Revision of the teaching material through project based method

Levon Aramyan

At the beginning of every school year teachers dealing with all the educational programs, come across a problem of quick and effective consolidation-revision of the material taught according to the subject syllabus of the previous year. That problem is even more vital in "Mkhitar Sebastatsi" Educomplex, where every year admission of learners gets bigger, subject syllabuses are carried on with specially worked out projects, and the newly admitted learners very often are not aware of the material included in the syllabus of the previous year.
The "Space" club is not an exception with this respect, as the program of the club activities is a long term one and can't be framed in one year, and learners, on the other hand, choose a club activity. To overcome this problem an effective way of consolidating the teaching material has been worked out which has already been successfully applied during these three weeks. The description of this method is given below in sequence of actions.

The head of the club (teacher) compiles the questionnaire of the theme (in testing version) which covers the whole material. Then he works out the theme related information which is to be presented in time of consolidation using not more than 5 minutes after each question.
It is also desirable that the questions be translated into English (this is more important for club activities) so that the learners could become familiar with the English terms of the given theme.
On starting the lesson the teacher divides the class into small groups (consisting of 4 learners) with a learner with good knowledge of English in each. The groups should change at every lesson so that the group members might get a chance to co-operate with each other.
The English question is projected on the white board, and the learners are given up to 1 minute to have a group discussion, and in case of necessity, to use the Internet in order to choose the right answer. In case of necessity the teacher can translate the question (or some words), if they are complicated for the learners.
The groups, having chosen the right answer, justify their choice and get 1 point.
Then the teacher presents the additional information which he has prepared for the given question.
At the end of the lesson the results of the competition type lesson are summarized, and the theme of the next lesson-contest is announced.
The teacher's and learners' personal notebooks/net-books and the projector are used during the lesson. Questioning can also be done with electronic pens.

The results of the method:

The process of the lesson conducted in the form of a contest allows us to keep all the learners attention concentrated on the material being discussed as well as on the short remarks made by the teacher.
The fact that the question is in English and answering in the result of group discussion develop the learners':
- ability to be confident in expressing own ideas
- co-operation
- team work
For all the learners revision becomes interesting, contesting, and the answers to the questions turn out to be impressive and easy to remember.
The wish to win at the next contest stimulates the learners to search for information about the next topic.
By applying this method, we can introduce the history of space-shipment and the English terms of this theme to the participants of Izmir Space Camp.