Anka Zapart

Teaching VYL Communicatively or About a course

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Input sessions

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.

L1 in the YL classroom. Bringing up the child

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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:

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

When is it ok to use students’ L1 in the classroom? (2023) Cambridge Blog: World of Better Learning

The use of L1 in English Language Teaching (2019), Cambridge University Press

Using L1 in the classroom, TEFL Online

Using the Mother Tongue in English Language Classroom (2022), OnTesol

Survival Guide Using L1 in the classroom by Lindsay Clanfield and Duncan Foord, One-stop English

Why, When and How to Use L1 in the Classroom (2022), Barefoot Teacher

Happy teaching!

How to make your own songs for the YL classroom

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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)
  • How to un-sing a song (here)
  • All the reasons to use a song in the classroom (here)
  • Five songs that have become games (here)

Here you can find some more interesting resources to read

J is for Jazz Chants by Carol Read

How to creat a jazz chant by Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto

Creating chants and songs by Carolyn Graham (Oxford University Press)

5 no-prep movement games for preschoolers

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Movement

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.

Happy teaching!

I am begging you, please! Introducing pairwork in YL groups

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Introduction

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.

Happy teaching!!!

Bibliography

The Power of Play: How Fun and Games Help Children Thrive – HealthyChildren.org

3 Ways Your Child Builds Important Life Skills Through Play – HealthyChildren.org

Why children need to play with their friends as soon as they can (theconversation.com)

Playing Well with Peers Means Better Mental Health (verywellmind.com)

Something (almost) out of nothing. 5 ideas for the user-friendly resources for YL classes.

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Here is a little post I wrote, about 5 easy to prepare, low-key and YL-friendly and YL teacher-friendly activities that can be prepared with almost no time investment.

One: a boardgame

Boardgames are fun and they are of a great help not only because they provide opportunities to practise vocabulary and structures but also because they help with kids learning to play in pairs or teams, to learn to take turns and to cooperate.

The most basic set includes a printed board, like the one that can be found in Heinemann Children’s Games (published in 1995, omg), featured in the photo below, a dice, a set of checkers. Apart from that, the teacher also needs a set of flashcards or mini-flashcards. The students play the game and every time they land on a box, they pick up a card from the pile and use the word in a relevant sentence (ie they say if they like the food item on the card or they ask their partner a question). Once used, the cards go to the bottom of the pile to be used again. If there are more than one team playing, it is good to use a few sets of cards ie Do you like with animals, food and toys etc. Unless, of course, the teacher has time to photocopy and to cut up the mini-cards.

Here are some useful tricks:

  • Instead of letting the kids roll the dice on the table, give each team a plastic cup with the dice inside and show them how they should shake it in order to get a number. This will prevent the dice from rolling off the tables and slowing the game.
  • Instead of checkers, you can use a set of small paper toys, colourful paperclips, colourful magnets or even simple colourful pieces of paper on which the kids can write their names. I also like to use stickers (still unpeeled, on small pieces of paper). This way, no matter who actually wins the game, everyone wins and the sticker is their reward.
  • Do not worry if you do not have enough time to play the game until the very end, from Start to Finish. This way of playing is only a convention. The game is still fun if the teacher sets the alarm clock for 5 minutes, for example, and then finishes the game, provided that all the players within a team have had the same number of turns. After the game is stopped, the winner is whoever is the closer to FINISH.
Heinemman Children’s Games

Two: I spy with my little eye

The only thing that is needed is a picture, some kind of an illustration, taken either from the website or from the electronic form of the coursebook. I do recommend Starters, Flyers and Movers picture wordlists which can be downloaded for free and which include amazing picture scenes for all the topics relevant to these exams and levels. To be honest with you, it is one of my professional dreams that Cambridge University Press publishes them and makes them available for purchase.

These can be printed or just displayed on the interactive whiteboard or on the computer screen. Kids play in pairs but everyone is using the same picture. The basic version of the game includes the more traditional version of the game (I spy with my little eye something big / small and something green / blue / yellow etc) but it can be transformed into any picture-based riddles or description game or Yes / No game and in that case any vocabulary and structures can be involved.

Here are some useful tricks:

  • There are many variations of picture-based activities. You can find lots of ideas in my previous posts from the series All you need is …a picture which you can find here and here
  • If you have a dice (or even better – a dice per pair or per team of students), you can also use the same illustrations in a dice description game
  • There are plenty of illustrations available. I do recommend Starters, Flyers and Movers picture wordlists which can be downloaded for free and which include amazing picture scenes for all the topics relevant to these exams and levels. To be honest with you, it is one of my professional dreams that Cambridge University Press publishes them and makes them available for purchase. I also like to use any of the Starters, Flyers and Movers materials, the speaking visuals, the reading visuals, listening part 1 visuals. Lots and lots is happening in these pictures and they are appropriate for the younger YL.
  • Don’t forget to check out the silly picture scenes used by the speech therapists. They are lovely, colourful and fun and kids really (really) like them. I wrote about them a few years ago and I am still a huge fan.
  • As regards the older YL, I still use the activities with different visuals: photographs from the google search engine, the higher levels exams (PET, FCE, CAE and CPE past papers, especially the speaking visuals). I also love using the materpieces of the world’s art but, admittedly, finding these might take a bit longer unless you have your set of go-to paintings.

Three: Tell me about it on Wordwall

This, thanks to all the tools available on wordwall, has become one of my go to games. It is a set of pictures (template: Open the Box), with a number of points in each box. Kids work in pairs, they choose the box and they have to say something about the visual in each box. With the higher levels of primary or the older students, the teacher assigns a number of sentences that they have to produce. With the younger students, the teacher gives clear instructions regarding the language expected. Here is one example for the year 1 kids of the pre-A1 level: toys. During the game the kids could produce the following structures: It is a teddy bear. It is brown. It is old. I don’t like it.

The game is a great one because it works with individual students and groups, big and small. Everyone plays together and everyone produces because even if there is one student responsible for choosing the number of the box, everyone can say something about the picture.

I like to play the game as one of the first competitive games with a group of young learners, only we play it teacher vs all the kids (and I do my best to lose:-)

Here are some tricks

  • If you don’t feel like preparing these, go to wordwall, you can find all my games in the community. I made all of them public. You can find them here or you can enter wordwall and look for my profile Azapart.
  • The range and the number of structures can be adapted to the age and the level of the kids. I play this game with my preschoolers and my primary students but also with my juniors and teens.

Four: Riddles

Riddles are, by far, one of my favourite games with any age, with the youngest of students and with my teenagers and adults, too. In order to make it work, we only need a set of flashcards or a set of mini-flashcards. I have already written a (great) post about it and you can find it here.

Five: A list of words

I have to admit, I love being a lazy teacher and I always award myself some extra points for all these occassions when I figure out how to be lazy and effective. One of my favourite ready-to-use resources are the word lists from our coursebooks. Sometimes, these can be a set of pictures + words (younger students), sometimes a table with all the key words, for all the older students, juniors and teens. Sometimes, these are the lists that the teacher has to create, especially if we talk about the higher level groups and about working on the vocabulary related to a text (reading or listening). All of the activities below are used to give the students a chance to use the words again and again and again, they are a part of the controlled and freer practice stages of the lesson.

Tricks or some of the ways in which I like to use these lists:

  • The list is used as the basis for riddles (see above).
  • Questions: students work in pairs, to ask each other questions about the chosen items. Depending on the vocabulary set, these questions can range from very simple (‘Do you like…?’), in a variety of tenses, especially if they are verbs (‘How often do you..?’, ‘Did you…?’, ‘Have you ever…?’, ‘Are you planning to…?’)
  • Pairs: students work in pairs and look for ways of pairing up the words and phrases, based on: similar meaning, same first letter, same part of speech, some logical connection, to name a few.
  • Ordering: students organise the words according to one or more criteria i.e. the important and the less important words, the easy and the difficult, the familiar and the unfamiliar etc or, simply, organising them in the order of importance or preference to the student and then comparing their new lists with other students and justifying their choices.
  • Similar or different: students choose a pair of words or phrases for their partner to decide if these two are similar or different and to explain why. This is, by far, my favourite one, especially for the older and for the higher level students.

Happy teaching!

What a difference a teacher makes! A post for all the novice teachers

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The beautiful tiles shown to us by engineer-history.ru

We are approaching a new academic year, new groups, new kids, new beginnings. What a happy coincidence that it is right now that I found this particular report and got to reminisce about this particular lesson that I observed many (many) years ago. Here is my start-of-the-new-academic-year post!

A quote from the report

‘It was a pleasure to watch you with that class and you have no idea what difference it makes to have a teacher who actually feels at ease in a PW class and who wants to be there. The kids can sense it and respond to it. There were many great activities and clear evidence of routine and good classroom management. Well done!’

And it was a memorable lesson for a number of reasons…

The were two teachers working at one of the branches of my school. One of them got in touch asking for help. One of her groups was a group of pre-schoolers and it wasn’t going very well. She went through the initial orientation and lesson planning with a senior teacher but, somehow, as it sometimes happens, it was not coming together. She requested to be taken off the group. It was an option that was being considered but, we wanted to see first if there was anything to be done and I went to observe the group.

Admittedly, it was not the easiest group. It was quite big, by our standards, filled up to the maximum (we had 8 as the maximum number), the kids were beginners but as it sometimes happens in language schools there were of different ages, there was a four-year-old and two six-year-olds and one of the children was also dealing with some attention disorder (according to what I could observe in one lesson).

It was not the best lesson. The teacher was trying, doing her best but, at heart, she must have already decided that this is not something that she wants to do and it was obvious, to the observer and, apparently, to the kids, too.

Two weeks and three lessons later, this group had a different teacher…

And that’s because we were lucky. During one of our training sessions, I literally bumped into the teacher and, in the hallway, in-between the training sessions, snacks and coffee, she asked me if I know of any ‘homeless’ group of pre-schoolers because she said, she would really really start teaching one. She had never done that.

And although I try to avoid doing it, this one time, I found myself observing the teacher in her first lesson with a group. I was sitting at the back of the classroom, with a piece of paper, taking notes and I could not believe my own eyes. Literally.

There must have been some magic done, some spells cast or, during these few days between the two lessons and the two teachers, these kids were tranformed into focused, well-behaved, engaged pre-schoolers! There were a different group of kids.

Everyone came, the older and the younger and the suspected ADHD, a full house! The teacher got some information about the group and the course from the previous teacher, she had some time to prepare. The teacher did her best to follow the routine of the pre-school groups that we had at the school and to manage the class. Nonetheless, it was her first lesson ever, with this group and with this age group.

Great teachers are made, not born and it was not her best lesson and it could not have been. She was just starting with the group, she was still at the stage of memorising the kids’ names and faces and yet, it was a good lesson. Not so much because of the appropriate tasks, instructions, staging and materials but because the teacher wanted to be in the classroom and, somehow, the kids knew it and they appreciated that and, as a result, they responded well to whatever it was that she brought with her. Everything else, the great results, the pleasure and the Above Standard lessons came later.

Why it is good news for all the teachers starting with a new group / level / age group / coursebook

  • Great teachers are made, not born. Even if the beginnings are complicated, stressful and scary, things are going to get better and they are going to get better thanks to the number of minutes, hours, weeks, months and years clocked in in front of a group of students. These number of minutes has its beginnings in the very first lesson.
  • You as a teacher, you can really (really) make a difference by planning the lesson and by preparing for who and what you might encounter in the lesson. By choosing the appropriate activities, by considering the things that can go wrong, by writing the lesson plan for your primary or pre-primary students, with a lot of variety, by reading about the first primary lesson survival kit and about the first pre-primary lesson survival kit, or about all the things that I wish I had known before my first lesson in pre-primary.
  • You, as a teacher, you can really (really!) make a difference by preparing yourself mentally for the first lessons and by believing in yourself! The one piece of advice that I always give my teachers about to step into the pre-school or primary classrooms is this: SMILE! That is because a smile can get us far and further! It is not so much about maintaining your muscles pulled into a shape of a croissant but about remaining cheerful. Things might not go to plan in this first lesson but it is absolutely necessary to remember that they will get better in lesson 2, 3, 4 and 5. As it is necessary to remember that we are great teachers and we love what we do. And that we do our best. When we do our best, of course, although, I personally think that most of the teacher try to do their best, on daily basis.
  • We are all a little bit stressed and feeling uneasy before the first lessons, all of us. Even those who are experienced teachers and trainers. Sorry! It is true the levels of confidence go up and the levels of stress go down with time but it is never completely relaxed. The only difference now is that at this point I am aware of the fact that things might not be perfect but I will know how to handle it. It is not ‘Oh, no! What if…’ and more like ‘Oh, ok, bring it on.’
  • Power to you, dear teacher!

What other advice would you give to a teacher who is about to start teaching Young Learners? Leave a comment in the comments box!

Happy teaching!

Crumbs # 65 Monster Bookmarks

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Ingredients

  • Colourful cardboard, some white paper, markers, scissors and glue
  • An idea to inspire you. I got mine from I Heart Crafty Things and if you are interested you can even find a template there for a small price although, I, personally, did not find it necessary.

Procedures

  • Before the lesson, I prepared the paper: small pieces of paper for the eyes, a large rectangle of cardboard (for example, an A4 sheet makes 2) folded in half, smaller rectangles (aka strips of paper) cut up for the nose.
  • We had two full lessons on the topic of body parts, monsters, health problems and going to the doctor. By the time we started the craft activity, the kids had already practised using the body parts in a sentence, they had described countless monsters, they had also created a monster with in a dice drawing activity.
  • I showed the children the ready product and we described it together.
  • We started with the kids choosing the colour of the big rectangle (the body of the monster) and so did I, in order to be able to demonstrate every step.
  • We cut up one of the longer edges, 5 – 10 mm, along the whole age (the hair). Afterwards, we applied the glue inside the folded rectangle and glued the two halves together.
  • We decided how many eyes we want our monsters to have. We drew these eyes, cut them out and glued them on the monster.
  • The kids chose the colour of the paper for the nose. We drew the nose on the back and we cut it out. On the back on the nose I drew three short lines at the top, to mark the place where to apply the glue. The kids do the same and we glued the nose on the monster.
  • We finished with drawing the smile and adding some decorations.
  • We finished with introducing the monster (name, age, boy / girl, what he/she likes).

Why we like it

  • This craft was a part of the lesson that in itself was very generative, productive and creative. That is why, for the main craft activity, I wanted something that the kids could use not only to produce the language but to use outside of the lesson. That is why I started to look for ideas for bookmarks.
  • When I showed my monster in the beginning of the lesson, some of my kids went ‘Oh, monsters, I don’t like monsters’ but, somehow, they all wanted to make theirs and they got really involved, boys, girls, the younger, the older. I was happy and not so surprised (because it did happen before) that they all left the classroom almost hugging their big-nosed creations. And, once out, I heard them report to the parents, in a very animated way, what it was that we did in class.
  • The craft is relatively easy, with some simple materials, especially that the cardboard can be easily replaced with the regular paper. It did involve some before-the-lesson preparations but nothing very time-consuming and, again, the templates were not necessary at all.
  • I have already started to think of adaptations and of replacing the monster with other ideas and shapes. I have not done these yet, but I am thinking a lot about elephants and, inspired by my friend’s son, LEGO people…Once they are ready, I will definitely share here:-)

Happy teaching!

Lessons from a year of teaching adults. A YL teacher looks back.

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The bigger picture

A great majority of the time that I have spent in the classroom as a teacher has been with young learners, those aged 3 and those aged almost 18. I have worked with adults, too, both beginners and advanced, exam and general or business English, in EFL and in teacher training, and here and there. However, there is no doubt that if I ever had to choose between these two, I would always choose kids. This is what I like most of all, this is where I can be really creative, this is where I find the challenge and the pleasure.

Over those 11 years that I spent as the ADOS and the YL and VYL Coordinator at BKC IH Moscow all my classes were kids’ classes, with a few exceptions of random cover and summer classes. It became kind of a joke between me and my brain, to pose the same question, every single August, when the new academic year was approaching, ‘Well, maybe I will ask the timetabling department for some adult classes this year?’. I never did, not once over those 11 years. Mostly because it quickly turned into making a choice between teaching my kids who I taught for a few years and taking on some new, unknown adults. I just wasn’t interested enough. Simple as that.

However, last year, a few unsolicited changes were introduced into my life and I went to in the motherland, picking up the pieces. As a result, I switched to the online, became a freelancer for a year, and found myself with a timetable in which about 80% of classes were with adult learners.

Now also this chapter in my life has come to an end and I could pack it up, label it as ‘mission complete’ and move on to reflecting on it. Hence this post.

I am a YL teacher and even though the changes were unsolicited, I really did make an effort to make the most of it and to find something that I could put on both sides of the chart. I took four months to write that post but it is finally here.

The highlights aka making the lemonade of all these lemons

First and foremost, the real hightlight of this year was the ability to impart knowledge and to rejoice the fact that the students were making progress, becoming more accurate, more fluent and more confident about their English, those who were beginners and those who were advanced, each of them was progressing and improving. Although, it has to be said, that it is the general highlight of teaching English. Your students’ achievements are a source of joy and happiness, and it has got nothing to do with their age group.

In the same vein, it was very rewarding to be receiving a positive feedback from my adult students, although again, that is always true and it has nothing to do with how old the students are.

It was an interesting experience for me as a teacher and as a human to work with students coming from a variety of professional backgrounds, true experts in their own area, be if finances, IT, banking, coaching, psychology, food manufacturing, car manufacturing or printing and. I was a kind of a privilege to become a part of their professional world and to learn about it, about the area, about the corporate world and about my own country, too, in a way. I met many interesting people and we got on, well or very well with some of them. Some of the lessons, apart from being a good product, were also lots of fun.

That also means that my resume looks even prettier than before because apart from the plethora of achievements in the area of YL EFL, I also have a nice paragraph about Business English and corporate English and a long list of high-profile companies that I have worked with.

I suppose that for me, personally, the most exciting part was the fact that, although, seemingly, I was like a fish out water, in a new area, in which I had less experience than in YL EFL and, in many ways, out of the box, I could find my way there. Teaching Business English, teaching Banking and Finance, teaching corporate English (which is the term that I personally coined for the general English classes in a corporate environment in which the traditional materials related to travelling, health etc are not the best) in a way that was effective and interesting for the students and also interesting for me was a challenge and I am proud to say that I did rock it. Over this whole year, I created and adapted materials, I experiemented with different techniques and resources and, as a material creator and a planner, I did have fun and I developed a lot. Hooray to that!

The other lights aka ‘Breathe, Anka, breathe’

I have to admit that, despite the whole year and a lot of opportunities for developing this particular skill, I (still) find it difficult to deal with the adults in class revealing their inner child. Naturally, I am trying to be a professional and I have a lot of patience and understanding. However, when something like that happens, I quickly become aware of how much of my resources and energy, I use up to deal with these situations. How thin is the ice on which I am walking.

For example, there were the situations in which the students would get stuck and who would give up instantly, even before they have even tried to do anything at all and even before the teacher even got a chance to explain, to scaffold and to support. This would happen regardless of the level, with some beginner, some pre-intermediate or some upper-intermediate students and what would trigger me especially effectively was the defensive ‘It’s so difficult‘, ‘I don’t understand‘ or ‘I don’t know‘, not when it is merely a piece of information signalling a problem but when it is used as a more polite version of ‘I will not do it. No. No. No!‘.

The same applies to the insecurity related to learning a foreign language, the lack of confidence in own skills and the fear of making a mistake, especially if they are paired up with a position in the company and age. Praising, reassurance and support, something that is easy and absolutely natural when it comes to kids or teenagers, all of a sudden becomes a real task requiring conscious effort and focus in the classroom with adults. I would like to believe that over the course of the year I got better at managing such situations and managing myself in such situations. It was interesting to realise that my patience batteries go flat much faster with adults than they do with kids.

Another thing that I found out about after a few months of teaching these groups was that peace and quiet in the classroom is not my favourite kind of environment and that, fortunately or unfortunately, I thrive in commotion, in noise, in a whirlwind, in a mess that is so typical of YL classes. Teaching my adults I found out that peace and quiet quickly leads to stillness and that quickly leads to routine and that leads to something dangerously close to boredom…I feel really guilty saying it because many of my students were amazing people, fun and intelligent but I have to admit that there were a few occasions in class when I would be teaching, listening, taking notes of all the emergent language and, on the margin, writing down notes for the lessons with kids because my brain would get bored and start wandering and coming up with ideas.

Last but definitely not least, there is also the question of oversharing. As a teacher of a language I do spend a lot of my days and weeks getting people ready to communicate. Naturally, what all the students are really interested in communicating as the things related to their life, private and professional, their opinions and views. However, sometimes it gets a little bit out of control and the conversation with the teacher may turn into a conversation with a friend or a barman or even a therapist. Personally, I do not feel comfortable with it because we are not friends, this relationship should remain within some professional framework. I don’t really feel comfortable with sharing any details about my life and, even more so, I don’t feel comfortable with receiving someone else’s emotional load, even if it is done in English. It doesn’t mean that we don’t share at all but there were quite a few occasions in which I felt the line was being crossed and some contingency plans had to implemented. Although, again, perhaps this is another thing that needs to be worked on and a skill to develop.

This paragraph will finish with an anecdote (for that is what that has become): Monday, evening, the end of a very hot day in July, the last lesson with a 1-1 professional in the area that will remain unnamed. We say hello, how are you, the student switches off the camera and it is only after a while that I notice that, due to the temperature, he chose to appear in class without any garments covering his upper body. I said nothing mostly because of the shock I was in, thinking ‘Well, there you go. I bet you not a single one of my kids would think that it is ok to arrive in such a state to a lesson. Even my teens have the decency to switch off the camera when they don’t want to be seen…’

Anyway, as I was clambering out of the state of shock, getting on with the lesson and coming up with different courses of action and when I had just decided to send the student an email after the lesson to ask him to either wear a t-shirt or study without the camera on in the future, all of a sudden my student switched off the camera and, after a few minutes, reappeared in a t-shirt. I suppose that even though I said nothing and even though I did my best to keep on my professional demeanour, there must have been something in my face that send out the right message. And it never happened again.

Coda

I don’t want this post to be a simple exercise of weighing advantages and disadvantages. This is an account of my personal experience and both things are true:

  • this past year of teaching adults (almost) full-time was an interesting experience and when I look back I still smile thinking about some of the lessons and some of my amazing students and although a teacher should not have any favourites, I wish I could wave from here to all of them but especially the amazing IT people, all the boys and all the girls.
  • although this can change in the future, right here and right now, I am a teacher of young learners.

If you are interesting in reading a little more on that, here are some other posts inspired by this year of teaching adults: the first impressions from the YL teacher who went back into the adult classroom, what my adult students could learn from my kids, and a whole series on discourse development tricks that was created during that year. I would still like to write a proper post on the corporate English but that will have to wait until the following weeks…

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #64 ‘What time is it?’ aka Classroom management tricks for primary

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Ingredients

  • A board and a marker, with two phrases written on the top: ‘What time is it?’ and ‘Time left:….min’
  • A watch for the teacher.

Procedures

  • Drill the question with all the kids (‘What time is it?’)
  • Every time you hear from the classroom the same or similar question, most probably in the kids’ L1 (‘What time is it?’, ‘When is the break?’, ‘How much time we’ve got left?’) etc, point to the question on the board and elicit it from the group or from one student and only when they do, check the time and write the number of minutes left until the end of the lesson.
  • Repeat every time someone asks the question but insist on them asking the question in English.

Why we like it?

  • First of all, this trick gives kids an opportunity to learn to control their behaviour in class. I use it with my pre-primary and primary students in a situation in which they cannot tell the time using the clock and they do not have their mobiles to do this using their digital clocks. Not to mention that at the moment we work in an unusual context and each part of the 4-academic hours-long day has a different length. If the kids understand better how much time is left or, in other words, for how many more minutes they are required to ‘work hard’, they are better prepared to manage their behaviour in the time left. Also, it is of a great psychological help to see the minutes disappear and then even if the day is long, even if the weather has an impact on the kids’ energy levels, even if the activities today are not amazingly exciting for everyone, there are fewer and fewer minutes to go through until the next break time, snack break, the walk, the playground and so on. It has been of a great help in all the summer classes.
  • The kids are likely to ask this question anyway, directing it at their teacher or their peers so giving them a chance to do it in English is an opportunity to learn and to practise some useful language in a natural context.
  • To be perfectly honest, it is a tiny little bit irritating to hear this question and to have to answer it a few times during the lesson BUT the very fact that the question is asked and the frequency with which it is asked is a great source of immediate feedback for the teacher and a signal that, perhaps, some changes need to be introduced in the original lesson plan. Maybe an activity took too long, maybe on that particular day the kids are too energetic or too sleepy for whatever is going on and they need a settler or a stirrer. Perhaps even an activity needs to be abandoned asap, for whatever the reason…Knowing is is much better than not knowing it and proceeding when your audience is not ready for it. That also means that on some days and with some activities, the kids will completely forget to ask the question and that is for the best reason of it. They will be so involved in the activities that the lesson length and the clock will not matter at all.

Happy teaching!