Steve, first of all, made clear that CLIL is about teaching any curricular topic in English, it is not about teaching English using any topic belonging to Science or Maths. Many books designed to teach English have a section in which they talk about history, science, literature, but this is not CLIL.
The aim of the workshop was to approach difficult wordy texts. In order to do that he organized the audience into different teams, gave them names (worms, butterflies, birds, turtles, etc.) and questions. All we had to do is to guess the answer, participate, and if our answer was correct he would gave us a point and a promise of a good prize!
Let's see some of the questions of the quiz competition:
1. If I put lots of blue and red socks in the washing machine and once it is finished, how many socks do I need to take to have a matching pair?
2. Which is heavier gold, silver or bronze medal?
3. Which is heavier milk or cream? ice or water?
So far the point is to raise curiosity, it is not about the contents, it is about discussing.
4. How high is the mountain Teide?
5. How high is the highest mountain in England?
6. How long is the average blue whale?
Another way of raising curiosity is to play noughts and crosses using different questions about different subjects. Let's see an example.
We create a chart with 9 items (one item per box): History, Science, Art, Geography, Maths, ICT, P.E., English literature and Music. Create two teams and make questions:
Name a string instrument
Say a sport that uses a ball
Who painted the Mona Lisa?
How much is 3 + 7?
And so on
More topics and activities: Classify historically the invention of sports (or when the rules were created)
Give the students the name of the following sports and ask them to make guesses and put them in order beginning with the oldest sport.
basketball - ice skating - boxing - tennis - car racing - skiing - wrestling - golf - baseball
furthermore, ask them to think about the slowest animal; just search in the internet something that could be classified cronologically.
Finally, U-Tube offers a wide range of videos that can be used for learning purposes and you can use them on the digital board if you have one. There is one of Homero Simpson and evolution which is perfect for Science classes.
We are born with natural curiosity, and if we are given motivating activities we can make classes a lot easier, have a good time and learn, either a foreign language or Science.
