How to learn Valencian through an orchard project?

During my last teaching training period I was in a classroom where the most part of the students were Spanish speakers and they had a bad level of Valencian. Consequently, I came up with the idea of doing a project which involved knowing more about the orchards of Benimaclet (The school was in this neighbourhood). I started to do research and I found out a website (https://sites.google.com/site/hortescolarecologic/home) that offered a lot of activities for children. Thanks to this source of information, I started this new project with children of six years of age who knew very little about Valencian but loved being outdoors and visiting the orchards. In fact, that is the reason why I chose this topic: My students were very motivated about visiting Benimaclet’s orchards once a week so I took advantage of this in order to improve their vocabulary and expressions of Valencian.

The results were fantastic. As I was working with this project I came up with new ideas and finally we made a lapbook of what we learnt: The importance of the orchards nowadays, vocabulary of the vegetables, animals and medicinal herbs we can find in the orchards, and the parts of the fruits and vegetables that we eat (roots, fruit, flowers or leaves).

Doing this lapbook gave me the opportunity to organize all the information that we had been looking at in a visual and interactive way so that students felt proud of their work and could also play with it while they were studying it. Moreover, with this project I learnt something very important about languages: If you really want your students to learn a language you need to think first about their motivations because they are not going to learn from something that they are not interested in so the first step is always knowing your students and analyse this context.

I really recommend the website mentioned before if you want to work with the orchards’ topic. I also recommend you to use the format of lapbooks in order to teach vocabulary of an specific topic because it is very manipulative and once students have finished it they can study it by touching and playing with it. Lapbooks also help students to form a general mental picture of what they just learnt because information is organised in an orderly way.

Here are some photos of the project and a video. I hope this has been useful for you!