For over a year now, TCS’s K4 English team has been developing and implementing a new project based on creativity and kinesthetics. It focuses on each student’s learning, adding a more didactic and fun approach.

The progressive and innovative project, trialed with the young students and baptized as “The Magic Room,” has provided the kids a fun and safe place to create. By placing no boundaries to their creativity, the teachers have discovered the manifestation and full expressions of the children’s bright minds.

“We, in the English class try to have the kids experience that first contact with the English language in a really fun, ludic way,” Javier Vélez, K4, English teacher, said.

The dynamic approach used by Vélez and his co-worker in the English department, Natalia Carrasquilla, provides a fun way of gaining knowledge by allowing the kids to experience a different side of an ordinary English class.

“Diana [Mitchell] our vice principal found this idea from another school where children are autonomous, where children can create, where they can develop many skills and besides that they are learning to ask many things that are part of their daily life, without having to be repeating the same all over again,” commented Carrasquilla.

The idea was born from the need of making the kids interact and ask a question in English. By already applying different interactive activities as games into their learning space, this project resulted in a perfect fusion of both purposes. Now, by constantly building an extensive range of objects, the students’ can feel the urge of making themselves understand from their teachers, allowing the appropriate expression and appliance of the English language.

“We wanted the kids to feel outdoors. The idea is that they do not feel that they are locked in a room but that they are in a different place and environment,” Carrasquilla said.

The natural surrounding gives the kids an alternative setting for learning and creating, as the recycled walls and ceiling, allow natural light into the room. The use of these materials, teach the kids the value and use of reused props.

“The children are euphoric, they can’t wait for us to take them to the magic room because it is the only place where they can truly do whatever they want,” commented Carrasquilla, as Vélez added, “The main goal was for the kids to free their creativity.”