One of the merriest and most exciting days in the life of our EL classroom is the Doors Open Day. Since 2011, when we began organizing it, as well as many teachers in our school, for my colleague Petra Majpruz and I it has become the ultimate event, and it has been supported by numerous children and their parents, as well as colleagues and ex-students.
You'll never find a rainbow if you're looking down.
Charlie Chaplin
Preparations for that day last nearly all school year long, from September to its realization in April, and we enjoy the positive impressions, photographs and classroom decoration for a long time. The material created for the workshop is often used eventually in our regular classes, as fun educational supplement to the Profil Klett textbook series. The topics for the current year are suggested by children in their extracurricular classes and are set up by listening to our pupils' literature-reading preferences within the English-speaking-area creativity framework.
The workshops are intended primarily for the 5th-8th graders. However, we are not completely stunned when younger students remind us of the time when we offered them Mad Hatter's tea or witches' toes or the time when the Physics teacher magically created the elephant toothpaste or set the Slytherin green snake on fire.
So far we have turned our classroom into Tea-Time Wonderland – the amazing land of Alice's “mad“ tea party from Lewis Carroll's novel, then into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry based on Harry Potter's literary and film character. As for the needs of Muggle Quidditch, we moved to the gym, and last year we solved the Sherlock Holmes mathematical detective puzzle during The Case of the Missing Pizza. The success of the past three years' projects is also owed to the creative cooperation with our fellow teachers: Matilda Šimunović (Physics, Chemistry), Gordana Meštrović (Art) and Suzana Barnaki (Maths).
Moreover, we are very happy to have carried out this year's project, The Charlie Chaplin Look-Alike Contest 2015, with the help of our Computer Science colleague and teacher with the record of a 12-years-in-a-row participation in the state competition! – Vladimir Marić.
However, the school year 2014/2015 in our EL Classroom has been marked by 125th anniversary of the birth and the centennial birthday of his “Little Tramp” - the legendary Charlie Chaplin. The objective of this “celebratory“ project was to strengthen pupils' interest to language learning by blending a face-to-face classroom component with an appropriate use of technology, media and art, and by doing so, add value to the teaching.
The project started with visiting the screening of The Circus accompanied by the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra live performance at Zagreb's Cinema Europa, as an extracurricular activity for interested children.
The culmination of it was presented in festive atmosphere on 28 April, as a unique Chaplin-like open door live show whose directors were teachers, pupils were actors and hosts, and the audience was made of anyone who dropped in (parents, grandparents, children, teachers, ex-students, guests…). It was designed as a 90-minute interactive black-and-white “silent“ movie performance with a lot of twenties-style props (20th century photography and camera exhibition, posters, clothes, tablecloths, curtains…), music and presentations.
The basis and the most exciting part of the workshop was the look-alike contest on four levels. Apart from Chaplin’s many films, the look-alike contests of the famous actor were a popular form of entertainment at that time. It is frequently disputed, whether in 1915 Chaplin decided to participate, incognito, in one of these competitions in San Francisco, and oddly lost, even failing to qualify for the competition finals.
- At one of the levels children impersonated Charlie’s four famous scenes (The Barber Scene from The Great Dictator, The Fork Dance and Eating Shoe from The Gold Rush and The Final Dance from Modern Times) and were voted by the audience for the best performance.
- Another level of the contest was designed as a competition among five groups of children who competed in a range of language-learning games (quiz, miming, the circus relay, gap-filling, unscrambling quotes…).
- A part of the workshop had been prepared as an integrative part of the Computer Science curriculum for the 7th graders (using presentation software). It was guided as a creative research task using English, thus correlating and incorporating technology in ELT, which proved to be highly motivating and appreciated by learners (many students simply like using computers, portable devices and mobile phones). Children were given specific parameters in English (style, length, font) to create their own PowerPoint presentations applying their knowledge of graphic elements, text frames and additional elements (sound effects, slide transition effects, inserting images and video clips, patterned background) focusing on the topics and language. There were four possible topics related to Charlie Chaplin's biography to choose from (Early Life, Film Director, Actor and Composer, Interesting Facts). Presentations were peer-assessed. Best-scored pupils made notes and practised speaking before a larger audience for The Open Doors Day.
- Finally, there was an art contest (poster-making) for the 6th graders as part of the Art class curriculum. Works were evaluated by the school staff and displayed in our EL classroom.
All the participants got personalized certificates and prizes kindly sponsored by Profil Klett.
This project has had a lot of positive outcomes; developing communicative competency in English, involving as many children as possible, boosting confidence and self-esteem in children by offering a variety of tasks to choose from and having fun while completing them, and many others.
The most precious thing of working with children on a common project is finding out some of their “new“ faces, some “hidden“ talents, skills, being bedazzled by their wit, love of the game and freedom of movement, and finally, remembering the essence of the teaching profession. The true recognition for the effort can be given only by children. What better proof of it than this question: “Teacher, what are we going to do next year?“
We hope we have given you a few ideas…
That's the time you must keep on trying
Smile, what's the use of crying?
You'll find that life is still worthwhile
If you just smile.Charlie Chaplin
