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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 1; January 2001

Lesson outlines

LESSON 5 - The Museum Project (Secondary)

by Marisa Luisa Ariza, Spain

I did this project with my students in Madrid, Spain. We went to El Prado Museum, but you could do the same with your classes in any museum near you, big or small.

  1. We all went to the museum and I sent the students off in pairs.
    Their task was to choose a painting that struck them.
    They had to write half a page about it, there and then in museum
  2. Back in our classroom the students corrected and expanded what they had written, some of them using the Web to get more information about their picture and painter.
  3. The next step was for each pair to produce a questionnaire about their painting, a questionnaire to be used with non-Spanish-speaking tourists, and so designed as to not make them panic and run! ( Plenty of polite stuff in the first couple of questions!)
  4. We went back to El Prado armed with cameras and cassette recorders.
    First the pairs took the whole group to the picture they had chosen and acted as "guides", situating and explaining the picture, in English.
    This took us round about 18 pictures.
  5. The pairs now went back to their paintings and interviewed tourists who had just finished looking at their painting. They recorded the interview and took pictures.
  6. An excellent picnic in the El Retiro Park, behind the Museum!
  7. The students wrote up and illustrated their project for display on the next parent evening.

Editorial note: in a country like Spain, tourism is a major industry and there must be a million ways of making tourists linguistically useful to our students.


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