Reduce wasteful behavior in the classroom
In an ESL class with young students, the best way to teach about the three "R"s is via concrete examples of behaviour in the classroom.
One of the primary natural resource that students use is paper. During their school years, students will go through countless notebooks and paper reams to take notes and write their homework.
Unfortunately, some young students use paper in a very wasteful way. Here are some extreme examples actually observed in the classroom:
- Some students would regularly use a new, blank sheet of paper to scratch with a pen that is running out of ink, to see if the pen can be coaxed to write!
- When students need to learn the spelling of vocabulary by rote, they need to write their list of vocabulary n times: some will write one word per line and thus quickly run through a whole notebook.
- etc.
Each of those wasteful behaviour is an opportunity to teach some English vocabulary at the same time as teaching a more conservative way of using natural resources. The teacher may use any such occurrence as an example to avoid. But doing so, the teacher must be acutely aware of the student's feelings! The point is not to make them feel bad by blaming them, but by gently pointing out why this behaviour is wasteful, why it matters, telling the student that it's ok because they didn't know better before, but showing them an alternative way. Actually, this type of occurrence can be made fun. For example, I1 have regularly made the whole class laugh by explaining that paper comes from dead trees, and mimicking a hunter who goes in the forest with a shotgun and "kills" tree by shooting at them, and subsequently mimicking the trees being shot dead, putting their hands (branches) on their hearts (trunk) and falling over. While the students are still laughing, I can go back to where I started: explain that it is better not to waste paper, suggesting alternative, more conservative ways to use paper.