Naturalistic intelligence
- 1. Naturalistic intelligence Bel辿n Grau Murcia Siung Ah Sin Lee Miglena Braynova-Georgieva Mariola Requena Sell辿s Estefan鱈a Ib叩単ez Ortega Mar鱈a Dolores Ib叩単ez Ruiz
- 2. Introduction Children having naturalistic intelligence may exhibit some of the following characteristics: They may: 1. Have keen sensory skills - sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. 2. Readily use heightened sensory skills to notice and categorize things from the natural world. 3. Like to be outside, or like outside activities like gardening, nature walks or field trips geared toward observing nature or natural phenomena. 4. Notice patterns easily from their surroundings -- likes, differences, similarities, anomalies. 5. Are interested and care about animals or plants. 6. Notice things in the environment others often miss. 7. Create, keep or have collections, scrapbooks, logs, or journals about natural objects -- these may include written observations, drawings, pictures and photographs or specimens. 8. Be very interested, from an early age, in television shows, videos, books, or objects from or about nature, science or animals. 9. Easily learn characteristics, names, categorizations and data about objects or species found in the natural world.
- 3. Treasure Hunt Aim: Students should be able to learn in a natural environment. Contents: vocabulary of nature (plants and animals) and directions. Materials: colour cards with instructions for each group, plastic animals. Location: Campus of the University of Alicante Students: 30
- 4. Steps The class is divided into 6 groups of five students. Each group is assigned a different colour card. Each group has to find a different plastic animal. Each member of the group must wear a distinguishing object of the colour assigned to the group. The aim of each group is to follow the instructions of their card and find their correspondent plastic animal. Remarks: the teachers (2) will give instructions to the groups and will supervise the work they carry out.
- 5. Who am I? Location: classroom Aims: students learn and have fun working with pictures of animals. Contents: vocabulary related to colours, textures, animals and their different parts; use of the interrogative constructions in present simple; yes/no questions; short answers. Materials: animal cards.
- 6. Steps The students are divided into groups of six people. Each student puts a card on their front without knowing which animal is it. By turns, they make questions to the others students in the same group in order to guess which animal they are. The others can only replay with short answers. Remarks: the teacher must control that the students use English for that purpose.
- 7. Conclusions With both activities we want the students to learn contents in a different way which would probably be more difficult in a traditional manner. The fact of being outside and finding out which character they are become an enjoyable alternative. These exercises develop not only the naturalistic intelligence but also others such as: linguistic (students demonstrate their linguistic skill in other language) spatial (they need to move in a specific place and identify certain objects) bodily-kinesthetic (when talking in a second language, sometimes it is needed to reinforce what we want to say by moving our hands and other gestures, etc) interpersonal (cooperation among all the members of the group so they'll solve the activity, specially in the first activity) intrapersonal (thinking before talking, specially in the second activity)