Kids love projects. It's part of human nature to take up these discovery 'adventures.' It's curiosity. It's a mere reflex--the most basic of survival instincts. It's their chance to "shine." This would be the reasons why projects still work and will, for as long as teachers would make them attractive for their students. Projects help them grow and give them the chance to express their personality. How could they not like them then? It's inner deep motivation to be involved in projects that appeal to their interests, to their age, to their previous knowledge, to their weaknesses that they know they should work on. Their behaviour?! Very engaged students thus, once they resonated with the idea proposed by the project. Let's take for instance "Drama Clubs/Plays" or "Reader Theatre's Activities". They simply love them. They'll reverberate always.
I will now talk about the benefits of such a task. It can be fun, interesting and the project gets them to share and collaborate. It helps them socialize better and they gradually learn to improve their communication in English, and possibly in time, they might grow to think straight into English...something that most of my students lack. They seem to have this bad habit of translating their thoughts from Romanian to English. They preserve the Romanian structures and patterns so this hinders communication at times.
Moreover, they need projects to improve their critical skills and enlarge their creative powers. It's a magic realm-- what a good and real-life oriented project can offer! In addition, when working together they learn to discuss and negotiate, so they gain something not only professionally, but also as human beings.
On the other hand, alternative assessment seems to offer a clear image upon what exactly is expected from students and it offers guidance on attaining our teaching goals and lesson objectives, but what I liked most this week was WebQuest, a wonderful opportunity to work on projects! What is most interesting and practical about it is its structure: students can see right from beginning the steps that they are supposed to follow!
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