Creating travel-inspired teaching resources is essentially an issue of critical content analysis and presentation. These activities are a great way to enrich the classroom experience and demonstrate your love for language in a practical way (and impress the administration).
If you are out traveling this year and looking for a fun way to bring your adventures into the classroom, consider these ideas.
Keep a Travel Journal
While you travel, keep a journal of your experiences, thoughts, and ideas. Write about your train rides, hotel stays, meals with friends, or anything that inspires you. When you return to the classroom, share some of the highlights from your trip with students (and other teachers!).
Creating a travel journal is one way to have an authentic shared experience with your students without having to leave the comfort of your classroom.
Combine Cultural Elements with Teaching Moments
Pull cultural elements from your trip into the classroom. If you travel to a new location, consider connecting with teachers in that region to learn how they teach culture. Then bring those experiences to your classroom and design activities that reflect the local language or culture.
Get Creative with Photographs
What better way to bring language into the classroom than by showing students your own photographs? Having photos of yourself in a foreign setting is also great for encouraging students to practice their pronunciation.
Take pictures of everything, whether it’s an interesting building, a historical artifact, or any other location that sparks your interest.
Bring it All Together for Classroom Activities
These simple steps can help you create travel-themed activities for the classroom that will have students learning and having fun at the same time.
- Create a scrapbook with pictures from different places in your travels (the more creative, the better). Ask students to label or identify items in the photos.
- Create a map of the place you traveled to, using magazines or newspapers. Students can create their own maps and compare them with each other.
- Set up an exhibit with cultural artifacts from the place you traveled to, such as plastic food samples or toys. Students can match items in the exhibit to pictures in a picture book about another culture.