Chapter 9: Teaching Nouns to primary students creatively using Tangrams and Puzzles

 Chapter 9: Teaching Nouns to primary students creatively using Tangrams and Puzzles

Date/Time: 1st May 2024 Wednesday 4:42 am / 1st May 2024 Wednesday 7:28 pm

This is yet another very interesting post about enhancing teaching and learning using technology creatively. This post is based on my experience of working voluntarily with the amazing learners at the Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation in Peshawar, a school for street children. The lesson was about teaching nouns and I had to think about teaching nouns in a not so traditional way. I came across the idea of using tangrams (chinese puzzles - a set of 7 shapes ) that could be used to teach nouns. This was something very different and I don’t remember being taught in this way.

The lesson started with the discussion about different objects in the classroom. The learners came with different objects they see in class. These were sorted into different categories like person, place, animal or thing. As a whole class we came up with a definition of nouns. This activity was followed by a student solving a worksheet about identifying nouns in sentences which most of the students were able to do well. This is a usual practice of teaching nouns to primary students. I made cut outs of tangrams, seven shapes consisting of 5 triangles, a square and a parallelogram. The students were given instructions to make any object using tangrams that represents a noun. It could be a place, person, animal or thing.

The idea behind the tangrams is to use the seven shapes to create any object without overlapping the shapes. This teaches students creativity, problem solving skills and spatial skills.

Each group was given the tangrams and I used an online link to share an image of a rocket made with tangrams. It was great to see learners being able to make a wonderful rocket using tangrams and they colored it as well. The rockets were pasted on the classroom wall. Also the students had an opportunity to practice making the tangrams using an online link on the laptop. It was great to see the students excited and making different objects using the tangrams online. The site was very helpful because students had to drag the shapes to the image to complete the shape. They learned not only about nouns, tangrams but how to use the cursor to drag and move objects on the screen. They could move to the next shape, save it and take a picture of the complete shape as well. Though only a few students could do this activity , they did it wonderfully well. 

The next day the lesson was extended to teaching about types of nouns and these included singular and plural nouns. We started the lesson with revising about what the learners learned about nouns in the previous class. It was great to see they remembered the definition of nouns and could easily share examples of nouns. We started discussion about singular and plural nouns. Students came up with examples of singular nouns and plural nouns from the classroom. My planned lesson was to teach about singular and plural nouns, meaning students need to know that singular nouns refer to the name of one thing, place, person or animal, whereas plural nouns refer to names of more than one place, animal, person or thing. Most of the examples I shared had plural nouns ending with the letter “s”. When I saw student responses they knew it all, so I started questioning about naming plural nouns that end with “es”, “ies”. It was good to see learners could come up with a few nouns ending with “es” and “ies”. 

This was followed by a worksheet task, where every learner underlines or encircles the nouns, then they identify it as a singular or plural noun. Most of the students could do it on their own while some needed assistance. So I wrote the sentences on the white board and kept asking learners to identify the nouns, and sort them as singular or plural. The next part was to use the nouns in sentences. Since the learners were able to do the task timely, I gave them two nouns (tables/chair) to make sentences on their own. They were able to do it by themselves.

The next task was very creative, I took puzzle pieces with me to school.  I had practiced and tried to make some objects using the puzzle pieces. I showed the students the puzzle pieces and suggested they make different objects using the puzzles. The object has to represent a noun, and it has to be either a singular noun or a plural noun. It was great to see the amazing objects the learners made. Some made airplanes, bicycles, bikes, flowers, fans etc they were so keenly working on the activity. They were so excited to make the objects. I was amazed because they did much better than I expected. They were very creative designs they came up with. 

Once the learners had done this activity they had the opportunity to practice making different objects using tangrams online. It was great to see that all students wanted to work on the online tangram activity. Since I had one laptop, I had to let them work individually. A few students were able to create different objects online in the tangram activity. I was thinking of letting the learners work individually on the tangram activity in  the next class. I came across a tangram activity on abcya which has three different levels from easy to medium to hard level. Each level has around six activities. The next activity is only unlocked if the previous activity has been successful. The activity is differentiated and helps move from simple to complex tasks. This can be followed by a more challenging task with added difficulty, where they create the shape without assistance, they have to drag the shapes to complete the image. I found a link where the learners can drag the tangrams to complete the shape.

Overall I think this was an amazing lesson with a super awesome response from the learners in both traditional and technology integrated activities. The activities I enjoyed were the online tangram activity, the activity in which the cut outs of shapes were used to make a rocket and the puzzle activity where the learners made amazing objects to represent singular and plural nouns.

This was something new for me too and it was a great learning experience for me. If I map these activities to the SAMR model by Dr Ruben Puentedura, the task design falls between the modification and the redefinition level. There was a visible transformation in learning visible due to significant changes in the task design. They could create different shapes using  the tangram activity online, undo and redo, select any shape practice, practice as many shapes at their own pace, take a picture using the camera option and save the work, move to next shapes. They could use the scrambled pieces to create another shape. The tasks that could not be done with a paper pencil traditional activity were transformed using the online activity. The abcya activity provides opportunity for differentiation as well, where the learner chooses the difficulty level of the task and moves at his/her own pace. The work was shared online on the social media pages too. 

I enjoyed working on the lesson and I hope you guys will enjoy reading the amazing learning experience. Feel free to explore the resources mentioned in this post further.

Regards and prayers

Sheeba Ajmal