Anka Zapart

Joan Miró and elephants. Art and English in primary

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Here is our Elmer

I went into this lesson on my toes, slowly, cautiously, almost unwillingly. On the one hand, I was curious, as with all the Art project. On the other hand, I was just not so convinced. On the one hand, there was a new group of kids, I did not know their levels and we were supposed to try doing online what we did face-to-face before. On the other hand, I started to look for all the Miró animals and, randomly, I typed in ‘Miró and a toucan’ and found just that. And it made me burst into laughter, just because it there was an occasion when Joan Miró held a hornbill (aka almost a toucan). I knew I would do it all anyway, even if only to find out whether I can, but I was a bit anxious.

Our Gallery in Miro

The Before

  • Introduction of colours, a variety of songs, wordwall games and Miro games
  • Working on building the routine and getting used to the online format
  • Introduce the artist of the day and his arts. We focused only on the animals and on the colours. We ‘visited’ our MiroBoard Gallery and we tried to guess the animals and match Miro with photographs
  • We started to sing ‘Walking in the Jungle‘
  • And, finally, we tell and listen to ‘Elmer’ for the first time (I have actually only used the video, muted, and I told the story myself. We also included some gestures to involve the kids).

It is necessary to add that this year, due to the fact that we meet online with my Art Explorers, our classes have a slightly different format and we work on two-lesson basis. In lesson A we introduce the vocabulary and the artist, in lesson B: we revise and focus on craft and creation. The activities mentioned above were also executed over a period of two lessons.

The photo of the materials sent before the lesson

The While

  • Get all the materials ready (a glue stick, a marker, a piece of white A4 paper, some coloured paper or pieces of colourful pages of newspapers and journals), send the list to parents ahead of time
  • Check that everyone has everything (‘Show me your paper’, ‘Show me your glue’ etc)
  • Show the kids your coloured paper, call out the colours.
  • Ask the kids to show you theirs, call out the colours.
  • Show the kids how you tear off a strip of each colour, show them a ready bunch. Wait for them to get theirs ready.
  • Draw the elephant step by step. Start with the body, then the legs, the tail, the head, the trunk and the ear (by the way, the full shape of an ear is here only to help the kids visualise the elephant, a part of it will be covered by the coloured paper). Show each step to the camera and let the kids copy. Ask them to show you the paper after they have finished each step. Put the marker away.
  • Open the glue, spread the glue all over the elephant, evenly, while holding the paper to the camera. Close the glue and put it away.
  • Tear off a piece of one of your colourful stripes, glue it on the elephant, and then a few more. Invite the kids to do the same (‘Now you’). After a while ask them to show you their copies or ask what colour they are using, only to check how they are doing.
  • Continue until the elephant is ready.
  • Take the marker again and draw the eye, a small black circle. This way the creation will be easier perceived as an elephant.
  • Put up your elephant for the kids to see. Ask them to show you theirs.
The drawing. In one piece and in the puzzle version

The After

  • Introduce your elephant and describe it: ‘This is my elephant. He is green, blue, yellow and black’.
  • Ask the kids to do the same.
  • Watch Elmer, the video again, and, as before, pause and re-enact it with your elephants.
  • We finished with singing ‘Walking in the jungle’, with our elephants, too.

Comments

I am really happy with how the activity went. Initially, I was worried that preparing the elephant will be too difficult for my kids (but they all could follow me in drawing the elephant, step-by-step, with pauses and modelling) and that preparing the patchwork will be very time-consuming but the magic happened here, too as the kids quickly realised that they were in charge of managing how big the pieces of our ‘patches’ were. The older ones were more dilligent and more accurate with the smaller pieces whereas the younger ones opted for bigger pieces and we all finished at the same time. The patchwork part took about 5 minutes. Only one of my students needed more time (as she does every time) and for that reason we started to watch the story without her elephant to give her a little bit more time. She was watching while finishing and she introduced her elephant and it worked very well.

Overall, the amount of language produced was not quite on the amazing side but this was only our third lesson of the course and I am happy. Last but definitely not least, my kids were happy and very proud of themselves and their patchwork, Miró elephants. There is definitely more to come.

Happy teaching!

I am easy to prepare and very necessary in the classroom. What am I? A riddle!

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Dedicated to Monsieur Alexander (6 y.o.) and Mademoiselle Victoria (3 y.o.) with big thanks for reminding me how important riddles are even if you speak the language very well.

Why? Because you simply must!

  • Riddles are an opportunity to develop focus and listening skills: you are required to listen until the very end as all the elements of the riddle are important and they can help you figure out what the answer is.
  • Riddles help to develop cognitive skills while you are guessing as you are required to put together different pieces of information, to understand, to synthesise and to analyse.
  • Riddles help to develop cognitive skills even more when you are creating your own riddle as you are required to apply and to evaluate the information you providing to make the riddle challenging and achievable at the same time.
  • Riddles are something that we use and enjoy in our L1, from the early childhood and it is only natural that we will try to bring them into our EFL lessons, with kids and with adults.
  • Riddles help develop creativity.
  • Riddles are fun and they create plenty of opportunities for bonding, in a pair or a group.
  • Riddles, in L1, help the kids develop the awareness about how the language works, how the hidden meanings, the homophones, the collocations and this can also be transferred, at least partially, into the EFL or the ESL
  • It is obvious that the context of the EFL and the ESL does not always allow for the riddles and their benefits to be used fully and completely even if only due to the limitations of the language level which, in case of some of the young learners, might be as low as A1. This does not mean that they cannot be used. On the contrary, they can be introduced from early on.
  • Riddles, regardless of the context, are an opportunity for the students to speak and to produce a mini-discourse.
  • In the EFL/ESL classes, it is relatively easy to choose the vocabulary range and the structures for the students, depending on the level and the topic. This range can be easily extended.

How to? Riddles in the EFL classroom

  • The simplest version of the game can be played with preschoolers and we usually start simply with guessing ‘the secret word’ which is the card that the teacher and then the students choose and hold close to their chest and the class are guessing. This version is used to introduce the very idea of the riddles. When the kids have become more familiar with the format, the level of challange can be raised and the production maximised by asking the kids to describe the card they are holding in the simplest of way i.e. with the colour, operating within the colours of the objects on the flashcards used (‘It is green‘ or ‘It is green and red‘). With time, more adjectives can be added (‘It is big’, ‘It is small’), the categories (‘It is a toy’, ‘It is a pet’) or even opinions (‘I like it’, ‘I don’t like it’). There is a post devoted to one of the ways of dealing with riddles with the youngest learners. You can find it here.
  • The primary (or the more advanced pre-primary) students can start adding simple categories in their discourse (‘It’s a toy’, ‘It’s an animal’, ‘It’s in the schoolbag’) and start describing the word using the relevant structures. For example, with food, we use the following four: ‘It is cold’, ‘It is hot’, ‘You eat it’, ‘You drink it’) and these are the structures that the students know and will need anyway and these particular four can be supported by a relevant gesture. The same goes for the animal riddles set: ‘It is big’, ‘It is small’, ‘It can run’, ‘It can fly’, ‘It can swim’. I also like to add ‘I like it’ and ‘I don’t like it’ even though it does not quite provide enough information for the children to guess the object as the class may simply not know what one of us thinks about it, it gives the student making a riddle an opportunity to express opinion and to make it all more personalised. With the youngest students the teacher can assist production in the beginning by asking questions such as ‘Is it hot or cold?’ or ‘Can it swim, fly or run?’. This set of structures can be developed and extended depending on the students’ age and level.
  • As regards the more advanced and older students, the riddles can be made more extensive and more resembling the riddles that the adults and kids play in English as their L1 or the riddles they play with their L1 with the use of simple homonimes or homophones, a wider range of vocabulary or structures or complexity for example by making a list of words not to use when to describe a certain word, describing it with associations (i.e. kids, fun, outside to describe the word ‘playground’), with metaphors (i.e. ‘It is the brain of the computer’ for ‘hard drive’ or ‘It is the opposite of a mountain’ for ‘a cave’) or, even, by a mixture of these (‘Tell me what it is and tell me what it’s not’)
  • As regards the material and the support for the teacher one of the following can be used: flashcards, mini-flashcards, a page from the book with words and words and images, a poster, a set of wordwall cards, a list of words.

Happy teaching!

Material design for beginners: The resource as the source of inspiration

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(From the series: Try something new today!)

Today I am going to share these idea for YL lessons that started with the teacher (aka yours truly) finding a material that she really (but really) wanted to use in class.

Some of them have already been published here, on this blog, some of them are brand new, right out of the box, right off the production line.

Oh, also, please make sure you have a look at the introduction to the series here!

Oldies but goodies

Silly pictures are a perfect example here because I found them while I was looking for something else entirely and these just popped up. Until then, I hadn’t even known of their existance. Now, we love using them. Make sure you have a look at the original post)

Wordwall activities are all based on the templates provided by the website but they can be used in a variety different ways. The material is there but there is a lot that can be done with that.

Let’s look for pairs is a game that actually started with a visual that included a rather random set of jungle animals and, initially, were not an activity at all. I loved the animals, though, I started to think how I could use it in class. And an activity was created. I cannot find the original source but it was not very much different from this one here.

Dice is also a resource and a tool that was a starting point to a wide range of activities and I have been passionate about using it in the classroom for ages. Some of the ideas can be found here.

And, last but not least, songs can also become games and here some ideas how to do it.

And some latest finds

Two videos

There is very little that can be said about using videos in class because this is one of the hot topics in the EFL. Kieran Donaghy’s website is a great place to start if you are looking for inspiration and ideas. I have already committed a post on this blog here but today I would like to share one more idea and the mechanics of it and the journey that a video took to become an activity and a lesson.

I love running and over the years I have developed a passion and an obsession related to all the amazing people who managed to achieve something amazing in the area. No wonder that my superhero for many years has been Tom Denniss, the Australian who ran around the world. Literally. In 3 years and about 60 marathons. For many years, one of Tom’s photographs taken during that run, was pinned on the door of my fridge. And no metaphors here.

Naturally, that meant that I read and watched everything that was available on the subject, including this video, and from the moment I saw it, I knew that I would use it in class. I have used it many times since, on its own, in the lessons devoted to unusual journeys, special achievements and numbers as there are some impressive statistics related to Tom’s feat but this September I decided to take it to another level, paired up with that of another adventurer, Helen Skelton, who crossed the Amazon in her kayak. Here are the main stages of this lesson:

  • photographs of both heroes and their adventures
  • a discussion on the challenges and dangers of both achievements, choosing the more difficult one
  • a discussion on the first impressions, whether they are important or not, about our personal experience in that area, the misleading first impressions, the correct ones
  • watching the first minute of the interview with Tom and the first minute of the interview with Helen and discussing the impression they made on us
  • watching the rest of both videos to find out more about their adventures and to decide whose was the more impressive and the more dangerous one
  • a comprehension debate together
  • a discussion in groups to compare opinions regarding the challenges
  • the final debate regarding the first impression and the second impression, a discussion on whether the professions of the interviewees (Tom – a scientist and an entrepreneur, Helen – a TV journalist) might have had an impact on the impressions they made on us
  • feedback, error correction and round-up

Speaking YLE

Cambridge Young Learners Exams is definitely one of those topics that have been waiting for its own post here simply forever and I know that its day will eventually come.

Today I would only like to focus on the Movers speaking part 1 and Flyers speaking part 2 resources that have inspired me to come up with an idea for an acitivty for my primary and pre-primary kids.

The resource here is a set of two pictures which have some small differences between them. You can find the samples in the Sample Tests published by Cambridge. I had been preparing my students for YLE for a few years and I had known the visuals very well and there is no other way of putting me: it was bugging me that I could not use these beautiful visuals with my pre-schoolers because this was the material produced for A2 speakers and my students were only pre-A1 and five. Or so I thought until I realised that I can still keep the resource and keep the general idea of the activity (‘looking for differences’) but the thing that needed adaptation was the aim, especially the linguistic one. The set of complex structures had to be replaced with a simple ‘I can see…’. In order to make the task more achievable for my youngest students, I also decided to change the resources, too and to replace them, initially at least, with a much simpler set, limiting the set of vocabulary items to only one topic (ie only toys, only farm animals) and lowering the level of complexity but abandoning, for a while, the almost identical visuals and choosing simpler two pictures of a farm.

These are the two images that were used in a YLE-inpsired ‘Find the difference’ task with a 6 y.o. primary student, in the lesson on toys and with a group of 5-6 y.o. level 3 pre-primary students. The teacher and the students took turns to compare the two pictures using a simple structure (I can see…). The teacher was initially describing the toys in picture 1, the students – in picture 2.

But this idea was developed further by adding two more visuals, a toy room in the kindergarten, and the activity was adapted too. Using the four pictures, the students were looking for the same toys featuring in one, two, three or perhaps even all four rooms, for example: I can see a teddy in picture 1, picture 2 and picture 4. The most fascinating thing about it was that after a very short while we had one student describing the pictures and producing the language but the whole group were listening in order to check that no pictures were ommitted by mistake. And to support their friend, too.

One-sentence phonics stories

This particular one was created on the basis of the short phonics stories that feature in our coursebooks for primary, in this case the Superminds series by Herbert Puchta and Gunter Gerngross published by CUP.

The original material consisted of an illustration, a one-sentence story and an audio track, like the one in unit 1 of level one, focusing on the /a/ phoneme and practising in a story ‘A fat rat in a black back’ (SB p. 15, sample page 6).

Together with the PostIt notes on the MiroBoard, it gave me the idea to put together a game in which the kids could really practise reading the story in a fun way and to practise the key phonics words as well as all the words the kids have learnt so far.

This is a very simple game in which the kids have to read the original sentence, close their eyes and during that time, the teacher replaces one of the cards. The kids open the eyes and read the slightly adapted sentence. Then, step by step, during the following rounds, the original sentence keeps changing and the kids continue reading it out loud. The number of rounds can be adapted to the needs and abilities of the group and the kids can also be involved in adding the words. In the regular classroom, the same game can be played with even less preparation as the only thing you need is a whiteboard and a marker.

The original sentence, based on the task from Superminds 1
One new element
All the variants in this game

I hope you have found something useful here. If so, please come back. There will be two more episodes in this series.

Happy teaching!

Try something new today!* Material design for beginners**

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One of my favourite EFL quotes is what Katherine Bilsborough started her presentation at TESOL Greece in 2019 that we, the teachers, we are all material writers. Because we simply are, all of us. Even if we don’t ever produce a coursebook, even if we don’t ever get to share ideas on our Instagram or in our blogs. Even if we never get to be famous and renowned, we produce materials for our students, day in day out.

If you want to read more about creating materials, don’t forget to check Katherine’s blog on material writing here and her interview with some great advice here.

In this post here, I would like to share some ideas from a low-key but an advanced material writer, hoping that my everyday material creation, design and adaptation might help some of my fellow material writers, those with less experience.

Why do teachers adapt, supplement and design?

Methodology aside, the very subjective and personal answer to this question is very easy: the students are boread, the teacher has noticed that something does not go as well as planned, the teacher has found something that they really want to use, the teacher does not like whatever is in the coursebook, the teacher is bored…

The three concepts to take into consideration: the material, the activity, the aim

The material aka the physical resource that we have at hand, the photograph, the drawing, the poster, the puppet, the flashcards, realia, the song.

The activity aka the game, the reading task, the matching activity, the odd one out, in other words – a set of instructions of how to do something.

The aim aka why we bother and what exactly we want to achieve.

The understanding what these three are (and what they are not) is the absolute first step in starting your own blazing career in material design because at the stage of creation these three can be the source of inspiration and, at the later stage of reflection and readjustment, one or two of these three will be the elements that can be tweaked and manipulated in order to perfect the initial desing.

This is why, in this particular post, I am going to share ideas that had their starting point in the material, the activity and the aim.

Example #1: the coursbook

Using the sample of the unit 1 from Superminds 5 published by Cambridge University Press here, page 1 (which is page 10 of the students’ book).

The material here is an illustration, a scene from the Pompeii and three characters from the book, Patrick, Phoebe and Alex, a set of numbers and a set of words as well as the audio track which here is the list of words.

The activity is to listen and to repeat the words and to check with the partner.

The aim is for the students to become familiar with the key vocabulary in the unit and to be able to practise them before they move on to the following exercise which introduces the kids’ first adventure as time travellers.

When we started to use it in class, I kept all of the coursebook material but I decided to adapt and to extend the original activity for my students (A2 level, aged 7-8-9 years old) seemed to be ready for a more challenging task that would involve more communication and language production. One of our favourite activities here is to play riddles in which the kids work in pairs and describe one of the items in the picture either by giving their definition (It is big, it is made of, it is used for) or by providing their location in the picture (It is behind Patrick).

This way the material and the aim stay the same and only the activity is slightly adapted.

Example #2: Own materials on Miro

This is a task that I designed for my 1-1 online student, aged 6 y.o. who cannot read yet.

The material here, created using Miro Board, is a picture of a tractor, a set of photos of animals, and a set of colourful cards with simple descriptions of animals.

The activity is a riddles game in which the teacher reads out the definitions of the animals in the order chosen by the student. The student listens and guesses the animals which is later revealed by the teacher.

The aim is to practise listening skills, to develop the ability to focus and to practise the names of animals. In the long run, this activity is used also to prepare the student to start producing similar riddles about a chosen animal.

Now, the next step will be the three follow-up posts devoted to resources whose existance started from finding a new material, coming up with a new game or with a very specific aim for the lesson. Don’t forget to check them out!

Happy teaching!

*) This is one amazing slogan that belongs to Sainsbury’s, the chain of supermarkets in the UK.

**) The material presented here was first a webinar given for teachers from all around the globe, organised by BKC Moscow in September 2022

Over to me: presentations, interviews, lessons

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I have decided to put all my recordings in one place, mostly for myself, so that I could easily find all of them and access all of them. But, I am also hoping that they might come in handy for some of you so here we go:

In English

In Russian

Crumbs #41 Let’s look for pairs! A vocabulary game for kids

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All the pairs. Somehow the penguin, the gorilla and the mouse got left out.

Ingredients

  • A set of pictures of animals, flashcards or on Miro. That’s it.

Procedures

  • Revise the vocabulary and ensure that all the cards are displayed at the same time for the kids to be aware of all the options
  • Model by choosing a pair of animals and putting these cards aside and justifying your choice. With my pre-primary kids, I like to use the first person statements (I’ve got 4 legs etc) as this is what we do with the younger kids (to enable the kids to talk about themselves and the animals without having to introduce the additional structures and to keep it coherent with the songs that we use ie Little bird or As quiet as a mouse). I also tend to vocalise the language ie I’ve got 4 legs (for the cat), I’ve got 4 legs (for the elephant).
  • Invite the kids to take turns to make their own pairs and to describe the rationale behind it.
This is what our Miro board looked like before we started

Why we like it

  • An opportunity for the kids to use and to develop the higher order thinking skills in the EFL context
  • The students are in charge of what they want to talk about and what they can talk about. It is appropriate for mixed-ability groups.
  • Little or no preparation as the flashcards are already there, the physical cards in the offline classroom or the set of pictures on Miro which, once prepared, can be doubled easily and used only for that activity.
  • A great variety of structures that can be revised and some opportunity to learn the new ones as the kids might have the ideas that they cannot express in English yet and this game can be the springboard which will help to introduce these. If the teacher speaks the kids’ L1.
  • Lots of opportunities for adaptation and using them with different sets of words such as toys, fruit, food, transport and, naturally, the relevant structures. I like to start this game with animals because of the range of easy structures that even the very young beginner students can use in order to complete task and because of the variety of topics that can be included (the colours, the number of legs, what animals can do, what they eat, where they live etc)
  • The level of challege can also be easily adapted, for example, the set of cards can include only 8 items or the teacher can focus on putting the animals into pairs basen only on the colours or the size which are probably the two most achievable categories, both cognitively and linguistically.
  • This is a neverending activity because the cards and the animals can be grouped and re-grouped over and over again to let the students create new and less obvious links between the items. Conversly, it can be shortend as needs be.
  • As regards the interaction patterns, this activity can be used with groups, with kids working together, at least in the beginning, or in pairs if we have the appropriate number of sets of cards as well as with 1-1 students, both online and offline.
  • There is also some potential for adaptation in the area of materials. The most obvious choice are the flashcards, the mini-flashcards or the Miro board. The teacher can also create a handout with the animals pictures and/or names which the students can colour-code as they are putting them in pairs. This might be a good solution for the kids to work in pairs in the offline classroom.
  • Last but not least, this activity is an opportunity for the kids to develop the listening skills (as they want to find out the justification for their peers’ choices) and the speaking skills (as they want to present their own reasoning, too). I simply love to observe how my students start with the simplest and most obvious connections and how they venture out into more and more creative ones.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #40 A fruit salad

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Ingredients

  • Fruit, washed and cut up into manageable chunks. The most basic set includes: apples, bananas, pears, seedless grapes, seedless oranges.
  • A plastic plate for each child, a plastic cup for each child, a plastic spoon and a plastic knife.
  • A set of tissues and a set of wet tissues.
  • Optional: a set of fruit flashcards and the video of the Super Simple Song ‘Are you hungry?’

Procedures

  • Start with presenting the idea of the activity to the parents and agreeing on the list of fruit to be used. It is absolutely crucial that the parents are aware of the procedures and the ingredients and that they approve. In my offline classes, I normally send a message to find out whether the parents approve and then I send a list of specific fruit that I would like to use. I look for seedless oranges and grapes. The list of fruit does not have to be very long. It is going to be a great lesson anyway, even if only the basic fruit are used. Although, of course, the salad will look very appealing if we include more colours and adding some citrus such as orange will be beneficial as regards the flavour, even a little bit of the lemon or orange juice will bring out the flavours of all the fruit and it will blend them nicely. But it is not obligatory. In my online classes, the parents prepare the fruit that the kids really like and it might happen that our sets will vary.
  • Wash the fruit and pre-cut them into pieces and chunks or ask the parents to do the same at home.
  • Plan where (in the school or in the classroom) you are going to set up your salad production station. Ideally, it would be done in a separate room, where everything can be prepared before the lesson and where the students can relocate half-way through the lesson. In the online classroom, the kids can relocate to the kitchen or cut things up on the table in front of the computer. In the classroom or in the kitchen, prepare the working top first: wash the tables, cover them with a plastic tablecloth.
  • Set aside the time for hand-washing. Line the kids up and go to the bathroom, wash the hands, dry the hands and go to the classroom.
  • Give out the tools while pre-teaching the names and while introducing the basic health and safety rules i.e. a plate – it stays on the table, a cup – it is in front of the cup, a knife – be careful. It is a good idea to stage the giving out of tools ie: first the plates and the cups, then the first fruit and the knives, then clean up the plates and give out the teaspoons etc.
  • Take out the first fruit, call out its name. Demonstrate how to cut it up, for example using the following set of instructions: 1) take a piece of apple, ‘Apple, please’ 2) put it on your plate 3) cut it up carefully 4) put the apple into the cup
  • Repeat with the other fruit. Throw away the plates. Give out the spoons.
  • Stir the fruit in the cup carefully.
  • Start eating.
  • Game 1: What’s this?: it is a fun game that involves eating and guessing which fruit we have fished out. Teacher can demonstrate how to play it: take some fruit from the cup, eat it without looking or even with the eyes closed and try to guess what it is. If modelled properly, with the teacher asking question ‘What is it?’ and trying to guess ‘It’s an apple’ etc, the kids will follow and will be playing in the same way.
  • Game 2: Singing and eating: Play the song and pause at every fruit and ask the kids the same question ‘Are you hungry?‘ ‘Oh, look (name the fruit in the salad). Yum, yum, yum’. The only thing to remember here is to make sure that kids finish eating before we play the song again and to continue singing.
  • Clean up, throw away the rubbish, clean the hands with the wet tissues.

Why we like it

  • It is a great and relatively simple way of making the language real and meaningful. We learn about fruit and we do something with the real fruit. With many other topics creating this connection between the classroom and the real world is a bit more complicated, fruit (and food in general) is easy. After a few basic precautions are taken, such as the allergy check, the parents permission, clean hands and a safe working environment.
  • It gives kids a great sense of achievement despite the fact that in the eyes of an adult that might look simplistic. One of my groups called it ‘a cooking lesson‘ and after the first salad, they kept asking for more of those.
  • It is an opportunity to develop social skills (we are taking turns and waiting for everyone to finish), focus (we are cutting fruit slowly and carefully), fine motor skills (we are working with a knife, we are manipulating small pieces of fruit).
  • It is an opportunity to eat in class and that is always fun but it is also something that we do together, as a group and, as such, it can be repeated regularly, although not necessarily with the salad every single time. It can turn into some ‘teatime‘ aka a lesson when we just have a little snack together. That name and the idea is also something that came from one of the groups.
  • It is not an activity for the first lessons with a group
  • If done properly, the lesson can lead to a lot of production. The ‘What’s this game’ was something that just happened in class, just because I really could not recognise one of the piece of fruit in my cup. I fished it out to taste it and I was simply blabbling to myself. The kids were watching and quickly followed suit. Together we turned into a real game and, since then, I played it with all my groups. The other game, based on a song, was something that we played in class for a few lessons, with our set of plastic fruit and it worked very well. The kids liked giving out fruit and pretending to munch on them. Moving onto the real fruit and the salad was a natural next step.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #39 A lazy role-play

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Ingredients

  • Any role-play or a dialogue i.e. a transcript of any listening task which is a dialogue (i.e. Movers listening part 2, part 3), any written dialogue (i.e. Movers reading and writing part 3), any functional langauge introduced in a dialogue or a role-play
  • A pencil or a highlighter for each child

Procedures

  • Start with the main aim of the task is, ie listening in case of task 3 of Movers or reading in case of Movers, introduction of the functional language, etc. Go through all of the stages outlined in the teacher’s book or whichever ones you see fit in your teaching context.
  • Give out highlighters or pencils, ask the kids to open the books and look at the text again.
  • Introduce the concept of a banana (or whichever random word you want to use). Explain (and demonstrate!!!) that you will read the text slowly with some bananas in it and that if the students hear the word ‘banana’ they have to highlight or underline one word that comes immediately afterwards. Model with a few words.
  • Read the text with the bananas as the kids listen, follow and underline or highlight. The words chosen to be highlighted are the key words for each specific dialogue and their number depends on the dialogue and on the age and level of the students. With the older students and the more complex texts and language, the students can highlight two or more words that constitute a phrase or a collocation. This can be signalled with a repeated number of bananas ie banana banana for a two-piece phrase or banana banana banana for a three-piece phrase.
  • Ask the students to work in pairs and read the dialogue again and to use their own words and phrases instead of every banana.
  • Afterwards the kids can change roles and read it again or change the partners.
  • If the kids are ready, in the final (and optional) stage of the activity, they can close the book and role play and recreate the dialogue and the converation based on what they remember.

Why we like it

  • It requires no preparation, unless by preparation you mean opening the coursebook and finding the role-play or finding the teacher’s book and making copies of the transcript of any listening activity
  • It offers a great opportunity for the students to practise their speaking skills in an activity that is both controlled (as we have a framework) and free (as there are quite a few options to choose from)
  • It also offers a chance to work on the grammar accuracy and the transformation skills
  • It can be done online or offline
  • It can be done with a variety of levels. The highest level I have used it with was B1 (teens), the lowest level, so far, was A2 (primary).
  • So far, I have only tried it with dialogues but now, writing that post, I started to wonder about the potential of that activity for discourse building and creation. The original text could serve as a potential framework and support for the students to use. I am yet to experiment with that option.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #38 A – Z Game

by

Ingredients

  • A piece of paper and something to write with
  • All the letters of the alphabet written in one or two columns, with some space to write, next to each letter

Procedures

  • The teacher divides the students into pairs or teams and gives out the paper with the letters of the alphabet or asks the kids to write these down.
  • Step 1: The teacher announces the topic i.e. Clothes and asks the kids write one word (or phrase) for each letter of the alphabet or, more realistically, for as many letters as they can. The teacher gives an example. Ideally, the teacher creates her/his own list in order to have a set of words to model the other stages of the activity.
  • The teacher sets the time limit (i.e. 5 minutes for the younger kids and 3 minutes for the older kids). It might be a good idea to use a song instead and after the song finishes, the activity does, too.
  • The kids work in teams and make a list of the words within the vocabulary set. After the time is up, the teacher stops the game.
  • Step 2: The kids exchange the lists and count the words or phrases which their friends have managed to write within the set time limit. The teacher writes the results for each team on the board.
  • Step 3: The teams read the words on the lists and choose: the most interesting word, the most unusual word, the funniest word, three words you also have, three words you don’t have, any word you don’t understand or remember etc. The teams work in pairs and find out why their partners put these words on the list. If possible, the kids exchange the lists with another team and repeat the procedure once or twice.

Why we like it

  • For the students it is a great opportunity to revise and recycle vocabulary. All the beginner levels aside, even when the main lesson aim is to introduce and to practise new vocabulary, chances are the kids have already learnt, heard, used or seen some of the words. After all, the vocabulary sets are repeated and extended from level to level, not to mention that most kids have more than one source of English in their lives: the state school, the language school, a private teacher, brothers, sisters, parents, videos on youtube, cartoons, stories, computer games online…This game is one of the easy ways of revising all this vocabulary to prepare for ‘something new’
  • For all the reasons mentioned above, it is an absolute necessity for the teacher to find out how much the kids already know as regards a certain area in order to do a very focused (if a very contained) needs’ analysis and to adjust the volume, the level and the intensity of the new material presentation later in the lesson
  • It is very easy and requires no preparation whatsoever.
  • It helps to improve the students’ self-confidence because it gives them an opportunity to see how much they know already.
  • It can be used with any set of vocabulary, either thematic (i.e. clothes, food, animals) or content-related (i.e. the words necessary to describe a picture, the words used in a certain text or a listening task, a video)
  • The final task can be easily adapted i.e. choose 5 words to describe yourself, choose 5 words to use in a story or in a dialogue, choose 5 and describe them for your partners to guess, use a dictionary to find the words or structures for the missing letters, compare the lists with your friends to find the words or the structures for the missing letters, use the words to describe a photograph, use the words to talk about your day today etc.

Happy teaching!