Naturalistic intelligence

Belén Grau Murcia

Siung Ah Sin Lee

Miglena Braynova-Georgieva

Mariola Requena Sellés

Estefanía Ibáñez Ortega

María Dolores Ibáñez Ruiz

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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)