Flipped Classroom: Party Time Vocabulary for 5th Graders

 Hello my future colleagues, today I am going to tell you about my flipped classroom experience.

Have you ever heard of flipped classroom approach? In a flipped classroom, students learn at home through videos or readings, and class time is reserved for discussions and activities, emphasizing active learning. It allows personalized learning pace, enhances student-teacher engagement, and provides active learning. It has disadvantages, too. Flipped classroom approach depends on student tech availability. It may face resistance from students and teachers. Some students may not complete pre-class work. 

My friend Ayşe Rümeysa Şahin and I had to prepare a vocabulary teaching video for 5th graders about the unit Party Time. We used Animaker to prepare an animation video. It was reall hard for us to work with Animaker, because we haven't prepared an animation video before. First, we chose the vocabulary we were going to teach. Then we prepared the animation and added audio to it. We also prepared a worksheet for the students. I prepared the video and my pair prepared the worksheet. We used Canva to prepare it. 

Although it was a bit hard for us at the beginning, we had so much fun while doing this activity. We also think the animation we prepared is pretty fun. Hope our future students will like it too.

Here is my friend Ayşe's blog.

Here is our vocabulary teaching video and worksheet, if you want to have a look at them.

See you later!

Creating a Corpus-Based Teaching Material: Using Canva

Hello my future colleagues, today I am going to tell you about creating a corpus-based teaching material.

Creating a teaching material and worksheets for middle school students using a corpus-based approach has been an exciting experience for me. We started by putting together a mix of real-world examples to make the material more authentic and relatable. To bring everything to life, we used Canva. Canva made it easy to turn our teaching ideas into visually appealing and easy-to-follow materials. Its simple and user-friendly features allowed me to add colors, visuals, and interactive elements, making the learning experience more engaging for students. The combination of using a diverse language collection and Canva's design flexibility not only made the material look good but also helped students understand English in a more practical way. This experience taught me the importance of corpus-based teaching materials and blending creative content with design tools to make learning enjoyable and effective for middle schoolers.

Our target audience was 6th grade middle schoolers. Our focus was generally on vocabulary. The first activity was constructing sentences with the given words. With this activity, students will be able to construct sentences related to context. We also wanted students to do this activity with a friend, so that they will be able to learn working together and practice cooperative learning. For the last activity we made students prepare an invitation card. Students will be able to make an invitation and organize an event with this activity.

Besides the problems that may occur because of the lack of technology access, there are some other problems that may occur while using this material. Some students may struggle with generating creative ideas for their invitation cards. They may have different proficiency levels so we have to choose the vocabulary that will be suitable for all the students. Students might find it challenging to construct grammatically correct and varied sentences. Lastly, preparing an invitation card may take longer than expected, so that may lead to time constraints. 

It was a great experience for me, and working with my friend Şevval Yılmaz was also fun. Here is our corpus-based teaching material if you want to have a look, and here is my friend Şevval’s blog. See you all!