School Surveys

This project has been a great experience and i will do it again with different topics and different objectives. it can be adapted to any age or any topic and makes students  really learn by doing.

My secondary 12 year-old students have enjoyed being journalists for a few days. In groups of four they wrote  questionaires on Lifestyle (diet, physical exercise and free time mainly). It took them a couple of sessions to elaborate them under my supervisión. Structures like How often do you..? How much  or how many? and frequency were the basic grammar structures and they provided options to answer. A great amount of vocabulary was also used.   

I took them to different clases of Primary to complete their questionaires. They were very well organized in order to obtain the most accurate results. Everybody had a role ;one of the members in the group made the questions, another gave the options, a third one counted…It really felt like DOING SOMETHING important.

Now it was time to deal with stats. How to transform the typical 3 out of 25 eat fast food everyday or 23 out of 25 practise sport outside school..into percentages or other ways of saying. They did Mathematics calculating percentages. They learnt that 50% of students is the same as” half of the class” or that 95% is the same as “almost everyone”, 100% is “the whole class” and 20% is “just a few”. After calculating they created a Writing organizing the information in different paragraphs.

Then the it was timeto be creative  and they had to put all this information in graphics and make it the most attractive posible for a future presentation.

Last  step:

Teams presented their work to students of 2nd year secondary. They showed their posters and talked about primary students Lifestyle. It was challenging for them to speak in front of other students older tan them.The audience was given a short questinaire to fullfil after the presentation so that they also would get involved.

 It also would be perfect if their works could be published  in a school magazine or similar.

By Mª Soledad González