Assignment #4

An important lesson I would like to teach the children in the Philippines would be the importance of washing their hands before they eat or touch their hands to their mouths, especially after touching an animal or trash.

I would want to present 3 main points:

i. dirty hands make dirty insides
ii. dirty insides can make you very sick
iii. washing hands keeps everything clean

To use a new technology, to be interactive I would have each child color five "germs" on paper that could eventually be stuck to a felt board (or even a chalk board). Then I would pick a child in the class and label the board after them (the board would represent them). I would talk about how clean the board is, the person must have just bathed. Then I would say, "Mikey just played with a dog, and now he's giving Timmy a hug because he's excited to see him." Timmy would go up to the board and put a "germ" on "Mikey." Then so on and so forth with a day in the life of Mikey. By the end of the day he'll have had many germs on him, even ingesting a good amount because he never washed his hands. He'll get sick.

Then I would run through the story again (a little faster) and have Mikey wash his hands, keeping him a fair bit cleaner. And then even again with ALL the children washing their hands, showing how clean Mikey is at the end of the day.

I think a felt board would be a new technology for the kids, but the lesson is nice because it can go with any type of board.

The main drawback would be that the kids get too distracted decorating their germs and by the newness of the felt board that they would lose sight of the object of the lesson: washing their hands.

from experience I've noticed that interactive learning seems to excite the kids in the Philippines. I think that's because they mostly rely on a lecture system, so having the opportunity to participate is nice for them.

A nice technological improvement to a felt board would be an overhead projector with overheads. They are easy to clean and maintain and would be a bit better than a felt board.