The tour to the museum was quite pressed with time as I had not finished all parts of exhibition on the two floors. Yet I did focused on some bits of the items such as the wedding costumes of the early 20th century, the fishermen’s life on boats, and the downtown life of people in between the 1930’s and 1970’s, and so on.
We can actually do an exercise of recounting a story with photos and text support. The students select one favorite historical event or object, recounting the history presented on the photos or in the instructions. Also, we can connect the history with our present life by comparing similar places, objects and the like. For example, the old tram presented in the museum is an early model of those still in service on the Hong Kong Island. They have similarity in the double-deck structure, and enormous differences in the internal design.
Another example is the bank notes issued in the old days. See the 500-dollar bill by HSBC in the 1930’s and the one used today, how are they different from each other?
Students can also work in groups to make a presentation of their discovery in the museum. Of course, the novel things they found and the ways they presented their findings will be marked.
In my opinion, is order to carry out the tasks you mentioned in the post, a lot of professional knowlege or vocabularies are required. Such as the how to describe the different parts of the dollar, the buses and so on. What is the level of the learners? Have they got the basic knowledge involved in this task?
ReplyDeleteCould be a bit more challenging to the students. They can simply give a general description of one or two pieces of antiques. No need to go down to the details. Another way could be story telling, which require narrative skills.
ReplyDeleteGreat ideas Robbie - I love the way you have illustrated them with the pictures that you took. I think Hallie's point is valid too: depending on the level of the learners you will need to provide various pre-visit and after-visit tasks so that students clearly benefit from the language learning point of view. Have you thought about how to incorporate ICT?
ReplyDeleteHi there Robbie, more pictures please and some more blogging as well !
ReplyDeleteMy students have loved seeing photos, gives them something to talk about. We don't have trams in Taipei, We .T. we don't have trams. The tram route on HK island moves a lot because when it was laid down it followed the coastline...this has changed, hence it twists and turns a lot.
More blogging please Robbie !