This is the third episode in this series. Don’t forget to check out week 1 and week 2 first. There is the week 4 post, too!
Starting the lesson
Nothing has changed here and I have to say it is a lovely feeling to have it ‘just happen’, at least for a few minutes of the lesson. It is a confirmation that things are happening and according to plan and that, eventually, we are going to extend this ‘law and order’ to the other stages of the lesson, too.
How do you feel today?
According to what I planned, we added two more feelings ‘I am ill’ and ‘I am scared’, one to describe how we really feel in class (Hello September, Sneezing and Coughing!), the other one because I want to have it ready for all the stories to come. It might be also a nice phrase to use when we talk about emotions, also to say ‘I am not scared’, which is a very positive affirmation to make anyway! At the end of week 3 we have a total of 13 adjectives and phrases to use to answer this question and I have two more expressions, as suggested by the kids themselves. There is more to come soon!
Apart from that, I decided to let the kids take over and to take turns to ask the question to each other. At this point we are still doing it in a very closely-monitored way, with the teacher supervising and the kids simply answering a question from one student and then asking another one, in a chain. It took some time of the lesson as the kids were taking their time to choose the following child but it was definitely worth it! I was observing the children and I did notice how seriously they took the task and, actually, how much pleasure it gave them, too, to be involved in such a way.
Songs
We have practised all the songs introduced before and since we already have quite a few, it is possible to ask the class to choose a song to sing: ‘Do you want to sing ‘I can count to 20’ or ‘Count from 10 to 100′?’ to give the students an opportunity to make decisions about the lesson. That is what we did.
We also sang ‘Pete the Cat, I am rocking in my school shoes’ and during some of the lessons, this turned into almost a theatre, because all the kids wanted to sing and to perform all the actions, to sit at the desk, to eat something (they quickly reached out to their bags for a snack) or to read a book, in exactly the same way as Pete does, lying on the floor…This was definitely the song of the week for us!
From the new song, we only introduced ‘Have you got a pet?’ which we needed to introduce and to practise the verb and the structure which was the theme of the week. We also played the game with the spinner from wordwall, in which we sing the song for students, one by one, spin the wheel and the child in question answers ‘I’ve got a tiger. I like it. It’s a good idea’.
Rules and Classroom Language
We have been revising all the classroom verbs and phrases we introduced in the previous week and we devoted one of the English lessons to introduce and to drill some more advanced classroom language that include:
Can I go to the toilet, please?
Can I drink some water, please?
I sit nicely.
I listen to the teacher.
I am a good friend.
I have a question.
The two new phrases include: I don’t fight and I don’t shout, because this is exactly what was happening. I normally try to avoid using this kind of a language and to focus on a positive way of formulating the rules but one of my groups needed a very serious reminder.
Rewards chart
There have been not to many changes here. With my group A, the chart is no longer necessary, we only need to revise the rules and bring them back, to remind the kids about the behaviour we want. My group B need the rewards chart constantly but with the use of the chart and the rules, we are slowly moving towards the point where we want to be. I have some students who struggle with managing their emotions but there has been some progress in that area, too.
Time
Not too many changes here. We keep using the system we have created and it works. The kids are more familiar with the lesson plan, the different length of breaks, the changes of teachers, work in progress, nothing else.
Story
This week I decided to introduce a phonics story and, because of the theme of phonics, animals and have got / has got, I went for ‘Hen’s Pens‘. Overall, it was not as exciting or popular as the other two we have done so far but because it is a different style, without a song but it worked well.
What we did:
introducing the new vocabulary and reading
describing the picture on the cover
looking for dots and zigzacs around us
listening and talking about it
doing one wordwall activity on rhymes together on the screen
a reading activity done individually, on paper
a colouring picture for those students who wanted it
Accidentally, just before this lesson, one of my students found our paper copy of Usborne stories and he brought it to the classroom and looking through the book, he found there our story. This way, he created a link to our following lessons because I want to use the story in a few shared reading activities.
Socialising
These are the things we did in the previous week to faciliate the community building:
we continued doing everything we have done so far: making decisions, choosing songs and activities, helping with the resources.
we added a little bit of student – student interaction during the first stages of the lesson (How do you feel today, see above)
we did a few activities in Maths and Science to help the kids work in teams. We had two team activities with one student working for the group – two treasure hunts. In Science students took turns to find clues what to draw in a picture (types of plants), in Maths, similarly, tasks (addition and subtraction to 20) in order to uncover the secret phrase (‘Maths is very interesting’). In another Maths lesson we also played with subtraction and posters and small objects. In this game, kids had to work in small pairs to solve the task (put the hands on the poster to leave the required number of animals visible and take out the small objects out of the box).
we also tried to play ‘I spy’ in one of the Maths lessons, this time in pairs. It was mildly successful as a speaking activity but they did get a chance to sit together and work on a task together. It was a necessary step and I would like to repeat it again in week 4.
Creativity
We have had some opportunities for creativity in this week, too!
we created a beautiful picture of different plants in a Science lesson. It was guided (my instructions) but the execution was up to students. Of course, they really wanted to take them home.
in our final Maths lesson, we decorated the first page of the notebooks that we will start next week
there was a follow-up colouring picture for the story, for those kids who wanted to get one
Teacher
This is only very much Anka-relevant and it might not work or be important for all the other teachers in the world. I decided to take a note here, though, to remember and to see how these things will be changing because they also affect how we work as a group and how I feel, too.
I managed to convince my fellow classroom dweller to rearrange the tables in one of the classrooms so now we have a beautiful U and I am happy.
I am planning my lessons with the resources and boxes online, in order to be clever about all the carrying things around.
Tuesday was quite difficult in terms of behaviour, very jagged and patchy, hence annoying and tiring and I went to school the following thinking that, no matter what, ‘I will have a good teaching day and the kids will have a good learning day!’ and somehow we all did. Partially, it was due to this approach, partially, because I prepared activities to help me achieve it. I noticed that I have been setting my expectations and the level of challenge a bit too high for my kids, without taking into consideration the fact that it is still only week 3 of our adventure and that we spend together 20 hours a week, some lessons are early in the day, some lessons are late in the day and they all simply cannot be just amazing. Although they can be good and they can be better if all these factors are taken into consideration. I did and Wendesday and Thursday were much better.
A set of shapes of your choice, cut out of paper before the lesson
An A4 piece of paper with the list of figures that will be included in the activity.
A glue stick for every child, a pencil to take notes
Procedures
Naturally, this project involved some pre-lesson preparation: the handout, the glue and, most of all, all the shapes which needed to be cut up and sorted out. I used 5 separate boxes to make sure that they don’t mixed and are easy to select and to abandon.
We had two lessons devoted to shapes and so we could do all of the following as a preparation for the project: introducing the shapes, looking for the shapes in the classroom, song Can you see a circle? from Super Simple Songs, looking at Shapes Monsters from Twinkl, to recognise and to count them, making shapes from pipe cleaners (the example of which you can see above), working on the sequence (‘circle, square, circle, square’) and, as a direct example for our creativity, looking at some transport made of shapes (also found on Twinkl).
The next step was a set of instructions. At the moment I work with a teacher assistant and I saw it as an opportunity to use this resource in setting up the project. I prepared my instructions to use the simplest language possible but I still asked my TA to translate sentence by sentence. The main elements were these: We are doing a project. We have five shapes (displayed on the board). You can make something for yourself. Maybe a flower, maybe a car, maybe a monster (referring to everything that we saw in class). All ideas are good ideas. You can use 10 shapes (gesture). Please sit down and think. I will call one student to come here and choose shapes. Sasha, come here, choose 10 shapes. etc.
Afterwards, with Sasha choosing her shapes, two students helped with giving out the handouts and the glue.
Everyone kept working on their shapes, I was walking among them, helping and monitoring and as soon as they were finishing, I would come up and ask them to count all the shapes they have used.
In the end, the kids were showing their projects to each other but it was not a formal stage of the lesson. Ideally, we should have finished with everyone showing their work and presenting ti with a simple ‘I’ve got…’ but, unfortunately, in our case, we ran out of time.
Why we like it
In general, it is a simple project with a lot of potential and it can be used in a variety of lessons.
In a Maths lesson, like ours, it is a an opportunity to see the practical use of shapes and to balance the serious studying with a more creative task. It also involves shapes recognition and counting. It was also an interesting follow-up and development on the previous lessons in yet another way: we looked at shapes, we counted shapes in shapes pictures, we looked for shapes in the classroom and we made shapes out of pipe cleaners. These last two activities were especially exciting for the kids and that was my cue for a more hands-on activities.
In an English lesson on shapes, this activity could also work very well, especially that there is the early literacy activity which, potentially, can be extended. The kids can be asked to copy the words from the board and, in this case, the ‘handout’ will not be necessary. The kids can also be asked to write the name of the picture they created, especially if they work within a vocabulary framework, for example toys, pets, animals or transport, although, admittedly, this would put a kind of a harness on the creative thinking here.
In an Art lesson, this activity can be connected with any artist who liked shapes for example Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, El Lissitzky or even Picasso. Apart from the main art project, there would also be an input session devoted to the Artist of the Day. If you are looking for ideas, please have a look here, at Teaching English Through Art.
As a first project, this lesson was a wonder (and please forgive me blowing my own trumpet here!). The kids got the idea and they really took to it. Everyone interpreted the task in their own way and created some lovely pictures, some of which are an inspiration for me as a teacher, for example to draw the shape first and use the shapes to create a proper collage or to make a list of all the shapes necessary beforehand, in order to facilitate and to promite the Thinking Time stage of the project. Please make sure you have a look at the examples below.
The kids got involved in the project, even though there were a few who were slightly reluctant in the beginning. However, as soon as it became obvious that, really, all ideas are good ideas, they started to work on their projects.
The next time I do this project, I will make sure I prepare my own model. I was planning to do it but then the teaching day started and I simply forgot. It would have helped with the instructions and the whole project, including the counting of the numbers and the final presentation.
As regards the choice of the resources, it seems that it was also a good idea to go for a more exciting type of craft paper, as regards the gloss, the texture, the print or a mixture of these. It really adds up to the success of the project. It might be also a good idea to consider an A3 paper for the base, the A4 might be a bit limiting, although A3 is definitely a more tricky size to carry around, to take home or, even, to put up on the wall.
It really was a way for all the kids to exercise their creativity and I am very proud of my students. Some of the creations are simply brilliant and they helped me learn something new about my students. It is also a signal for me to use more of these activities.
Some noteworthy examples of creativity from my kids
This is Lena who was the student to plan her project properly, out of her own accord. She prepared a list of ingredients necessary and, as you can see it does not quite match the number of the shapes used. We fixed it later, after the photo was taken, by writing: circles: 3 + 3 etc.
This is Sergey who decided to take a completely different route and to create a proper work of art, made of hearts only and with a red pencil which is also glued to the paper.
This is Sasha, who was initially very uninspired by the task as he prefers listening. However, after a while, he figured out how to combine the two. He drew an ice-cream cone and then, once it was ready, he came to choose his shapes. This is a lovely approach and I will definitely be using it in the future!
This is a beautiful example of how creative kids can get. Sasha, whose most favourite thing in the world are horses, found a way of creating a horse with the shapes we had. It shows a high level of development of symbolic representation as well as creativity. We see a horse in it hence it is a horse.
This is a picture by Nicol, quite simple one, just a house, we might say, but it is just wonderful because of the paper used and because of the consistent use of hears as windows.
And another wonderful picture, a bear, in which Sasha, decided to use a variety of techniques, including drawing and elements of origami to create a 3D eyes and muzzle for the bear.
This example comes from Sasha, who decided to go for a seemingly simple design of a structure, made of only four shapes. However, it was nothing but simple! The big blue square is in fact glued expertly along three edges to create a pocket into which the small blue rectangle could be put in and taken out. Sasha was extremely proud of his example and I was proud of him.
Please make sure you read the previous post in the series here. Here is the week 3 post and the week 4 post here.
Starting the lesson
Nothing has changed here. We continued doing everything the way we did last week but I did notice (with joy) that this week it all went smoothly and that all the kids were answering smoothly and without my support, gestures and hints, even when it was the school admin who came in to check the attendance officially which normally takes place in lesson 1 and which sometimes overlaps with my roll call.
How do you feel today?
This stage of the lesson didn’t change at all in the previous week either. On the one hand, I was a bit guilty about not introducing any new phrases / adjectives but, only other hand, it is not bad that some elements stay exactly as they were, not to overload the kids. I am definitely planning to introduce them in the upcoming week.
Songs
As regards the new songs, yes, we do have some! First of all, Who took the cookie from the cookie jar is now officially a game and students themselves remind me of it. First we go over all the structures and gestures (the set displayed in the video) and we watch the video together and ‘rehearse’ singing. Afterwards, we play together and it is lovely to see how the kids get involved. Generally, the idea is that we play in a chain and the last student ever is the ‘kangaroo’ who took the cookie, however, it did happen a few times that the kids themselves decided to own up to having taken the cookies, in the middle of the game and we just accepted it and played on. What is more, one of my students, went out to the cloakroom and brought back his jar of cookies to be used as a prompt while his turn came. He also promised to share the cookies with the class during the break which was sweet and it made every happy. It was also great to see that the kids picked up on the melody and the structure and we made the first attempt at our own version of the chant…
I also wanted another song for numbers and I found this one, from the Singing Walrus: Count 10 – 100, in a slighlty upgraded version. ‘I can count to 20’ was a huge success, not only because of the easy lyrics but also because of a simple dance routine and that is why I decided to create a similar one for the other song. I will not dare to include a video here and the decription will be muddled, I fear. The main idea is that there is one arm movement for each number and we end up with waving our arms joyfully for ‘one hundred’. I am happy to say that it has worked very well and now we have to educational brain breaks for the Maths lesson.
A special bonus is the third song from Pete the Cat. To find out more about, please scroll down.
Another lovely realisation was the fact that my students chant and sing the songs during the breaks, out of their own accord, and even at home. As one of my education parents said ‘Who took the cookie is a very dangerous song! Sasha sings it all the time at home!’ Music to my ears!
Rules and Classroom Language
We have been revising all the classroom verbs and phrases we introduced in the previous week and we devoted one of the English lessons to introduce and to drill some more advanced classroom language that included
Can I go to the toilet, please?
Can I drink some water, please?
I sit nicely.
I listen to the teacher.
I am a good friend.
I have a question.
We have a poster for each, with the phrase and a picture and I came up with a gesture for each of them. We introduced them, we drilled them, we played a few movement games and we came up with a chant, too. There was a handout, too. The posters are on the wall and we start with reading them in the beginning of each lesson.
I wanted to introduce two more (‘I ask if I can take something’ and ‘I ask if I can write on the board’) but they turned out to be too complex for coming up with a gesture and to repeat and I need to rephrase them.
I am also compiling a list of a few more sentences for us to start using, some of them based on the classroom procedures, some of them based on the students’ behaviour that we will need to work on.
Rewards chart
As I mentioned last week, I changed the list from the board to a small whiteboard because, first of all, I need the board for other things and, second of all, it is easier to carry my mini whiteboard with me around the classroom.
Another interesting thing happened. One of my groups (9 kids) is already at the point when they don’t need a rewards’ chart. They are involved, they want to study and, although they are still kids and they have their crazies, these do not require any real intervention and it is easy to deal with them only through reminding them of the rules. So far so good.
My other group (12 kids) are a bit more rowdy and I have two troubled souls there and the rewards’ chart works really well for them as a reminder of what we want and what we don’t want, together with the rules. We had at least two very tricky situations but we are dealing with them and I am hoping that my tricks, the help from the school psychologist and the parents will help me work on all of that.
Time
We continue using the clock and I noticed that more of my students get a better understanding of the clock and the lesson time versus the break time. The only thing that I added to the lesson time is also a small box with the number that the big hand of the clock needs to reach.
The lesson plan I mentioned in the first episode of this series worked much better and more effectively this week. I used it in almost all the lessons in the previous week. It worked very well with 1A who already have their favourite Maths game and who try to include it in all the lessons as the final point. One of my students actually remembered the name and he made an effort to remember how to write it from memory in order to be able to add it to our plan.
Story
Traditionally now, Thursday (my last day of the week) is a story day in English. This week I decided to introduce the kids to Pete the Cat and specifically to ‘I am rocking in my school shoes’.
I love this story for many reasons:
Pete the Cat is cool and apart from the narrative and the dialogues, it includes songs and they are cook, rock songs, a nice addition to the very kiddie-like Super Simple, for example.
This particular story includes about seven or eight verbs in the Present Continous, related to the activities in the school (I am playing, I am reading, I am writing, I am adding, I am painting, I am sitting, I am eating, etc). I decided we really need them in order to describe what we are doing and to check that everyone is on the task (‘Sasha, are you writing?’) etc. This is a topic that is very easy to introduce, you can play Abracadabra and have a low-prep movement game and, very soon, we will be able to use it to tell stories.
The story also includes the names of the places in the school which I want to focus on in the upcoming week and have the kids use them, after I have labelled all the doors in the school in English.
So far, we introduced the game and practised the verbs in a game, we watched the story and try to sing the song and we had a small reading / drawing task (‘I am eating’ + add your own noun). As a surprise, kids also got a Pete the Cat colouring page to do at home. Naturally, Pete the Cat is coming back next week.
Socialising
These are the things we did in the previous week to faciliate the community building:
more students’ help with giving out and collecting back resources (handouts, markers, glue, notebooks) and with cleaning the board
some opportunities for making a choice: ‘Which song do you want to sing?’, ‘Which game do you want to play?’. I also tried ‘choose the next student’ but they are still too shy and it did not work very well. I nominated instead.
I kept an eye on the kids interacting with each other and I also started a journal for both groups, to keep track of these observations (related both to progress and to behaviour and socialising). I plan to add notes to it only once a week. I noticed some new friendships forming, between girls, between boys and in mixed groups, I noticed kids playing together and collaborating during the breaks and during the outdoor time. I noticed Sasha sharing his cookies with the whole group, although social skills are not his strong point yet or the kids policing each other during some lessons.
Creativity
This was only our second week but I decided to include some creative tasks in Maths or in Science and it turned out that this is exactly what the kids needed. We did three of those: a plasticine model of a plant (Science), making a book with plant types (Science) and a real project in Maths ‘Let’s make something out of shapes’ All of them were very successful. How do I know? Right after the kids saw the finished product and the resources, I got flooded with the same question coming from 12 or 9 different directions in the classroom: ‘Can we take it home?’ and although I would love to put these beautiful creations on the walls, I gave up. I collect all the other handouts and put them in their portfolios, here, I did not have a heart. Everything beautiful went home. I only took photos.
Teacher
This is only very much Anka-relevant and it might not work or be important for all the other teachers in the world. I decided to take a note here, though, to remember and to see how these things will be changing because they also affect how we work as a group and how I feel, too.
We finally have the internet connected in both classrooms so I can use a much wider variety of resources, powerpoints, videos, songs as well as all of the online resources. This has an impact on the variety and it helps to keep the kids’ attention and focus.
I am not very happy (as in: AT ALL) with the tables which are ‘the typical tables in the classroom’, in three rows of four. I hate these rows and because I share the classroom with the L1 teachers, I cannot move them freely. Not only because they are a bit on the heavy side but also because some of the breaks in-between the classes are short and there is no time to reorganise the room before I leave it. I am not sure. I am thinking.
The other issue related to the fact that I am in two classrooms is this: I am in two classrooms which means that I am in none and I am slowly turning into a Mary Poppins, only not with a bag but with a set of boxes that are my treasure chests, boxes that I carry around…Much as it is true that my arms need some toning and some workout and it might actually be beneficial for me, it is another thing that gets on my nerves. I cannot change the set-up, I will be sharing and moving around, but I think I have a solution. I just need to reserach it.
As regards, the resources, in general, I am better organised and that makes me happy.
The academic year has started and this September I have found myself with a new group of children, in a new school and, in general, in a completely new environment. It is a bit of a whirlwind and how else? Greenday’s song with the most amazing title and line ‘Wake me up when September ends’ was not written for teachers but it surely feels like it was. However, primary school kids, a new academic year and a new course means only one thing: working on the new class routine. This still stands true.
All of it might a blessing in disguise. A teeny tiny bit uncomfortable because I am literally out of my comfort zone (and my classroom) but how beneficial! Instead of bringing the kids into my world and my kingdom (aka my classroom), I get to take what I know and believe in and to organise a new world and a new kingdom (and a classroom!) accordingly. These new circumstances are an interesting opportunity for me to reconsider what the class routine means for me, what are its main elements and how they can be translated into a new environment.
I decided to keep a diary of the first month to see what is going on and this way create a mini-series on the blog.
Starting the lesson
Where I teach at the moment, the kids have their classroom and they can go in and out of the classroom, outside of the lesson time, whenever they want. For that reason, we cannot do the line-up outside that I like so much. What is more, the school does not have any bells or any signal system as there are primary and pre-primary classes, with a slightly different timetable and that means that anything ringing for one would be a distraction for the other. However, that also means that we have no official start of the lesson.
For that reason, as soon as it is time to start the lesson:
I put the hands up and we count down from 10 to 0, while I am counting on my fingers to give the kids a few seconds to calm down
We exchange hellos (‘Hello everyone!’, ‘Hello, Miss Anka’)
We do the roll call (‘Let’s check who’s in today!’ ‘Sasha?’ ‘Here’) – this is not only for me to mark everything in the register and to learn and to practise the names of all my kids (after two days, I already remember all of them, phew). This is also for me to check who is sitting where (as this can change) and we connect it with ‘checking’ that everyone’s names are on the board which is especially important for the kids who do not yet recognise their name in English.
How do you feel today
This was something that I knew I wanted to be a part of our routine from the very beginning and for many reasons, too. It is always a good idea to gauge the mood of the audience, regardless of the age or level and I like to know how my students are feeling on the day but it seems to be especially important for the younger kids in the beginning of the course and super super important for the year 1 students who are getting used to the routine and who are also getting used to being away from mum. All these emotions can help with dealing with different behaviour issues and they will be necessary to help the kids develop empathy towards their classmates. Plus, a lot of useful language that we will need to tell stories.
Anyway, we started the week with the six basic ones (happy, sad, angry, scared, sleepy, OK) but more adjectives and phases followed and by the end of the week we also had ‘hungry’, ‘tired’, ‘thirsty’, ‘not so good’, ‘energetic’ and, suggested and created by one of the kids, ‘I miss my mummy’ (in the photo above). Which, by the way, is an absolute treasure – my student not only noticed the need for this flashcard / emotion, he decided to share it and to produce the card following the conventions of the genre (aka all the cards I produced), including the colour, the size, the style and the choice of the symbols. He also insisted on my writing the English version of it and on displaying it on the board. And you know what? He read the audience exceedingly well! This is now one of the most popular way of answering the question…
I have them all on very simple foam flashcards and they are displayed on the board in the beginning of the first lesson. We go over all of them, ‘reading’ them and using the accompanying gestures i.e. even if the flashcard has only ‘happy’ written on it, we say ‘I am happy’ and I demonstrate the gesture for that.
Afterwards, I ask all the kids, in turns, ‘How do you feel today?’ and the kids answer. This stage is followed up by a song, which we sing together and which creates a nice balance, an individual task / production followed up by a group, choral activity. At this point we are using ‘Hello Song‘ from Super Simple Song.
We also write on the board the following: the day, the date, the weather, the subject and the time slot.
Songs
We have only started the course so there aren’t many songs that we know or that we have managed to choose as our favourites. However, I try to include songs as punctuation marks because we have a long day and although the kids get their snack and movement breaks, they still need some stirrer in the middle of the lesson. So far we have included the following: A is for Apple (English), I can count to 20 (Maths) and Who Took the Cookie from the Cookie Jar (as our final game in the Maths lesson, which, at this point, is the end of the English day. This will have to change in the following week).
Rules and Classroom Language
Speaking of rules, I think I have broken a few myself. I HAVE NOT introduced any rules in the first week. The teacher and the trainer in me are appalled at such a negligence. Or, rather, they should have been but they are not. Oups, sorry not sorry.
As I said, I am in a new environment and I decided to act on my intuition and now, after the first week is over, I am actually having a blast trying to analyse what I did and what I did not and why.
I introduced a few basic gestures – expressions in the first lesson and we have been revising these since but I have chosen only the few basic ones that help us navigate around the lesson and the classroom and these are: Yes, No, Stand up, Sit down, Stop, Quiet, Wait. A very, very basic set indeed, to help us survive but not to overload the children.
As regards the actual rules, things to do and things not to do, I took things easy because I wanted to see the kids first, to observe them and to analyse them in order to figure out what are those 5 basic rules that we need first. Again, to help us survive but not to overload the children. Now I know and we are going to be introducing them in the upcoming week, together with more advanced classroom language.
Rewards chart
Our rewards chart was another area that I started to introduce rather cautiously, almost hoping that I can get away with not using it at all. Alas, after two days it turned out that we will need it after all, as one of the tools to help the kids regulate their own behaviour. I am planning to use it temporarily only. I have already written about this kind of an approach and about all of the advantages and disadvantages of rewards charts in general. If you are interested, please follow the link here.
So far I have been using the names on the board, however, because of many different reasons, from tomorrow, we are starting with the hand-held chart.
Time
This is a brand new element that I did not use to think of much before or to include in the routine framework. Until this summer and until this academic year. Here are the two tools / tricks that we have used this week with my kids.
Lesson plan, or, a list of activities we are planning to cover in class. You can read more about it here. The points keep disappearing as we complete the activities. This helps the kids see the passing of the lesson and to manage their time and behaviour in time. Naturally, all the elements such as ‘songs’ or ‘games’ create something to look forward to in the later stages of the lesson
A clock on the wall: we started the week without a clock and I lasted two days, upset, confused and angry. This is how I realised that Anka, the teacher adores a clock on the wall, to start and to finish the lesson on time and to understand how and if the pace of the lesson needs to be adapted. On day three the clocks were already on the wall and we used them for the benefit of the kids. One of the things that we put on the wall is the names of the subject (English, Maths, ect) and the time slot of the lesson, for example 9:00 – 9:45. Afterwards, I say: the lesson finishes when the big hand gets to number 9 on the clock, while pointing to the hand and the numbers on the clock. I have noticed that children started to respond to that. We will continue.
Story
I have also decided that our last lesson of the week (Thursday) will be a story lesson, in order to finish the week on a high note, to do something lighter and to be able to take advantage of everything that a storybook can offer. This past week my story of choice was ‘Too Loud’ a story by Kay Widdowson about a cat mum who walks through the garden asking everyone, bees, frogs, dogsg and ducks, to keep quiet and only in the end do we find out that it is because her kittens are sleeping and she doesn’t want them to wake up.
We used the story to practise reading the names of animals, CVC words and not and to read and the kids were involved through the phrase ‘Stop. You are too loud’. This phrase is an adaptation of the line that features in the story, although I adapted it a little bit. I decided to use only ‘too loud’ instead of ‘too loud’ and ‘too noisy’ and I have developed it into a full sentence that we can use in the classroom on daily basis.
Socialising
Turning a group (or a class) into a community is a long-term project that will take us a large part of the academic year. I have already written a bit about it here. We have already started to work on it and in the first week:
we have done a lot of activities whole class, to give us all a sense of one organism
I have tried to use the kids’ names whenever possible and to keep them on display all the time, to give us all a chance to learn them. We have also done a few rounds of ‘Can you read that name?’
we have tried to play a boardgame, for me to see to what extent the kids are ready to take turns, to obey the rules, to work in small pairs
I have been observing how different kids work and interact with different partners although they hasn’t been a lot of mingling yet because I did not want to introduce anything mess-inducive before the kids are ready.
we have worked a lot with markers because it is fun and markers are an easier writing tool but it also helped with the simple team work as the groups of two or three students were given a box of markers to share and to take care of
I have started to involve the children into taking control of the classroom and the lesson i.e. inviting them to be the teacher, assigning a student to give out and to collect resources.
Don’t forget to check out the next episode in the series, at the end of the week! There is more to come! Here you can find the story of week 2, week 3 and week 4. You can also check up on us after four months in the classroom. Here is the newest addition to the series.
(Notes from the Back to School September 2023 webinar at BKC Moscow)
The aims?
Since I believe in leading by example, also here I decided to verbalise the aims for this webinar and for this post. I knew that I would have a mixed-ability audience, with some experienced and some less experienced teachers who might have or might have not used stories in their lessons. For that reason, I chose two main aims for this session:
For those teachers who have little or no experience with storytelling in the classroom (or little or no love for storytelling in the classroom): to provide the basic tools that will help them get started
For those teachers who already have a lot of experience with storytelling in the classroom (or a lot of love for storytelling): to bring in a new angle which will help to reinforce this love
What is a story and why we even bother
A structure of a story it is super simple. Rob Bisenbach calls it a three-legged stool here, since there are always characters who have a goal they try to reach and, on the way there, they encounter some obstacles or get over some challenges or, basically, who have some adventures. Everything else is an added value, like a set of blocks that you can add, take away or rearrange. I like this approach to and it does help me with preparing the materials for my students.
The best thing is that our life, our private life, our non-teaching life, is all built around stories. We read, watch and listen to stories in form of books, audiobooks and films and series. We tell stories of what happened to us at work, at school or just something that we witnessed on the metro or in the street. We tell stories to share our feelings, to make people smile, to make the little people fall asleep or to eat lunch. If we look for even a wider context, our family’s history is a story, our nation’s history is a story, everything that we read about on the news, the serious bits and the less serious bits, everything is a story.
No wonder then something that is such an important part of our life made its way into the EFL classroom, for children and for adults. Two years ago I gave myself a task of counting all the reasons that there might be to bring a story into the kids’ classroom and, based on what I could get my hands on in 2021, I found as many as 50, some related to child development, some related to teaching foreign languages. You can find this post here. I do recommend!
Different types of stories and their advantages (and all the tricky bits)
Coursebook stories: This is the place to start from all the teachers who have not worked much with storytelling with young learners. From the point of view of the leaners, these stories are easily availalbe, they often include the favourite characters who the kids can follow throughout the entire year and the language in terms of structures and lexis is carefully chosen and consistent with the material covered in each unit. On the other hand, these stories are also very teacher-friendly because they come with a set of instructions and ideas. Even if they are not ideal, they are a great starting point for adaptation and development. Our coursebooks also provide for a good variety of stories. Superminds from CUP for example include the following: cartoons (print and video versions), action stories for the younger kids and real, extensive reading stories for the more advanced primary school kids.
Traditional stories: They are a little bit more challenging, for both parties but they also have a lot of advantages. In many ways, these stories are already available to our students. It is quite likely that they have already heard them, watched them or read them in their L1 as the Little Red Riding Hood, the Enormous Turnip or Jack and the Beanstalk are a part of the world culture and bringing them into the lesson, in a different language version will be welcomed with joy. However, the beautiful and rich language, that is the main benefit of using these stories is also the biggest challenge in the context of the EFL or ESL young learners. More often than not, children would have to rely on their memories as a lot of the story will not be available to them. Consequently, these stories require more adaptation and grading and, in general, more work since these stories are not accompanied by ‘How to’ manuals and teacher’s books.
Phonics stories: This is another type of a story that was created not for the second/ foreign language learner but simply for a child learning to read. The language of these stories, although very often simplified and handpicked, focused on certain sounds and phonics, might still be beyond a regular young learner beginner learner. However, the teachers still use them because of their potential for the literacy skills’ development although it means more work and more careful lesson planning and staging on the part of the teacher.
Storybooks: There are many advantages of using storybooks with YL. These are the real stories, written for children and their plot is not limited by the set of the words that need to be introduced in unit 5, which, unfortunately, often makes the story very educational and, consequently, very boring. Storybooks are far from this danger zone. They use beautiful language, great characters and fantastic illustrations which can help develop not only the children’s language but also their visual literacy and literary tastes. It is true that, again, a lot of work might be required to adapt the langauge and the plot to make it available for our EFL/ESL students. Not to mention that the handouts and teachers’ books don’t exist, either so teachers are basically on their own. However, as a teacher who had an opportunity to see the long-term impact of these stories being present in the YL classroom, I can say that it is absolutely worth it.
There are some earlier posts on using storybooks in the EFL classroom and you can find them here
My favourite storybooks to have in the classroom, Top 10
Choosing a storybook for your EFL classroom, My experience
Videos: That is an interesting resource that was not available to us in the past and that has definitely blossomed since the time of the pandemic. There are certain limitations regarding the language, the support for the teacher but it is a resource that is readily available for the teachers and for the students and their parents and that is almost unlimited. Teachers often like to use Peppa (that most kids are familiar with), Pete the Cat or the Little Princess. I have so far committed only one post on Peppa and you can find it here.
YLE Cambridge
If the fact that stories are everpresent in our life is one important reason to bring stories into our lesson, then the Young Learners Exams are another. All of the modern coursebooks are aligned with the YLE skills and requirements, they offer skills development in the format of the exam and even if we do not prepare our students for taking the exams we will be developing their language skills in some connection with the papers format.
The exams themselves were introduced in 1997 and since then, as a conference presenter, a teacher, a trainer and a manager, I have often come across comments (doubts, inquiries or even accusations) that the exams were introduced for purely mercenary reasons and that children should not be exposed to any formal assessment at that age.
For me, personally, the main benefit of the YLE Cambridge is the research that was done and has been done in order to find out what being a young language learner is about and how chilren’s language skills can be tested in an appropriate way. And it was done not in connection with a group of students from only one L1 background but around the world which means that by analysing a lot of date, the L1-influence can be taken out of equation, helping us understand how children learn. Here is only one number for you: the initial versions of the tests were trialled on a group of 5000 children from Europe, South America and South-East Asia. If you are interested, please have a look at the Research Notes published by Cambridge online in February 2002.
Stories feature in three exams, starting from a very simple picture-based reading and writing task for Starters, through Movers, up to Flyers, with a real extensive reading and a reading comprehension task, a writing and a telling of a story based on a set of visuals. The storytelling tasks are included in the KET writing task.
The language
This is, by far, the most important reasons to use stories in the classroom: the language.
In order to tell a story, the students need to be able to operate quite a few structures such as the present or past tenses, adjectives, emotion adjectives, adverbs, linking words, time and sequence words, sensory words as well as the functional language in the dialogue. This means that the students need to possess all these skills to tell a story which, in turns, means that for quite a long time, for some of the levels, the students will not be able to do it. Or will they?
I do believe (and I will try to prove it:-) that storytelling is not only the aim in itself, it can also be an approach, and these structures can be introduced in order to enable the students to participate in storytelling as soon as it is possible.
For example, as regards adjectives, according to curriculum, the beginner students are not required to know any, apart from a few basic ones. The real adjectives input is scheduled for the A1 level (Movers) when the kids encounter comparatives and superlatives for the first time, although adjectives are around us and the meaning can be easily presented and practised because they are representational.
Far from being a call to action to change the curriulum, it is possible to introduce a lot of this language much earlier, in a way that is appropriate for young language learners.
I have already written about something that I called The Storytelling Campaign. You can read about it here: Introduction and here: Activities. Below, you will find the ideas as I presented them in our webinar.
Introducing adjectives: emotionsand not only
These are very easy to introduce. With our pre-school and primary school students, we start with the basic set of happy, sad, angry but then, as we go through the year, more and more adjectives are added. The photos that you can see here illustrate the set of adjectives that I use with my online YL and a set of homemade flashcards for our pre-primary. This second photo was taken in December, after only three months of classes with my youngest pre-primary and at the time they already knew all these 12 adjectives only because we started each lesson with talking about how we feel.
The other source of language as regards adjectives are the songs, from Super Simple Songs and other channels on youtube, for example Open Shut Them or As quiet as a mouse.
All of these can be used in the following way:
talking about how we feel in the beginning of the lesson, it is good for the language, for bonding but also for the teacher to find out how the kids are in class
this is the langauge that can help to signal problems, when kids are not feeling very well (‘I am sad’, ‘Are you angry?’)
and it can help sort out other classroom management issues (‘Look, Sasha is sad now. Don’t take her pencils, please’)
adjectives can be used to make riddles and to express opinion and this way personalise the content
adjectives can be used in simple Yes No game to describe any picture to prepare the kids for the listening or reading task or to practise vocabulary, for example: ‘The cat is sad. Yes or no? No, the cat is happy’
and this is exactly the same structure and approach that will be used to describe the pictures that are a part of a story (see: Movers or Flyers)
This is another topic that, in my opinion, is not really used to its full potential in our coursebooks. For that reason, I like to introduce games and activities that promote the use of verbs. From the very first lesson we play a movement game (‘Abracadabra, 123 you are (dancing)’ and ‘Everybody is dancing’). I also introduce the verbs through the songs, for example What do you like to do, I like you and Please be quiet, I am trying to sleep. Sometimes I introduce them because of our curriculum, for example the third song here that covers Present Continous and the rooms of the house. Sometimes, they feature in our course just because they are a source of a plethora of verbs and this is how we learn them before Present Simple or Present Continuous make an appearance as per curriculum.
In the classroom, apart from the obvious advantages for classroom and behaviour management, as it is an easy to use stirrer, we can also use these structures to describe any pictures, which, again, is a preparation for storytelling with visuals.
The illustrations above come from the YLE Cambridge sample papers and they can easily be used in class, not only as the actual exam practice activity and not only with the children who are actually preparing for Starters. The story is so obvious and funny (and it includes all there elements of a story mentioned above) and the visuals simple enough for the pre-primary students to use, too. If they are prepared for it and if the activity is properly staged.
In the beginning the teacher is the one to initiate the structure either by making incorrect sentences (Mummy is eating. Yes or No) or by proving the sentence starters (Mummy is…) but, with time, the kids get more and more independence and skills. Actually, this activity can start wtih kids looking only at one picture before they are shown the whole sequence. And, bearing in mind that the teacher is the one to select the picture (or pictures) for the activity, it is really easy to choose a particular focus, closely connected to the topic of the lesson, for example talking about toys, talking about clothes, talking about food etc.
A simple story can be created even if only one picture is available, like the one above that also comes from YLE and is, in fact, a reading task, this picture can also become the basis for a story. We can see a beautiful family scene, a Sunday afternoon and everyone is doing something and feeling something. The first step is a simple picture description. The second step is figuring out what all the characters do next. ‘Next, mummy is drinking tea’, ‘Next, daddy is sleeping’ etc and here the kids can become a lot more creative. Naturally, all ideas are good ideas.
One more way of using this approach would be using not the visuals but the sets of words, like the one we have in Movers Reading and Writing part 1 or in Flyers Reading and Writing part 1. The teacher would only need to add some introduction, just like in Movers and Flyers story speaking. Kids need to continue the story and they need to use the words provided. I came up with this idea only while preparing the webinar and I am really looking forward to trialling it out with my students. Above, you can see my example from the webinar.
Introducing linking words
Simple linking words such as ‘because’, ‘and’, ‘but’ and ‘so’ can also be introduced as part of the traditional curriculum for pre-school or primary students.
‘Because’ is the one that we start using in the first half of year 1. It can be included in the hello circle when the students talk about how they are (‘How are you today?’ ‘I am happy’ ‘Because…’) and start giving simple justification for their adjectives. ‘I am happy because it is sunny / because it is Friday / because I have a little homework’. It might happen that the kids will start to answer in their L1 or in a mix of L1 and L2, but it is perfectly fine. First of all, I like to know why my students are happy or sad or angry because it might have an impact on their behaviour in class. Second of all, it helps me to react to their news and to bond.
‘Because’ can also be used while describing pictures or while expressing opinion in a simple way (‘Do you like this story / song / picture?’ ‘Yes, because it is happy / funny / fast etc’)In the beginning, this has to be initiated and supported by the teacher, with the sentence starters or with offering a few options for the answer. It also helps when the teacher acts as a model (‘I am happy because my lunch was yummy’).
‘And‘ is even an easier linker to promote. First of all, it can be demonstrated and supported with gestures (i.e. fingers, to signal more than one element). Second of all, it can be used with any vocabulary, colours, toys, food or emotions (‘I am happy AND beautiful’).
‘But’, by comparison, poses a bigger challenge but it is not impossible. With some of my groups in the past, I used the song already mentioned here (‘What do you like to do’ by Super Simple Song) because its every verse is build around a simple contrast (‘I like dancing BUT I don’t like dancing with a bear’). With some other groups, I started to introduce it with a song, too, ‘Do you like broccoli ice-cream?’, simply by adding ‘but’ for some dramatic effect in-between the lines of the story (‘Do you like ice-cream? Yes, I do’, ‘Do you like broccoli? Yes, I do’ ‘BUT do you like broccoli ice-cream?’) and the kids simply picked up on that.
The most challenging of all of these for my Movers kids turned out to be ‘so‘ as they seemed to confuse it with ‘and’. I haven’t had a chance to implement it in the classroom since it was an idea that came to my during the preparation for this webinar, but this connection could be created in a natural way between ‘I’ve got a stomach ache’ and ‘I don’t eat ice-cream’ or ‘No ice-cream today’ which we use with my pre-primary kids while talking about health and health problems. Again, one more thing to trial and test when I am teaching level 2 of pre-primary again.
As regards the story sequencing linkers such as ‘first’, ‘next’, ‘in the end’, we introduce them through exposure while telling stories based on visuals. It is one more activity that starts with the teacher being responsible for providing those and encouraging the children to follow up with the events of the story.
Staging of the story
One of the biggest challenges that the students face while telling the story is the very genre and the way we tend to present it in class. Very often, children, when they hear the word story, they automatically raise the level of challenge for themselves and they approach the task in a very serious way, hoping to create something that will at least match the creativity and the success of Harry Potter. Which, of course, is not the case. When we start telling stories in class, we are expecting something with a character, a goal and some obstacles, something with a beginning, the middle and the ending and, if we are using the YLE Cambridge materials, something that describes the three or four or five visuals provided.
Our task, as teachers, is to show the students, how this task can be broken in and managed, moving on from a very controlled practice, to freer practice, and, perhaps, eventually, to a very creative story writing or story telling.
Here is one of the approaches that I used in class effectively, based on the Flyers speaking materials.
Step 1: Collecting resources to tell the story in a simple way.
Students can work individually, in pairs or teams. They make a list of all the things they can see in each picture, starting with the basic nouns that can be seen which later can be extended into adjectives, verbs, emotions etc, anything more abstract. Afterwards, the kids, in pairs, describe the pictures (aka tell the story) with all of the words on the list, crossing them out as they use them. This is how we can ensure a good length of a discourse, especially that the teacher will be monitoring the kids as they are creating the list and the teacher can add some of the crucial words if they are missing. The students can exchange their lists and tell the story again, with a different set of words and they can also write the story for homework.
Step 2: Crazy words aka freer practice
This step is a simple development on step 1. The words on the list on the right have been provided by the teacher and, as can be seen, they do not feature in the visuals provided. Since, however, the children already know the story very well, they can be invited to take part in a more creative task. We read the words together with the whole group and I tell them ‘These words are in the story but they are not in the picture’ and we make a few examples together about the first picture, for example: ‘Students are hungry. It is 10 a.m.’, ‘Students are looking at the flowers in the garden’ etc.
Afterwards, children work in pairs and create their own story trying to incorporate all the crazy words.
Step 3: Story and its framework
This is the most creative approach in which the kids use only the general framework of the original story. After the kids tried to tell the story and tried to tell it with a few new details, they have a chance to change as much as they want to within the framwork. I prepare the main events, in the form of questions and we reveal them one by one while the students are working in pairs, thinking and planning their story. Afterwards, we have a big, whole class, storytelling session and it an absolute joy and fun to see in how many versions you can tell the story based with the same building blocks. Here, in the post on the activities in the storytelling campaign, you can find the framework for yet another Flyers story, Charlie and the elephant.
A few bonus ideas
Vyacheslav – about one more, super simple way of setting up a storytelling activity
We have put together twelve 90-minute sessions. At the moment we run them online because it gives us an opportunity to reach a wider audience.
The 12 sessions include:
Introduction. The VYL student: about the child in the classroom
The VYL teacher: the features of a VYL teacher and approaching the material
Classroom management: all the techniques that can help organise the students and the learning process
Behaviour management: dealing with issues
Coursebooks and material development: how to approach the coursebook and how to design own activities
Flashcards: the basic resource for VYL teachers in the online and in the offline classroom
Craft: including and managing craft activities in the classroom
Music and songs: the settler and the stirrer, all in one
Storytelling: using different stories with preschoolers
Lesson planning: how to plan effectively
Games: why kids need games
Literacy: how to start developing literacy skills in the EFL pre-school group
Each session includes both theoretical and practical, with the basics to help us outline and understand the framework and the connection to the ‘adult’ EFL methodology and a lot of practical solutions for the every day teaching. We have also prepared our reading list, with articles, resource books and videos that can help each participant either prepare for the course or to develop further after the course is finished.
The course finishes with an obligatory assessment task which was designed not as a research assignment but as a written reflection task to give the trainees an opportunity to look back at the whole course experience and to summarise the main take-outs.
The additional course components
At the end of each course we always collect feedback from our participants and this is exactly how we got inspired to add these additional components to further improve our course. From summer 2023, these include:
Lesson planning sessions: this is an additional session, a group lesson planning session in which we work with the material from different coursebooks, usually provided by our participants, preparing together with a tutor for ‘a typical lesson’ with this material. This session focuses on selecting and formulating lesson aims, selecting appropriate activities, adapting the coursebook and selecting supplementary materials
Private consultations with the tutor: this is a session that can be used in any way the trainee chooses, for example lesson planning, questions related to course design, discussing classroom managment, professional development, materials and activities etc.
Optional homework written tasks: there are three tasks, as a follow-up to three of the sessions: lesson planning, storytelling, language production. The trainees that decide to submit any of these tasks receive a written feedback from the trainer.
Who this course is for
This course has been initially designed to support the novice teachers in the area of very young language learners and that is why the sessions cover all of the basic areas that constitute the everyday life on the EFL carpet. However, since many of the experienced teachers started their career in VYL in a way and in a situation that was far from ideal, with no pre-service training, with no support and just learning on the go*), for them this course is an opportunity to boost and to reorganise what they know already and to align with the principles of the communicative methodology and the child development psychology.
Every single time we run this course we have a beautiful mix of participants, some experienced teachers and some VYL novice teachers, teachers working online and teachers working offline, teachers from the EFL, from the bilingual education as well as teachers who are also mums of little kids who want to learn how to start teaching their own children. It is a lovely learning environment and everyone is bringing something that they can share. And, it no surprise, that we got a very positive feedback from all of our participants, the newly qualified and the experienced teachers.
Feedback from our trainees
‘I think all the sessions were very useful because we have found out more about teaching very young learners, in some cases understood the mistakes we did and found some ways to improve it.‘
‘I really enjoyed the lessons. The classes about craft, songs and storytelling were especially helpful. Thank you so much!!’
‘All of them were very useful. I love sessions about craft and storytelling. Big thank you, that was great !!!!’
‘All sessions were useful and contained interesting examples. Although, if I have to name those more useful that others, these will be sons, craft and storytelling, great examples to remember and use in my own practice.’
‘Literacy, craft and storytelling session were the most useful as they had direct and immediate impact on my teaching practice.’
‘I’d like to take this opportunity and thank you for this course. I don’t have experience in teaching VYL, so whole course was highly useful and practice-oriented.’
‘I loved the last three sessions because they were pratical and I could use the ideas and materials on my lessons! I can’t say, that there were any useless sessions, but in the beginning there was some information, that was obvious for me. Anyway, I’m happy that I was able to do this course!’
‘Classroom management (I’ve never though before why VYL classrooms are organised in a different way from the classroom devoted to teaching children of different ages as I don’t remember myself being in the kindergarten and later on my classroom at school were very bare; and I was not taught about VYL classroom design before).’
And a few words from the trainers…
I absolutely love teaching the course. It has become some kind of a joke that I start every session with ‘Oh, today we are doing my favourite session’ but it really is every session.
Every single time it is an amazing journey on which we embark together and I take a lot of pleasure in sharing my ideas and experience and to help the trainees see how they can become better VYL teachers. It does not always involve any new amazing materials, coursebooks and resources but only a change of a mindset and a different way of looking at what we already have at our disposal.
The mix and the variety of backgrounds mentioned above is another reason why I like being a trainer on this course. Regardless of what it is that we discuss and look at instantly gets to be seen and considered from a few different angles, such as a different environment for the early language learning such as a bilingual school, home, an EFL class, different time allownances or formats (online and offline) or even different institutional policies because not all the EFL schools are the same. It’s not just ‘the idea from the tutor’, that is the only truth there is. It is an idea from the tutor that gets automatically reflected in a variety different mirrors and that automatically undergoes an analysis and adaptation. Which we are all learning from.
Happy teaching!
*) I am saying this with a deep conviction, based not only on my conversations with my trainees and my mentees but also based on the results of the reseach that I did for my MA thesis a few years ago and my dissertation got its title ‘Left to their own devices?’ for a reason. I, personally, was one of these teachers, too, when I started my teaching and my VYL teaching many years ago.
It is funny how, sometimes, a particular topic lands on your table all of a sudden. I’d say ‘L1 made a cameo appearance’ but it would not be very accurate. It was defininitely not a cameo appearance. I am thinking more of a scene from Harry Potter, the one in which the Dursley’s living room gets flooded with the envelopes from Hogwarts after uncle Vernon tries to hide the one letter to Harry for a few days…
This was the use of L1 in the EFL classroom, especially when you are teaching kids. There were some conversations with my trainees, during the input sessions and during the private consultations, there were a few sessions at the Warm-Up Conference from Masha Elkina. Then I found the book by Shellagh Deller and Mario Rinvolucri with whom I had a pleasure to learn years ago so I automatically reach out for their books whenever I see them on any shelf. Last but not least, there was my own teaching this summer.
One conclusion: I think I know what the next post is going to be about…
As regards, the book, I need to read it first and to find a few activities that I would love to experiment with in my lessons. Luckily, the new academic year is about to start so there will be at least two groups that will help me with it. The post will come out of it, too.
In the bibliography you will also find a few of the most recent articles available online (yay to the easy access) but I have to admit – I haven’t read them yet, the bibliography today will be my ‘saved for later’ type of a list. I will be dealing with them later but maybe you will get there first.
I have written about the use of L1 on this blog:
The overheard conversations about the different angles of looking at the use of L1, from the kids, the admin, the parents and the teachers
And about two situations with my pre-school group when I managed to solve the problem without using any L1, one related to behaviour (Are you a girl or are you a lion?) and one related to language clarification (The Spiderman story).
This summer’s teaching and why it made me think about L1
This summer, apart from my regular students, I am also working at a summer camp in the city, mostly with primary students and with a few younger ones, who usually come with their older brothers and sisters. We have a programme designed specifically for the summer classes, without any coursebook and with the adjustable level of the literacy content, focusing on developing vocabulary and structures and the speaking skills, with a lot of CLIL and task-based learning activities that can be adapted to the needs of a mixed ability group. If you are curious about the actvities, I have been keeping my summer camp diary here.
The biggest issue that I have had to deal with during this summer camp was not the mix of levels and age groups but the very essence of a summer camp, its short duration or, perhaps, not only the duration on its own and the fact that we teach students for only two weeks, usually, but the fact that during this kind of a camp, some students may join the group on only some days and even only for a part of the day. I would like to stress that we all had fun and we learnt a lot but, all these factors really did get in the way of the effective establishing of the class routines and introducing and implementing the class rules.
This has become especially important because my group was made of amazing individuals, aged 6 – 9, however, these were the individuals who had absolutely no idea how to be a group and how to try to be a part of a group. This is precisely what made me think about the advantages of using my students L1.
A few case studies, to get us started…
Imagine, dear reader, that these are the things that happen while mid-air aka while in class, teaching, engaging, motivating.
Case study #1: Two brothers, Sasha and Sasha, play in pairs and they start debating the rules of the game which quickly turns into a fight. It all looks serious, especially that these are two brothers taking part and, unwillingly, they bring into this conversation everything else that has gone on between them since that very morning or week. One of the brothers wants to play the game according to the rules that we have used so far (good, he has learnt), the other one wants to play according to the new rules that we have just introduced this morning and which his brother has missed. I actually want to laugh out loud because they take it so seriously, our games rules, but it is very serious for them and it is getting even more serious by the minute. There are six other kids in the lesson.
Case study #2: One of the girls, Sasha, suddenly comes across an obstacle in the lesson, for example, one of the other students tries to help her with an answer. Or she cannot find a pencil that she wants. Or she is not the first one that the teacher asks a question. Regardless of how minor this obstacle might actually be in reality, she automatically withdraws, tears up, loses control and, if there is any paper, around, for example a drawing, she crumbles it and throws it into the bin. If she had been an oyster, she’d snap shut. Sasha attends classes only three days a week, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and this kind of a reaction usually happens on her day 1, every single week. Later on, during the week, she calms down, feels a bit more comfortable until the following day 1 when the anxiety levels go up again, as if she had forgotten that she is in a safe environment.
Case study #3: We are playing a competitive game, in three teams. One of the students, Sasha, struggles with accepting the idea of a competitive game. He is over the moon when his team is winning, when they get many points, when they find a nice surprise but, at the same time, every time he is not, he starts shouting out all what he thinks about the game, ‘It’s not fair!’, ‘I never win’, ‘They only win’, ‘I always get the stupid boxes’….A very interesting case of an extremely short-term memory loss because, literally, a second ago, this student was celebrating his achievements in the game.
Case study #4: We are doing a creative task. Sasha has a great idea, she presents it and it really is great and a lot of fun. We all laugh. The following student, Sasha, also decides to include it in his contributions. Sasha girl reacts immediately with: ‘Oh, no, you are copying from me!!!’ Both Sasha are not happy.
Case study #5: Sasha is not happy with the behaviour of the group and she decides to assume to role of the teacher, or, perhaps, to help the teacher in the way she feels is appropriate and she makes a very decisive and authoritative comment, a very adult comment if you think about. She says: ‘You are very loud. Stop it. I am beginning to get a headache’. The group, naturally, does not approve and it is all obvious and written all over their faces – they are on the verge of deciding not to like Sasha at all. The funny thing is that this is just the group’s reaction to this particular song and it is within the boundaries and rules established in the summer camp group. Sasha, however, doesn’t know it because she joins the group only for an hour, in the middle of the day and, of course, she brings with her the rules that she learnt in her regular English classes at school. She is also a bit older than the group so perhaps that is why she feels she is obliged to take on the role of the ‘expert’ and to show the way.
(Here you can find a whole huge post that I am really proud of, about the competitive and non-competitive games in the YL classroom.)
The teacher sighs and makes a decision
All of the case studies described above come from the last few weeks of teaching, all of the Sashas are real people and I will have to go over the text again in a moment in order to make sure that the kids’ real names have not been typed up by mistake. Real students, real situations, real problems…
In all of these, there have been only one question that I had to ask myself, namely: What am I dealing with here and how can I sort it out in the most effective of ways? And, since you have been reading this post for a few minutes now, you can probably guess the answer already.
Having taken everything into consideration, the kids as a group, the kids as individuals, the details of the particular situation, I decided to deal with all of these in the students’ L1. Here is why:
All of these situations involved some kind of distress for my students and not dealing with them at all would be impossible as they were all very likely to snowball and to have more implications for the individual students and for the atmosphere in the group. Some action was necessary.
Because of the age and the level of the students, relying on the kids’ mother tongue gave me an opportunity to ensure that the kids will really hear me and, with using L1, I could have a real conversation. Asking questions, eliciting, asking the kids to reflect with pre-A and A1 students is only possible in their L1. Taking the kids’ real development into account and thinking of all of these situations as an opportunity to develop as a human, to develop the kids social skills and to help them notice the other children in the group, there is no doubt that L1 had to be used. As an educator, I had no doubt about that.
As a teacher of English, I did feel a tiny (tiny) bit guilty about not trying to do it in our target language but, having had enough time and plenty of those situations as I have been teaching at the camp over the entire summer this year, I know I made a good decision. The context is different in our permanent, regular classes. First of all, we develop the language in a more organised way and it is easier to smuggle the appropriate langauge to talk about emotions or rules there. Second of all, there is more time and the framework is more regular and structured. You start the year slowly, adding elements, games, interaction patterns as you go along and when the kids are ready for them. If the group returns after the summer, even if there are new students joining in, the skeleton of the rules, routines, rewards and patterns is already there, in place, and it really needs only some dusting, perhaps. Summer camp is an academic year in a nutshell, or pehaps, even better, it is like a time-lapse video of the academic year – all the stages and processes are the same only at a much faster pace. Of course, there are consequences of that.
As for the solutions and the situations described above in my five case studies, they were dealt with in a variety of ways. Sometimes, it meant putting the lesson on hold and having a short conversation with the whole group. Sometimes, it was limited to only comforting the student, offering help and giving her a moment to calm down. Sometimes it meant a quick chat with the two main participants, in private, without drawing the attention of all the other students. Sometimes, it meant a bi-lingual input, like in the case study #4: explaining that the student copied the approach and the idea only because it is a great idea in L1 and then, reinforcing it, or rather, claiming the key phrase (‘Wow, it is a very good idea!’), hoping that we will be able to add it to our set of the functional language in the classroom. Apart from that, I was working a lot on buidling the community, in the context that we were in, for example working in teams, working in pairs, working as one big team, letting the kids make decisions about the lesson and letting them lead the games. I would like to hope that all of these helped the kids develop their social skills, too.
Coda
There are no real take-outs here. This is only a description of an experience from this summer that has made me reflect on the ways of using and keeping the kids’ L1 in the classroom. And, certainly, it is not the last post in that category…
Bibliography
Sheelagh Deller and Mario Rinvolucri (2002), Using the Mother Tongue. Making the most of the learner’s langauge, Delta Publishing
The amazing staircase in the tenement house by Max Berg in Wroclaw
Looking for songs
We have lots and lots of sources of amazing songs that can be used in the YL and VYL classroom. The first and the easiest one of them is your coursebook and the main advantage of it is the availability and the close connection to the curriculum. The songs often combine the vocabulary and the structure of the unit and both the teacher and the students have an easy access to it. The songs’ lyrics are in the kids’ coursebooks, they are often built around the characters from the coursebook or the stories in the coursebook. As a teacher, I have been using the songs from Superminds and Playway to English by CUP and Discover with Dex by Macmillan and I am a huge fan to the extent that I would recommend them as a supplementary material to accompany another coursebook, too.
Another amazing resource is youtube and the brilliant channels such as Super Simple Songs, Dream English Kids, Fun Kids English or Mother Goose Club, full of amazing, kids-friendly, visually beautiful productions that can be used in our EFL classes even if the content does not match the curriculum 100% accurately. After all, this can be an opportunity to learn some more vocabulary or structures.
Sometimes, however, it happens that, no matter how hard you try and how long you look here and there, the song or the chant that you really need is nowhere to be found. There is a way out, too, because you can create your own songs! From scratch!
Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw
Creating your own songs: Starting from the rhythm.
This is more of a jazz chant than a song and I took the general idea from Carolyn Graham. The thing you need is a set of words to practise, divided into groups based on the number of syllables: 1-syllable words (cat, dog, frog, duck), 2-syllable words (hamster, snake, lizard), 3-syllable words (elephant, guinea pig, ladybird) and 4-syllable words (chameleon). You arrange them, in any way you want, following the pattern, for example: 2, 2, 2 – 2, 2, 2 – 2, 2, 2 – 4, 1 OR 3, 3, 1 – 3, 3, 1 – 3, 1 – 3, 1 – 3, 3, 1.
Hamster, lizard, snake
Hamster, lizard, snake
Hamster, lizard, snake
Chameleon, cat!
OR
Elephant, ladybird, cat
Elephant, ladybird, cat
Elephant, cat
Ladybird, cat
Elephant, ladybird, cat.
Practically any rhythm will do, especially if you start clapping your hands and stomping your find and chanting.
A similar technique can also be applied to any repeated sentences. I really like mixing affirmative and negative sentences connected with ‘but’ and ‘and’, for example
I like cats but I don’t like dogs.
I like ducks but I don’t like frogs
I like lizards but I don’t like snakes
What about you? What about you?
Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw
If you are looking for more ideas of this kind, please check out the book by Carolyn Graham (see below).
Creating your own songs: Starting from the melody
This, by far, is my favourite way of creating the songs I want and the songs I really really need. The only thing that it takes is a melody that the teacher is familiar with and filling it up with the lyrics that match the lesson’s theme and aim.
During the YL course sessions, I was visiting one of the breakout rooms while the trainees were discussing the ways of adapting a certain material and, together, within a couple of minutes, we came up with a simple song that could be sung in the lesson on pets, with to the melody of The London Bridge is falling down. It went more or less like that:
Little dolphins cannot dance, cannot dance, cannot dance.
Little dolphins cannot dance but they can swim!
Naturally, this little verse can be replicated with all the other animals and verbs, according to the vocabulary content of the lesson.
Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw
Creating your own song: Starting from the language
This one is probably the most challenging one because there is no basis here, like in the previous two. However, at the same time, since you are not bound by the rhythm or the melody, you can put together any text you need. I have used this approach while creating a chant for one of the groups with whom I had a double lesson, with a break in-between. This is the song that I put together to signal the beginning and the end of the break. The melody for this song was completely made up.
Let’s take a break.
Let’s run and play.
Five minutes. Five minutes
Let’s take a break.
Let’s drink some water.
Five minutes. Five minutes.
Let’s take a break.
Let’s go to the toilet.
Five minutes. Five minutes.
In one of the Science lessons for my pre-schoolers we were doing the food chains and I really wanted to make it more interactive and fun and this is how we ended up with a play with an alge, a fish, a squid, a dolphin and a shark. The story was built around all the creatures noticing their predator in the ocean and hiding. While taking turns to sing the song
I am a little, little alge
And I am happy
At the bottom of the ocean
Where I live
Oh, no! Look! What’s that? It’s a fish!
Let’s hide.
In this particular lesson we made the finger puppets for all the characters, practised the song a few times and then we all participated in the game aka the performance. It was definitely a success.
The only trick with writing a song like that would be coming up with the message to convey, verbalising it and sticking to the appropriate number of syllables in each line. As can be seen in the examples above, the verses don’t rhyme and they don’t need to. As for the melody, it can be anything and, once you’ve got it, it is a good idea to record it, for memory, even if only on the smartphone recorder.
Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw
Here you can find my other posts about using songs in the VYL and YL classroom
Where to start if you have never sung before (here)
The question appeared in one of the groups on the social media and I realised that a) I have something to share here and b) I haven’t got any posts on the movement games for the little people.
One: Abracadabra
Resources: only a magic wand. It can be made at home and producing magic wands is now a real hobby of mine. The easiest version (in the photo below) can be even made with kids, in class. Some shops sell magic wands, too but, really, kids will respond well to a simple pencil if it is accompanied by some ‘Abracadabra’
How to play: We have been using the same line for many years now, with many groups: ‘Abracadabra, 1,2,3. You are….’. The game might be introduced with the first topic that lends itself to miming, for example ‘pets’ or ‘toys’. We start with the simple phrase ‘Abracadabra, 1, 2, 3. You are a cat / a dog / a frog etc’ and I support the language with the visuals namely flashcards displayed on the board and my own examples. The gestures we use for each of the pets, toys, fruit, transport, jungle animals, fairy tale characters, jobs are not universal, they are only our creation for that particular group. Please remember that the ability to represent characters and words through gestures is not a skill that children are born with. They are developing their symbolic representation and they might need the teacher’s support in the beginning of this journey. That is why the teacher’s example is so important.
After the kids have learnt their first adjectives, these can be extended into ‘You are a happy cat’, ‘You are a sad princess’ and so on. Naturally, the game is led by the teacher in the first lessons but later on, the children are invited to lead the game and to cast some spells in the classroom. They start with the very simple and basic combinations but with time they start to be really creative, both with the langauge and with gestures. Think about all these gems from the classroom: ‘a sad pumpkin’, ‘a sleepy cat’, ‘an angry princess’…How would you mime these?
A classroom-made magic wand
Two: Musical flashcards
Resources: only one set of flashcards, I normally use the set from the coursebook, A5 size.
How to play: We stand in a circle and the cards are lying on the floor, in the centre. We move around, in a circle, just walking. The teacher sings a song and my choice is usually ‘Happy Birthday’. As soon as stop singing, everyone stops and picks up one card from the floor. Afterwards we show what we have by using the word in a sentence. The simplest version is ‘It’s a cat’ but the structures can vary and be more closely connected to the vocabulary for example: I like + food, I’ve got + toys, I am wearing + clothes and so on.
After each child produces the sentence, we put the cards back on the floor and continue the game. It works well with all the groups although with my bigger groups, I encourage the kids to speak together, in kind of a messy choir, in order to save time and not to risk any dead moment in the lesson.
This is not a competitive game, no one is sitting down or dropping out, we all play throughout the game. No points are awarded either.
A classroom-made magic wand
Three: Everybody is dancing
Resources: None:-)
How to play: We stand in the circle and the teacher is chanting or singing the phrase (the melody is made up), and everyone is performing the actions. I normally start with the easy verbs i.e. clap, march, walk, eat, drink, dance and swim but we keep adding through the entire year, more complex and more creative verbs so by the end of the first year we have lots of them at our disposal because kids learn all of them just from this simple game.
The teacher is the one to lead the game for quite a long time but the kids can be slowly involved, too by giving them a choice of two verbs, for example ‘Sasha, everyone is singing or dancing?’, Sasha: ‘Dancing’, after which the teacher is singing or chanting what Sasha has chosen. Eventually, the kids are ready to make their own decisions and to produce full sentences. And Present Continuous (because that’s what it is) will come in really handy with storytelling and picture description.
Oh, one important thing: don’t forget to add ‘sleep’, it will work wonders to calm the kids down.
A classroom-made magic wand
Four: Snake!
Resources: a long snake made of paper aka a necessary number of scrap A4 pieces of paper glued or stapled together with a head of a snake drawn on the first one and the tail of the snake drawn on the last one. I actually like to use the A4 sheet cut in half for a thinner snake and I cut out the head and the tail. Perhaps a set of flashcards in the first weeks of playing the game or with younger students.
How to play: The teacher puts the snake on the floor, the kids come to the snake one by one and stand in a line on one side of the snake. The game is intended to practise one particular group of words with some distractors included, distractors here being any other words, not in the category. For example, if the main aim is to practise colours, the basic distractor can be numbers or even kids’ names if that is the beginning of the year and the children do not really know anything else.
The teacher calls out the words, in a random order. If the students hear the target vocabulary, they have to jump over the snake (or to step over if the kids are young and not very good at controlling their gross motor skills) every time they hear the target word i.e. a colour. If they hear one of the distractors, they don’t move. In a way, actually, it is a movement variation of ‘Simon says’ only no one is dropping out.
When we start playing, we line up and I show the kids all the flashcards and we revise all the words. I also tell them that today we play with colours. Later on in the year, when the kids have more vocabulary at their disposal, the teacher can raise the level of challenge and play with two or even three categories.
The game mostly focuses on listening for the target vocabulary and discriminating it from the distractors but it can easily be turned into a productive game with one of the students standing at the head of the snake, facing the group and calling out the words. In the early stages of the unit, when the kids still might struggle with remembering all the new words, it makes sense to let them look at the cards displayed on the board or on the wall or to even hold all the flashcards and to call out the words they want to use.
I created this game for my group in Pamplona in which I had 12 little kids and no room in the classroom apart from the relatively narrow aisle in the middle of the classroom. This is how the snake game was born. We needed something thin to fit in the aisle and I chose a snake because I hate them personally and stepping over a snake is a good move, very conducive to survival. But the kids accepted it and we loved the game.
The snake itself needs to be made but it is easy to store it and to recycle it and if it gets destroyed during the game, it is also easy to fix. Or to be recreated. During one of my training sessions, one of my teachers suggested using a skipping rope and that, of course, is a solution. However, I still prefere the paper because in case of a mishap and a kid tripping over the snake, the paper seems a safe option. If it gets torn, we can fix it, no harm done. A child tripping over a skipping rope, however, might result in a child falling down. Typing that up here I realised that if the classroom has the appropriate floor, the snake can also be drawn on the floor, with chalk for example…
A classroom-made magic wand
Five:I like cats, I don’t like cats
Resources: one set of flashcards, the regular A5 set that normally come with the coursebook and two cards with symbols for I like / I don’t like, for example a heart for ‘I like’ and a crossed heart for ‘I don’t like’
How to play: Before the lesson the teacher puts up the I like / I don’t like symbols on two walls in the classroom, on the opposite ends. In the real life, these two simply stay there for the rest of the year as we use them all the time. The kids get up and stand in the middle of the room, half-way between these two signs. It is good to put there a small stool or a table with all the cards, for example all the toys, pets, colours etc.
The teacher picks out one card, for example ‘green’, calls it out and the students go either left or right, depending on whether they like it or not. The teacher points at one of the group and says: ‘Green!’ and the kids reply ‘I like green’ and ‘I don’t like green’ together with the rest of their group. Afterwards, they come back to the centre (aka the stool) and the game goes on with a different word.
This is another stirrer that gives the kids a chance to move around a bit and to produce the langauge, with the additional support since they have the flashcards to reinforce the meaning of the word and since they produce full sentences with approximately half of the group. The kids can also be invited to lead the game by choosing the words to use.
The game can be used throughout the year with almost any vocabulary and there are a few adaptations possible especially as regards the settting. If the group is big or if the kids are too energetic and too tricky to control, the same game can be played with the kids sitting on the carpet or even on their chairs. Instead of walking to the left and to the right, they can stand up and sit down or clap their hands and stomp their feet or raise one arm or two arms for ‘I like’ and ‘I don’t like’ respectively. This will make the classroom management a little bit less challenging for the teacher.
A classroom-made magic wand
Bonus activities: My favourite movement activies
Resources: the access to the internet and youtube
How to play: All of these songs here have been created specifically for the purpose of ensuring some movement in the classroom. The main aim here is not the langauge production although they do include some language but, of course, the movement is the star here.
Move by Super Simple Songs – a real hit, nothing more to say.
The Rolly Polly Roll by Super Simple Songs – another hit but only if you have a carpet because kids might actually try to roll or to crawl. You’ve been warned:-)
The Jellyfish Song by Super Simple Songs – I love it and it is quite a challenge to turn yourself into a jellyfish
Head, shoulders, knees and toes – this is the first song we sing in the classroom, mostly because kids can participate without any language production, just by doing what the teacher is doing. I like to sing this one myself, without the audio, in order to be able to control the speed and the activity. There is a version by Super Simple Songs, of course.
Shake your sillies out by Jose Paolo Liwag – I love to use this one with my older students, actually when they can appreciate the need to shake our sillies out and to clap our crazies out…
The Dance Freeze Song by Scratch Garden – the hit of this summer camp. There are some cool verbs and dance movements and we just LOVED to dance! You can also teach your kids the most important verb in the world: FREEZE.
Action Songs for kids by The Singing Walrus – one more fun song, with the basic verbs.
Make a Circle by Super Simple Song – it is a very popular song, I have seen it in many lessons that I observed but, somehow, I have never used it myself a lot.
A classroom-made magic wand
Some things to remember
Before you start any movement games, make sure that the kids are ready. Ideally, these games can be played in the part of the classroom where we have more room, only the carpet, no or fewer pieces of furniture. If that is not possible, please make sure that you create this space, with the kids’ help, possibly, to make sure that it is as safe as possible.
It is also a good idea to introduce some rules related specifically to this movement part of the lesson and these will depend on the classroom and on the group. In my classroom, we used to do all the movement games on the carpet by the window and for that reason our only rule was: We stay on the carpet, to ensure that the kids do not wander around, run around and leave the safe space.
Make sure that you move to this other place of the classroom in an organised manner. In the beginning it might be necessary to call the kids one by one, by the name to avoid a situation in which we have to control a stampede of five-year-olds there and back. With my groups (the maximum number of students in our pre-school groups is eight), we have our chant. I like to go to the carpet first and singing, call all the kids one by one (‘Sasha in the circle, Sasha in the circle’) and to wait, holding hands with all the kids, as they arrive. The child who is just joining is the one to choose the next child (‘Sasha, who’s next?’) and for the last one to join us we all call out loudly (‘Sasha, come here’) so that nobody feels unwelcome. Some kids actually love to be the last ones to join the circle because it is a lot of fun to be called by the whole group.
When the movement game is over, we go to our tables and desks, one by one or in pairs and the teacher is the one to make a decision about the order, at least in the beginning when the kids are still getting used to the new element of the routine.
Bigger groups can use the same pattern, but the kids move in groups of two or three so that the preparation for the activity does not last longer than the game itself.
One of the other things that I always do as the first activity on the carpet is to make a circle, holding hands and run a few rounds of ‘big circle’ (we stretch our circle), ‘small circle’ (we gather in the centre), a few times with these two adjectives and with the other ones, too for variation, for example a low circle (we bend), a high circle (hands up in the air, still holding hands), a wavy circle, a shaky circle and so on. It is an easy, risk-free activity, the kids love it (especially when everyone is present and we can really make a big circle) and, most importantly, after arriving one by one and being individuals, we can do something as a group, something super easy, before we get on to the more creative and productive things.
These games are not only about movement, although this is their reason for being in the classroom and in the lesson. However, as always, the main aim is language production and for that reason the students as the teacher, leading the activity have been included in all of the games presented above.
Can you hear some desperation, dear reader, in the title of this post? Rightly so. I started to write this post after one of the sessions of the summer camp that I took part in. My kids were amazing, of course, clever and eager to learn and, really, we did have a lot of fun. At the same time, looking at how they interact with each other, I could not believe my eyes and my ears. Despite the fact that many of them were already eight and nine, their social skills were on a disastrously low level. Practically anything that involved taking the other humans in the classroom into equation was a huge challenge for way too many of them. I did sigh with desperation, once and twice, and then I rolled up my sleeves and started to introduce pairwork, even though these were not my permanent students.
You may wonder why it shook me so much and why I decided to fix it. One reason is, naturally, my professional obsession with maximising production in kids and, really, I cannot imagine teaching a group of primary school children with the teacher at the centre, all the time. It is a waste of time and a waste of opportunities because kids of that age are capable of working in pairs without constant supervision. And if they do, they automatically produce more language.
However, there is more to it, of course because kids who work in pairs are more independent and more autonomous as learners and they have an opportunity to work with a variety of partners and to make friends and to bond with the group. This, in turns, is a better prognosis for the general classroom and behaviour management because you are less likely to get into trouble and to disrespect someone that you actually like and respect. If only you had a chance to get to know them and to like something about them.
Pairwork, yes or no? YES. One, big, decisive YES.
Where the angels don’t fear to tread. Pair-work in pre-school?
Yes, absolutely yes! I have been introducing pairwork in my pre-school groups first intuitively, simply because I had a very big group of children and we never got to produce any language apart from choral, whole class production and that simply was annoying for me, as the teacher. My students had a lot of potential and I did not want to waste an opportunity. Not quite knowing what to do and how to do it, I started to move towards working in pairs. It worked and by the end of the second year of pre-school, my group was ready and I was able to do what I do with my teens or adults: ‘Together, together, together’ while pointing at pairs of students. By the time we got to primary, this was a natural part of our lessons and some of the children were not even seven at this point. It is possible.
Then, naturally, I decided to do it again, with a new year 1 group, but this time, in a more conscious way, in order to be able to share it with my teachers. We started the course in September, we started to shape the group and the routine and we started to introduce pair-work. I kept my eyes open, I kept our class journal and we did it. It took 13 weeks of a course, with classes that took place only once a week. I presented the results of this research at our BKC Conference in 2020. and you can read more about it in a post here.
How to do it: The choice of the activity
The choice of the activity is one of the most important elements contributing to the success of the whole process. I got a heads-up here only because I have been teaching for many years and I had a chance to bump into one of the older coursebooks for kids which, although it had a few disadvantage and which does not even come close to the level of the currently used coursebooks for children, it did include a few ingenious solutions and, among them, the one I am going to describe below.
The one that featured in every unit of the coursebook was the maze the example of which you can see below. Initially, it was a simple but effective listening game, to practise the target language, especially vocabulary. Kids would listen to a robot dictating the path through the maze, for example: START: red…blue…yellow…brown…grey…etc until one of the exits, A, B or C. The words were separated by a funny sound, something that I would describe as ‘stomping by a robot, marching’ that the kids absolutely LOVED but it also gave them a great advantage of getting enough time to prepare for the following step. In every activity there were about 6 or 7 rounds of the game.
This game can be easily turned into a speaking – listening game and, eventually, into a pairwork.
It starts with the teacher NOT using the audio and dictating the route through the maze, with the kids following it and reaching the final destination. Naturally, the following step is the teacher nominating the students to decide on the following step, one word per child. This stage can go on for as long as it is necessary for the kids to become familiar with the format.
Afterwards, either still in the same unit and with the same maze or in the following unit with the new vocabulary, kids are put into small teams and they lead each other, in teams, through the maze. Eventually, they are put into pairs and they do it with only one partner, with one student speaking and the other student listening and following from the start to the exits.
In order to make it more monitorable, for the teacher and for the students and, also, to make it more achievable, we started to trace the route with coloured pencils or markers, each round with a different colour. This way, the children could always go back in case they got lost and the children can also monitor each other, the student dictating could potentially see where their friends were going.
This way, in a relatively short period of time, the kids got used to the new format, to working together, with only a partial monitoring and support from the teacher. It definitely helped that the vocabulary range in each case was quite limited, namely, only single words, from the obligatory set of words introduced and practised before. The students were not overwhelmed and could focus only on the format of the game. At the same time, however, in the later units of level 2, there were also more complex mazes, for example one in which the kids had to listen to a brief description of an animal for example: it has got stripes, it is big, it can run (zebra). Obviously, that means that the level of challenge can be raised when the children are ready for it.
Julie Ashworth and John Clarke, I Spy 1, SB, p. 23, OUP
It is very easy to recreate the idea using only the black and white clipart visuals and a grid of the required size. Here you see a maze that I created for my preschoolers (rooms).
Below you can see one more type of an activity that features almost in every unit of the coursebook and this one is specifically designed for pairwork for the young students. It was always some kind of a guessing game, with the two spies (the theme of the book, duh:-) trying to guess what the other one is thinking about. I really liked it for the visuals specifically designed for that purpose and the target langauge beautifully displayed on the page to support the students’ production. Using these was a lot of fun and it was effective but I still think that the previous one, the maze, worked better as regards the first steps in working in pairs.
Julie Ashworth and John Clarke, I Spy 1, SB, p. 45, OUP
Contributing factors
There is a whole lot of things that a teacher can do in class in order to facilitate the whole process. They can be implemented throughout the course, little by little, bit by bit.
Seating: make sure that the kids are sitting in a way that faciliates pair-work, in some sort of separation from the other pairs, for example by pairing up the tables and chairs, putting the chairs and kids facing each other.
Resources: these need to be prepared with a lot of care and attention. Apart from the example based on the activity that features in the I Spy coursebooks, described above, the teacher can also use a set of mini-flashcards, as described in my post about pair-work for preschoolers. These cards are used in a game of simple riddles but the cards themselves are small (eight or six or four that fit on an A4 piece of paper) in order for the kids to be able to manipulate them with ease. What is more, a set comprises of an envelope, too that holds all the cards. This way, there is no danger of kids dropping the cards (or if they do, these will fall back into the envelope) and the secret, very necessary in that game, is easily kept throughout the game. Even if the cards are printed on a regular photocopying paper, they are not see-through, being in the envelope.
Roles and turn-taking: Another thing is that the teacher only needs one envelope per pair. This helps a lot with assigning the role. It is crystal clear to the kids who is speaking (the child with the envelope) and who is listening (the child without the envelope). Turn-taking is also more obvious since the kids are literally passing the baton here, the envelope or whatever is the set of materials.
Signals: Introducing the pairwork is a part of the routine and, naturally, it will take some time. To facilitate it, like with the other elements of the class routine in primary and pre-primary, it would be good to include some visual representation of the pairwork, such as gestures or chants, anything that will signal to the students what is about to be the following stage of the lesson. It can be for example a simple flashcard. I love to use a flashcard with a pair of socks for the younger kids and a two pears for the older kids who can get this pronunciation joke but a picture of two kids talking will do, too. Some more modern coursebooks have started to introduce those and that is great). Another solution can be a simple chant, for example ‘Let’s play together! Let’s play in pairs! 3…2…1’. As with all the chants, this will introduce the next stage and it will give the kids a chance to get ready or maybe even to organise themselves. The same applies to the end of the pairwork stage.
Pairing-up: In the early stages, I would recommend a teacher-led pairing up. It is perfectly natural that in a group of children, there will be some students who will be better prepared to work in pairs early and some who will need to more time, even if all the students are of the same age or level. Based on the knowledge of the group and the individual children to end up with the most efficient pairing. This might be necessary to do over a few first lessons, later starting to experiment with some variations. I like to use a set of cards with all the kids’ names and we have a pairwork (or project) draft when we need it. The cards can be taken out of a box or a bag by the teacher or by students, too.
Time: Thil will of course, depend on an activity but choosing an open-ended game, without an obvious grand-finale gives the teacher more freedom and flexibility to finish the game when it is best for the class, rather than having to go until the very end when some of the kids might already be getting tired and bore and when they can start losing their focus. It might be a good idea to set a timer on the phone or to choose a song as a timing tool. It is very necessary to tell the kids how long they will play for.
