Re: Connecting Classrooms to Real Life: Making Learning Effective Through Everyday Real Life Examples
Yes, you are right in syaing linking lessons to real-life examples transforms how students engage with learning. You've asked very difficult question how do we link our our lessons to real life? I teach languge, English to students of grade ten. I'm finding it difficult to tell you how do I link my lesson to real life? Any way I dare to tell you. I don't know whether you will satisfy with my example or not. I give you one example here. When I teach Direct Indirect Speech to my students. First of all I call three students in front of class. I ask student A to say student B something. Then I ask student C to ask student B what did he say to you? The student B will tell Student C what the student A said to him. This is a conversation in real life. Then I teach how to convey a message of one person to another person. Another way of communication is Chinese Whisper. The students stand in a queue. One student gives message to student standing in front. He gives messsge to next student standing behind him. In this way the message is to be conveyed to last student. In the end it is asked from the last student what message did he get. Whether he got complete message or not. Thirdly when teaching any lesson I link its some parts with real life so as students can understand the lesson fully. In this way I've found students concentrated on the topic. They don't divert their attention to anywhere else. But when we don't link our lessons with real life, the students don't become concentrated and their attention diverts to somewhere else and they don't understand the topic fully. They become very lazy and are sitting in class like statues. So it is necesssry to link lessons with real life. As it is said "Education is not to prepare for life but education is life itself".
Yousuf Memon
High school teacher at Govt: MDM High School Matiari Sindh Pakistan.