And The Cow Goes MOO(C)

Programs for this blog post

Teach In Spain Program

Authored By:

Claire W.

When you get ready to move abroad to teach English they tell you all about how to find apartments, how to get a visa, cultural differences to expect and so much more. But there’s one hidden little secret that they don’t tell you and it’s called the MOOC. 

The MOOC is a compulsory course that is designed for us language assistants and covers four areas of information for us: the Conversation Assistant in the Community of Madrid, the Spanish Education System, the External Evaluation of the Bilingual Program, and our Final Project. These short courses help us better understand the context of our roles here and allows us to reflect on our work and our schools to better the program for years to come.  

The purpose of the final project is to share resources successfully implemented by me, the language assistant, with other language assistants and teachers. So I hope this blog shows you the kind of work we do as assistants and how interesting and fun it can be. 

Brown Bear Brown Bear

I hope everyone remembers the beloved children’s book ‘Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See?’ written by Bill Martin Jr. and illustrated by the famous Erick Carle. The book is designed to help toddlers associate colors and meanings to animals. As someone who works with three, four, and five year olds, I knew this well loved book from my childhood would be the perfect topic for my presentation. 

 

There are three main objectives that I wanted the children to get out of this book. 

1. The first is obviously learning the colors which is something that my kids work on a lot. In my presentation I also included a song from youtube that sings about the colors that my kids love to sing along too. With the book, it not only reviews the colors but also helps kids learn application of colors by associating colors with animals. For example, the brown bear or the green frog or the black sheep. 

2. The second is that they get to build their English vocabulary by learning new animals. The book focuses on nine animals: bear, bird, duck, horse, frog, cat, dog, sheep, and goldfish. A lot of these were new words for my kids that I had them repeat with me later. 

3. Lastly, I worked on their English hearing and repetition skills. The famous line “Brown Bear Brown Bear what do you see?” is repeated at each turn of the page but subbed with the color and animal of the page we just read. When I read the book, I had the kids say with me “Brown Bear Brown Bear what do you see?” and by doing this they practiced the pronunciation of the new vocabulary words as well as understanding and being able to repeat what they hear from me. 

 

After reading the book I reviewed the colors by asking kids what their favorite colors were by going through slide six. This helps them learn “favorites” which comes in many questions we typically ask them. “What’s your favorite color” or “what’s your favorite animal” and others are the type of questions that we use as basic building blocks for conversational English. 

I also wanted to strengthen the kids' association of colors with animals and other objects and be able to look at an object and identify the color. To do this, I included two online games accessible to everyone. The first was a monster matching game in which there were a set of 8 doors with a colorful monster behind each. I would call on a kid to choose one door to reveal a colorful monster and then choose another door. If the monster behind door #2 was the same color as door #1 then it was a match! If not, the kid would sit down and the next would come up. So this game also served as a critical thinking memory game because in order to make a match, they had to remember where the other monsters were. 

The second game I played with them was more of an association game. So they had to match the colors with objects such as shoes, cars, carrots, etc. to strengthen their understanding and association of colors with the world around them.

 

group of students looking at a whiteboard and playing a color matching game

 

In conclusion

This presentation was a huge success with the kids. In the days and weeks after the presentation I could tell that their color identification abilities had gotten much better. On top of that, they loved the book and seeing the different animals and repeating the phrase with me. My objectives were met and the kids enjoyed it which is such an important part of our jobs here in Spain! 

 

Below you can find links and citations to all the resources I used including my final presentation. 

I hope this gives you a glimpse of what our work is like as auxs! 

 

Resources: 

  1. Martin, B., Carle, E., & Mlawer, T. (2017). Brown Bear, brown bear, what do you see? Henry Holt and Company. 
  2. Rainbow Colors song
  3. Colour Matching Game
  4. RoomRecess Monster Matching 
  5. And the cow goes MOO(C)