Teaching Tip: Through the Interactive White Board to Use a Picture Book in Teaching

Name:

Hsu Hsiu Fen

Economy:

Chinese Taipei

School:

Chaiyi County Siang He Elementary School

Subject:

Foreign Language: English

Tip:

In English teaching, the picture book is a great material to use in teaching. Not only introduce a story, but also teaching English. The interactive whiteboard (IWB) is a new technology. You can say the IWB is essentially a large touch screen. So through the IWB teachers and students can interactive by write, read, and even touch on the screen.

How can we use a picture book in teaching four English skills though the IWB? This is an example. Before your teaching, you need to scan the pictures of the picture book. The scanned pictures are displayed on PowerPoint slides through the interactive board to the class. Then you show only the pictures to students for free talks and guided talks about the pictures among the teacher and the students. At that time, you can invite students to circle some special pictures by listening to your vocal instructions. You can also invite students to write some words or even sentences on the interactive whiteboard. Such talks include discussions, questions, and answers that lead the students through listening and speaking practice. Those activates are based on the students’ experiences. If you are interested about this, you might surf on the website, http://163.27.95.129/smartboard/modules/tad_player/play.php?psn=9.

Those slides are very useful. Like you also can use those PowerPoint slides to do something different. This is another example. Before your teaching, you can create some questions that are based on the words and sentence patterns known to the students. And you need to type the answer sentences in order into the slides. During your teaching, you ask each question in the sequence to get students to answer the sentence that type in the slide. So you can show the typed sentence for students to read. Because the text fits the students’ current language level, which makes guided reading and/or shared reading manageable to the teacher and students. From reading the text consisting of familiar words and sentences, the students review the language items they have learned. Besides, you can use those sentences to invite students to circle some special words by listening to your vocal instructions.

If you want to provide something new, then you can type the original text with the pictures. Though the level of the original text is higher than that of the students’ language proficiency, this text provides new language items for learning, including vocabulary words and sentence patterns. It can be regarded as i+1 input. Again, you can also blanked some words by adding some color squares. During your leading reading the original text, you can provide an opportunity for students to try to find out what the word is. If the word that students haven’t learned yet, you can use the Phonics skill to lead them find out the single letters in that word. By writing letters or words on the IWB, students learned words by the teacher and themselves. Students will remember the words, sentences and even the story. If you are interested about this, you might look one photo that I provided on this website, http://163.27.95.129/smartboard/uploads/tadgallery/2009_02_26/3_DSC06597.JPG.
Try to find a different way to teach English would be inspired your students to want to learn. If you do not have the IWB, you can also use a normal board. Those activities are only tried to share a different idea for teaching English.