Popcorn At Slovene Lessons

In this school year I am teaching four pupils with special needs in the 8th grade who have speechlanguage impairment. Therefore, in the process of teaching, a lot of time is devoted to lifelong learning, especially to functional literacy, because it helps in mastering of other skills and everyday situations. The 8th grade curriculum states that pupils must know, understand, describe and use language description of a certain device and gradually adopt the characteristics of a text type, description of a working process which is then formed by themselves. These are two different contents which were intertwined in the course of a class. In the project, which lasted five school hours, pupils got to know a popcorn making device and tried to use it themselves in the last hour of the project. The purpose of first two hours was to get acquainted with the device. The device was in front of pupils all the time and the pupils used devices attached instructions to get to know the device and then they learned how to create a device description. In the next two hours they used devices attached instructions to learn how to make popcorn and learned how to describe a work process. In the final hour pupils independently prepared the device and used gained knowledge to make popcorn. Using this project, besides educational goals, these functional goals prescribed for the third triad were achieved: accumulation of different information, thinking and critically accepting texts and creating own non-literary texts. Pupils with special needs have often difficulties to transfer learned abilities to real life and that is why such projects need to be included in a classroom as often as possible.