New methodology for teaching language in Bogotá with Shape Colombia

Hello, my name is Sergio Berezin, I'm from the Samara city, in Russia. I want to share with you some of the things that we did during the project Shape Colombia in the school IED Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. First of all, I’d like to tell you about our class: the classroom is equipped with smart board and a lot of material for learning English. We also use a completely unique methodology for teaching children, because many of them had never heard the language before.

Our project is the most extensive in the history of Bogota and Colombia at all,  with 200 different teachers from around the world and we had 4,5 month to teach kids. Shape Colombia is a project created by AIESEC and supported by Secretary of Education of Bogotá, British Consul and many others investors .We have made a huge contribution, since the moment we came, to the education structure of Elementary and High Schools in the city.

Many Colombian children have been to an English language course and we achieved great results. I want to notice that it is very difficult to learn a new subject for children, but we’re making everything to change the way of studying and to bring new techniques to the process. For kids, it was really interesting to get acquainted with a completely different culture.

We used practical exercises in the classroom, puzzle games for children in English and different ways of studying the subject in international level. I never saw the children feeling asleep in the classroom, since we do everything to get their interest. For the quite small students, we have prepared games and video-tutorials for better comprehension. With teenagers, we have achieved a good level and now they can describe what they want to do in the weekends, talk about their favorite movies and share impressions with friends.

With reagards,

Sergio Berezin
International Cooperator