Profile

Here it is, an activity that was designed to help teachers revisit the first few lessons from New Interchange without  everybody going ho-hum-been-there-done-that... The teachers here created their own profiles and took them to class for their students to understand the idea better.

Here's what you will need to hand out to the class. Camlin have a nice set of oil pastels, 48 colors in a box, that will definitely excite students. You could also get the cheaper wax crayons, the advantage of which will be that there will be more boxes to share. I like the pastels, though, because of the vocabulary-learning opportunity they present: not just red, blue, yellow and green, which students know already, but peach and maroon and gray and turquoise...

We cut up chart paper into poster-sized sheets, but it struck me later that we could just have torn out sheets from an A3 drawing book.

Step One: Draw this picture of a head in profile onto each student's sheet. If you feel that you cannot do this, let me know and I'll send you a template that you can print, and then use to trace the outline.

Step Two: Hand out these profile sheets to the students. Tell them that they are going to follow your instructions, and create colorful pictures of themselves. Tell them what a profile is, and how this is going to be a two-in-one profile. Well, it works both as a picture and as an informal write-up. Hand out colored pencils and crayons/pastels too. Depending on the strength of your class, and how many sets you have, you should already have worked out how they will be sharing these. Give them instructions about this.

Step Three: Ask your students to select a dark-colored pastel stick/crayon. Go around checking to see if they have chosen a dark color. Answer any questions they may have about the colors. If you are not very familiar with colors yourself, retain the color sheet that comes with the box and use it. When all of them have a dark color ready, tell them to go over the outlines with it. As you move around the class, repeat your instruction in different ways: darken those lines, trace that outline with your pastels or crayons, strengthen the lines in that picture, that's a very faint outline on your sheet, make it clearer... and so on.

Step Four: Tell the class what they should put into the upper left section. For this demo profile, I've decided to use this section to put in a few details about my family. You can select any topic that you want them to be able to talk about. The idea is to get the students to draw at least three things about that topic. For instance, if it is about their family, they could draw pictures of their parents and siblings (of course you will use the simpler  'sisters and brothers'), they could show what each member of the family does, they could draw the house they live in, the pets they may have...

Steps Five Six and Seven: Decide upon what you want your class to do with the other three sections. The upper right in this picture has been filled in with the things I dislike. In the lower left section, I have drawn an unhappy incident that happened to me, and the lower right shows the things I'm planning to do. As you can see, in the upper sections the class will be revising the present tense, in the lower left they will be using the simple past, and they will speak about the future in the lower right.

Step Eight: Now to fill in the core. This is the section that contains their strengths, their skills, abilities and their support group. The point is to let each student see for themselves how they do have a lot to offer the world, something that children without English in India sometimes have to be reassured about. Here in Hyderabad we asked our students to put in the languages they know in one section. Most of them know at least three languages, and have simply not thought anything of it, when in fact it is an achievement. In another section, ask your class to draw pictures of the skills they have. Examples could be being able to ride a bicycle (especially if it's a girl student), carrying out simple repairs about the house, cooking, being able to make their friends laugh... In the third section they could put down the names of  people who they know they can turn to when they need help of any kind.

                                        

So there you have it all. All of this takes some time to complete, and the teachers here got their students to make their profiles over a few classes, using the exercise as a filler sometimes, or as revision. You could always use any stage of profile creation to start a conversation with the class. When everybody's completed their profile you could put up all the colorful sheets on the walls, as one of the teachers, Nidhi, did. Don't forget to get them to write down their names.

Here are a couple of student profiles in different stages of completion from Nidhi's class.

At the end of it all, your class would have learnt how to follow instructions, what a profile means, how to talk about themselves using the simple present and the simple past and how to discuss their dreams for the future. In doing all of this, they would have had a lot of fun and gotten to know each other better. Also, if you look at the aims set out for the first sixty hours, you will see that this exercise fits in there very neatly.