In this post I will explain how I introduced STEM contents into subject that I teach Italian language, in order to connect the study of Italian to real life situations. As Scinetix Ambassador, I want that my students find a solution of the problem using research work, critical opinion, their strong sides of personality, peer collaboration, etc.

According to the school plan and curriculum for Italian language in 8th grade, my 15-year-old students had to learn words about energy sources and energy consumption in Italian. I decided not to use the text in their student book and found in the Scientix RESOURCE REPOSITORY great resource “GETTING TO KNOW ENERGY” in Italian http://www.scientix.eu/resources/details?resourceId=3072.

Learning Goals of our lesson were:

• Understand what energy is, what types of energy there are, and the different forms of energy
• Explore cause and effect as it relates to energy use
• Compare how children around the world use energy to identify similarities and differences.

Warm up activity (10 minutes) was watching video about energy in Italian “Le fonti di energia”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFmijtXf95s, which helped them recall the knowledge of physics about energy types.

During the main part of class (25 min of “reading and comprehension”) my students were reading the text in Italian “Impariamo a conoscere l’energia” from the school projector and trying to understand it:  http://storage.eun.org/resources/upload/657/20170727_192744893_657_Energy%20tips_September%202010_final_PR_09092010_IT.pdf. They were divided into groups and each group had to analyze their section from the text. I was asking questions to help them to understand the key words and global meaning of the resource.

In last part of the class (10 min) I gave them a small student’s worksheet to answer the question and control their knowledge: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-SmKktRWl4K7PZLdPhw10UUiLXWdxQZH/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=109170172222911948615&rtpof=true&sd=true.

They were supposed to link the types of energies to the images, determine whether the sentences written were correct or false, and share ideas on how to reduce energy consumption.