Charlotte’s lips had been tightly pursed since the beginning of the activity. While other students were busy with drawing or writing, she was blankly looking at the paper for almost ten minutes. So I knelt down next to her and asked her why she refused to do the work. She didn’t say a word. Instead, tears were welling up in her dark brown eyes.
Before I go further, I want to explain the context. In Quebec schools, subject matters are organized by the competencies students need to acquire. To develop the competencies, the Ministry emphasizes that all aspects of learning should be ‘relevant’ to students’ life. That is, lessons, materials, and school experiences should reflect the realities experienced by the students. The underlying idea is that students learn better when they can connect the learning experience to their daily life.
So if you flip through an elementary school level ESL textbook, you will find topics such as school, sports, food, animals, and family. These are usually organized by the degree of familiarity. That is, students will encounter more familiar topics at the beginning of a school year and less familiar topics later. Consequently, if you follow the sequential order of the textbook, you will most likely teach the so-called “family unit” in October or November. In this unit, grade 3 or 4 students usually learn vocabularies related to home and family relations in conjunction with possessive determiners (e.g., my, your, his, her, their).
