Science, Maths...) in English. I could see that those people were really concerned with this issue and that the majority of the opinions were against bilingualism. Their opinions were based on their experience.  One of my followers in Instagram sent me the link of one of these posts and I couldn't help giving my opinion. I told them about how I thought a subject in a language differen from L1 should be taught. As many of you know, I am a CLIL Science teacher and I consider I have enough experience on this issue. That day I decided I had to write a post on what I consider CLIL is and what CLIL is not. Let's get on with it! From my point of view, CLIL is NOT : - Translating contents from L1 to L2 - Repeating contents which have already been ...

  MORNING!!! 😃 As English or CLIL teachers, we are always concerned with encouraging our students to speak English in our class. Some kids quickly catch structures and vocabulary and  they start using English without much support. However, that's not the most common. SCAFFOLDING is based on Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development. Scaffolding is the process of supporting students during their learning process. At the beginning, students need guidance and suport. As they make progress, Scaffolding can be gradually removed. In CLIL , you can scaffold the process and the language.  SCAFFOLDING  can be presented in many different ways: realia, clip, visuals, graphic organisers, picture dictionaries, mind maps, substitution tables, videos, songs... SCAFFOLDING is highly important both in English and CLIL lessons. When we are learning a language, we need different types of support until we can perfom by ourselves.  I would like to know how you use...

Wow!  I have realised it has been a long time since I last came over... This school year is being a bit stressful..., but I have to find time for me and for YOU! As CLIL teachers, we often face with the difficulty to find texts adapted to our students' English level. Some years ago, I started adapting texts so that they were appropriate to the structures and vocabulary my students were familiar with. I assure you that all the effort and time invested in this purpose pays off. Let me tell you how I adapt texts in my CLIL classes. What I do is either I seach for a text and then I adapt it or I write the text myself. As you can see in the images below, I hightlight in bold the words I think they might not understand. They usually read the text by themselves and they underline the words they don't understand.  Then we read the text together and I make sure they are understanding it. Finally they answer the comprehension questions, but first I check they know what each question mea...