Anka Zapart

Behaviour management in the VYL classroom. When the world begins to fall apart…

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London

I would like to dedicate this post to my trainees on the IH VYL course because it was during the coversations with them, during the session and after the session, during the tutorials and the informal chats on Whatsapp that this article took shape.

The set-up

Imagine: you plan your class, you get the materials ready, you enter your little kingdom and then things happen. They are the things you do not approve of, things you don’t like, things that should not be happening, things that get in the way of learning English. Or, in other words, as Harold Macmillan said ‘Events, my boy, events’, my favourite line of this week or even this whole month (courtesy to Edward).

The number of things that can happen is somewhere around… a few hundred and, naturally, it is simply impossible to put them all into a manual for teacher, with all ‘what to do’s and what not to do’s’. There are too many of these and there are too many variables that will be playing a part and adding the local colouring. Here, it is not the case of ‘one fits all’. Oups.

One thing is certain, the problem is not just going to go away, it is not going sort itself out. Whatever ‘unwanted behaviour’ is taking your lesson apart, it needs to be dealt with.

Here are a few roads to take.

Spinetto, Italy

The worst solution ever? Doing nothing.

Simply because it not a solution at all. The problem (whatever it is) is not going to simply go away, disappear or un-happen. Pretending that it hasn’t happened and moving on, in an attempt to save the activity, the game or the entire lesson, can only lead to even more serious consequences.

The unwanted behaviour needs to be acknowledged and stopped because it can escalate and compromise the well-being and safety of all the people present. So, do something! Perhaps one of these things that you can find below.

Moscow

Signal

The simplest way of doing it will be calling the student’s name but using a voice that is appropriate to signal the unwanted behaviour. The tone of the voice on its own should convey the message that something undesirable is taking place and that it needs to stop. This, of course, does not mean raising the voice or shouting but if the teacher uses the same ‘happy’ voice for praising and for disciplining (or ‘disciplining’), the message will be much more confusing for the kids. Instead of ‘Oups, I’d better stop‘, the child will think ‘Oh, look, my teacher is saying my name in such a nice way. She must really like me‘.

In the same vein, long speeches, in L1 or L2, will be counter-productive in such a situation. It is much better to keep it short, for example ‘No!’ or ‘Stop, please!’, used together with the child’s name and a gesture. And, as soon as the unwanted behaviour finishes, also acknoledge it, perhaps with a smile and a ‘Thank you’.

Very often and with a majority of things that can happen in the VYL classroom, this approach should do, if applied consistently. After all, kids know that we don’t run, we do not push the others, we do not take their toys and so on. In most cases, such a gentle reminder, a speed limiter of sorts, will do the job.

Saint Petersburg

Pause

Sometimes, these kinds of signals are not enough, however and it might be necessary to pause the lesson and deal with the problem in the open, either because more than one student is involved and / or because everyone can learn from it. This might be a situation when more than one child has done something to upset another (ie draw on their work, take their toy, say something) or when there is more than one child involved in any unwanted activity (hiding under the table, pretending to be a very angry dinosaur, hitting the class puppet, drumming with the markers on the table). All these situations do affect everyone present, not only the two students actively involved, and they need to be dealt with in the open.

‘Stop’ is still going to be necessary but it is going to work only as the first step. If there are any resources that contribute to the mayhem, they need to be taken away, for example these markers used to drum on the table. Then, a conversation.

It is very difficult to recommend something that will work in all the situations and all the contexts. Ideally, this part would be done in the children’s L1, but not all the teachers out there speak their little students’ language and not all the schools out there approve of the teachers using the L1 in the classroom.

Now, in Russia, I have the advantage of being able to understand the L1 of my students and what normally happens is we have these conversations in two languages: I speak English and my kids react in Russian, but it was not always the case. Like many of my colleagues in the VYL classrooms around the world, I had to do my magic only in English.

To be perfectly honest, it is not easy to grade the language to the level of pre-A1 and, at the same time, to convey the message in a delicate and sensitive way, but it is not impossible. You can use simple sentences and draw the children’s attention to the fact that their behaviour may make other students unhappy (‘Look, Sasha is sad now’) or that their behaviour is not appropriate (‘Is it a good idea?’). There are some advantages here, as it is almost guaranteed that these conversations will be short and concise and this is how I have dealt with all the issues in my classroom in the past couple of years. Although, to be perfectly honest, sometimes I am sorry that I cannot just sit down and have a real conversation in my students’ L1.

Moscow

Be clever

There are many tricks that the teacher can use in order to manage the behaviour of the group and of the individual students, without interupting the lesson too much but dealing with the problem effectively. Here are some of mine

  • Almost magically remove or stop the catalyst or the distractor, for example, put the hand at the back of the stool to block it and to stop the child from rocking, put the marker on the top of the board or on the top shelf
  • Use the command ‘Freeze’ to physically pause all the class proceedings and in a game-like way stop the unwanted behaviour. Although, of course, the teacher needs to introduce the game first. Once the kids got involved in something else, the disaster has been averted and the teacher is again in charge, the lesson goes on, according to plan. It might be the best solution for all the difficult situations when the world really does begin to fall apart and a quick fix is necessary. Instead of a conversation with the kids, a thorough analysis of the situation and looking for answers and the steps that need to be taken in the future.
  • Create a diversion and draw the kids’ attention to something else – a song (the easiest one to implement), a video, a favourite puppet. Again, as soon as the kids have calmed down, proceed with the lesson. And then take a moment to reflect on what led to the difficult situation.
  • Become the class clown and joke your way out of it. A funny face will do, a silly, clumsy gesture and a well-faked horror at the crayons that spilled out of the box. Then, like in most of the situations above – proceed, reflect and change.
  • Depending on the situation, it might be a good idea to whisper some encouraging message into the student’s ear. It can be in English, it can be in the child’s L1, it might a real whisper or a 5-year-old whisper (a good attempt that everyone present hears anyway). It will help to redirect the emotions, break the spell of sadness or anger, and it will help them to focus on something else and it works really well with the situations in which a child is upset or sad or just withdrawn, for whatever the reason there might be. It might be also a good idea to play a quick round of Broken Telephone with everyone, to involve the whole group in the same activity but it will work only if the kids already know the game.
Vyborg

Praise

There are situations when the best way of dealing with the unwanted behaviour is a complete diversion when instead of addressing the offender (apart from the basic signal and calling to attention), the teacher can choose highlighting the fact that the other children behave well.

Not only will it work well for the behaviour that is aimed at drawing the teacher’s attention (since the teacher is withdrawing this attention) but it will also acknowledge and applaud the behaviour of the class which is something that we often forget to do, taking those ‘angels’ for granted. Although, truth be told, they deserve our recognition.

Praising the students and reinforcing their behaviour will be also a clear message and, short-term, it will create a situation when the ‘offenders’ get a chance to reflect on their actions and to calm down and by the time everyone else has already been praised, they will also be closer to the desired behaviour and the teacher will be able to high-five them, too.

Baikal

Ignore (only not really)

Some disasters are better to be ignored entirely.

Of course, by ‘ignore’ I do not mean here the official Cambridge Dictionary definition of the verb because that is going to get us nowhere good (see above). What I have in mind is a VYL teacher’s (a pre-school teacher’s, a parent’s, a carer’s) definition of ‘ignore’ which, more or less, goes like that: acknowledge that a situation has occurred and, instead of drawing more attention to it, let it sizzle out, while, of course, keeping an eye on the child, paying even more attention than usual, only not openly this time.

Sometimes this will work better than any whole-class conversations or ‘lectures’, especially when we are dealing with a tantrum directed at getting the teacher’s attention hoping for an outcome that will be more favourable (ie we will not sing the song I don’t like, I will get the best sticker, I will be the first one to join the circle) or when two students have had a disagreement (and there are no obvious roles of the offender and the victim or when it is impossible to tell who is who) or when there is obvious resistance from the student and taking the matter further is dragging it into a dead-end street, like in the story here.

It has to be said out loud, it will not always be easy to label a classroom situation as ‘Ignore (only not really)’ because, of course, tens and tens of factors will have to be taken into consideration. Nonetheless, I believe, it is good to remember that this option also exists.

Rybinsk

Ask yourself it is a one-off or a regular feature

Or about working with the events long-term.

It is perfectly natural that all, even the most angelic and most well-behaved children, have a worse day, a crazy day, a tired day or a not-such-a-good day. This is the day when their behaviour might surprise their teacher (or, let’s be honest, completely ruin their teacher’s plans for the lesson). But these are the one-off events and it is not even necessary to analyse them in detail.

If, however, such unwanted behaviour happens regularly and repeatedly, it will be necessary to look into it. Is there a pattern? Is there anything specific that triggers that behaviour, an activity, a person, a stage of the lesson? Analysing all these details will help to choose the right solutions to the problem.

Perhaps it is the time to change the routine? Perhaps some games or activities have to be put on hold for the time being? Perhaps the group needs more settlers? Perhaps they need more stirrers? Perhaps it is time to reconsider the seating arrangement? Perhaps it is the time to talk to the parents?

Find out more

It might happen, too, that the self-reflection of the classroom adventures is not enough and that the teacher will have to reach out to the parents because this background information might help to understand what is happening in the classroom and why and, in turn, lead to finding a solution.

New York

Post-post reflections

Classroom and behaviour management is the theme and the focus of session 3 of the IH VYL course on which I have been a tutor for four years now and that is always the session that, according to our trainees, ‘could last twice as long’, because there are so many issues, so many problems, so many tricky situations that the debate could go on forever…

Unfortunately, that is simply impossible. Fortunately, as another trainee commented, to some extent, we deal with the classroom and behaviour management in every session, while discussing craft, songs, stories and literacy so at the end of the course, our trainees are better prepared to manage a group of the little people. Here is one hoping that this post will be helpful, too!

It is my deeply-held belief that by gaining understanding of all the pre-school brain and heart and by trying to see the world from their perspective, we get better prepared to teach and to bring up very young learners and to deal with the classroom and behaviour management issues that might arise.

For that reason I started a series of posts on the blog, in which I describe the real situations from the classroom and how I dealt with them. The series is called ‘Child development stories’ and you can find it here. While a manual with all the potential situations and all the right answers is never going to happen, we can definitely learn from observing our students and from analysing what happened and get better at managing the pre-primary kingdom, on the good days and on the worse ones.

Happy teaching!

I am a teacher. Reflections from the rocking chair by the fire.

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All photos dedicated to the city. Happy Birthday, Moscow!

Everyone gets to answer the question, at one point in one’s life, at least once. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ On my personal wishlist, over the years, there were the following: a ballerina, a doctor, a woman (the first one), a plumber (that is the latest, my plan for the retirement years) and…a teacher. No idea if that means ‘no ambition whatsoever’ or ‘achievable aims’ but nevermind that. I am a teacher. Yay to these dreams that come true, tick!

I have been planning to write this post for a while but I’ve been struggling and what I ended up with was either a lot of sentimental waffle or some lofty speeches worthy of an educational Thomas Moore. No, thank you. Instead, I am going to hide behind a few stories, hoping that they will collectively illustrate why one might want to become a teacher.

There is a boy in this story, a local troublemaker, who actively spent his school time making his teachers’ life ‘interesting‘ for three years straight. There is always one of these in every class and someone has to be their teacher. The teacher and everyone else survived.

The same boy, fifteen years on (15!), meets the teacher’s brother at some kind of a social do in the hometown. ‘I was a nightmare at school‘, says the boy, already an adult, ‘Say hello to your sister and pass on my apologies‘.

There is another student, a girl this time, that the same brother meets at another do in the hometown. This student, years on, also asks the brother to pass her regards. ‘I don’t remember many teachers from the school.’, she says, ‘I do remember her. She was cool.’

There is an adult student, Olga, who gets in touch via Instagram and it turns out that she is also a teacher now and that seems to be inspired to become a teacher of English in the teacher’s classroom, about ten years earlier. And it nothing short of touching…

There is the first student ever, her own cousin, Magda, and the lessons which were based on pure enthusiasm and on intuition because the teacher was more of an ugly duckling and not yet a real professional. Now, imagine this teacher’s emotions when, a few years later, she was sitting in the hallways of the university, waiting for Magda to pass her final exams and to be awarded an MA in English and Translation.

There is a teenager, only a year ago, at the summer camp. This teenager fills in an anonymous feedback form and in her commentaries on the English lessons writes ‘I’m not scared anymore‘. To be honest, that reduces the teacher to tears because, really, although the lessons were good, she thinks ‘I have not done anything special‘, and yet, that seems to have made a difference.

There is the little girl, Sasha. After one of the lessons, this little girl comes up to her teacher, looks at her with a very serious face and says: ‘Anka, thank you very much for preparing such interesting activities for us‘.

It’s been a good few years already but the teacher still hasn’t recovered from the happy shock that this conversation was. The little people hardly ever do that. They will go for it, they will take part and leave the classroom happy. Sometimes, they might bring you a dead ladybird or donate the only balloon they have. Sometimes they may actually confess ‘Я Вас люблю‘.

Very often, though, as soon as they leave the group or change the school, they simply forget. Just forget. I like to think that they make room for new memories and new information. Out of sight, out of heart, without any metaphors. And no honourable mentions on the social media. But that’s ok, that’s simply how it is and it doesn’t matter. The teacher knows anyway that maybe she will not be remembered, but she did make a tiny little bit of a difference.

But there is more than just the blast from the past, more than just memories. There are the kids in the classroom, here and now. It is a good feeling to be looking at their progress test results. It feels great when they come back in September and proudly show the certificates they got from Cambridge.

It is even more beautiful when during the most regular lesson, you realise that the shiest and the quietest teenager in the world now leads the debate and presents winning arguments, with the confidence that could move the mountains. Or, that the student who entered the classroom five years ago to learn her first words, now is telling everyone about something that happened at school that morning, a hilarious story from the cafeteria, with the narration and the dialogue, with only a few grammar hiccups which are still to be expected since it is only A1 and she is only 9.

So, for a moment like one of these, the teacher is still a teacher.

And, now, as a reward, since you have lasted until the end of this post, here are all the articles that might come in handy in September.

Classroom management

Activities for the first lessons

Happy teaching!

My favourite songs aka Where to start if you have never sung before

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This post is dedicated to all the teachers who soon are going to be entering the VYL or YL classrooms for the first time ever and are now wondering how to prepare for that.

Why?

Songs are definitely the resource that a teacher should use while teaching primary or pre-primary. A while ago I have tried to collect all the reasons to sing a song in one post (the full list here) but if you have never sung before in the classroom, here are the five most important reasons

  • songs will help you create a framework for the lesson, something to begin with, something to finish with, some nice punctuation marks in the lesson
  • they will be the easiest way of changing the pace of the lesson. Even if the kids don’t participate fully from the very beginning by singing, the song itself will work as a stirrer (or a settler, if you choose a very calm and peaceful one)
  • they will create an opportunity for the children to participate, at least with movement and gestures and, depending on the song, even with a few words or structures
  • songs are something that we all do together so they will help you ‘unite’ the group after the tasks on which the kids work individually and they will help to create a community
  • you can share them with the parents, to listen at home, this way taking English out of the classroom

Some do’s and don’t’s

Staging a song lesson for pre-primary or primary should, in fact, be a separate post, because there is a great variety of techniques and activties that can be used. For now, I can recommend having a look at this post here as well as the five tips.

  • Listen to the song before the lesson and get ready. Plan how you are going to introduce it. Simply pressing the PLAY button and saying ‘Let’s sing’ is not going to do the job with songs in the EFL / ESL classroom.
  • Play the video. It will really help the kids understand what the song is about.
  • Sometimes they are already in the song and in the video, sometimes not and we have to come up with a set to use with each song. It is something worth investing your time in because the gestures will help the kids understand and remember the lyrics. What’s even more important, especially in the first lesson with a new song – gestures will give the children a real opportunity to participate.
  • Sing yourself, do all the gestures yourself. And with a smile, too! Even if you are the only one and even if the students don’t join you straight away. It is perfectly natural, they need time to get used to the music, the lyrics, the gestures, the rhythm. Plus, you are the leader! If you don’t get involved, why would your students?
  • Share the song with the parents and use it again. A song is never just for one lesson.

My favourite hello songs

Hello. Super Simple Songs – a real hit and a good start, with 6 emotions, including ‘not so good’, to show the kids that it is ok to feel not happy, sometimes.

Hello Song. Fun Kids English – another good one, with monsters, there are actually two parts of it, each with 4 emotions. It is good to have a new version when the kids get bored with the first one.

Hello Song For Kids, The Singing Walrus – I love it because it includes not only the hello questions but also some Present Simple sentences and questions about the everyday school routine (‘Everyday I go to school) and each of them is repeated twice, in the classroom it can be T and then kids. Lots of potential.

Hello Song for Kids, EFL Kids Videos – very simple but very energetic, lots of repetition but also a nice variation of verses sung loudly and quietly. We loved it.

Hello Hello! Can you clap your hands. Super Simple Songs – another simple one with a few movements, perfect if you want to get up and move a bit

My favourite goodbye songs

Goodbye to you! EFL Kids Videos – using the same melody and the same pattern as the hello song from EFL Kids Videos, helps to save the time and works both as ‘something old’ and ‘something new’

Bye Bye Goodbye Super Simple Songs – a kind of a follow-up to the Hello Hello Can you clap your hands, the music is different but the song uses some of the verbs.

Goodbye Song for Kids, The Singing Walrus – this one is a bit more complex, but again, as their hello song, it uses full sentences. Lots of potential.

See you later, aligator, Super Simple Songs – a very short one, includes gestures for alligator and butterfuly and if you want, it can go on forever.

My favourite movement songs

Head, shoulders, knees and toes, Super Simple Songs – everything you may need in your first lessons, just getting up and moving a bit, even if the topic of body parts is scheduled for some other day

Move. Dance Song For Kids. Super Simple Songs – my latest discovery, lots of movement (verbs), a great melody. It can be used partially ie the first three parts of as a whole. It can be also extended if kids have their own ideas.

Jump, Run and Shout. The Singing Walrus – another energetic, rock song with movement. Just like Move, we like to sing it in the beginning of the lesson. It helps to get rid of lots of energy.

The Jellyfish Song. Super Simple Songs – a simple but effective song, very little langauge here, you are going to be pretending that you are jellyfish. Somehow, the kids get a chance to move but also to calm down.

Shake Your Sillies Out. Brain Breaks For Kids. – this is one is for older kids, lots of great ideas here and quite tiring, when used from the beginning until the end, but my kids loved the idea of ‘shaking the sillies out’ or ‘clapping our crazies out’ (very necessary on some days) so we only used the movements, not the song.

My favourite randomness

Open Shut Them, Super Simple Songs – one of my favourite songs ever because it teaches adjectives and opposites (somehow neglected by many of the coursebooks and programmes) and you can easily include gestures. Plus there are four parts of it which means that a new one can be added as soon as necessary. Open Shut Them can almost become a part of the classroom routine for the whole year and later on, the teacher can even extend it by creating own versions.

Hickory Dickory Dock, Super Simple Songs – some counting, some animals and an unexpected ending.

What’s your favourite colour? Super Simple Songs – first of all, it can be inroduced from the beginning of the course (colours), it can be used as a game (to point at different colours in the room as the come up in the song) and, last but not least, it contains a great Q&A set (‘What’s your favourite…?’ ‘I like…’) and it can be turned into a real conversation and easily extended into other topics, as they come up i.e. toys, numbers, pets, letters.

Happy teaching!

Don’t Box Me In! Teachers Who ‘Bent’ the Zoom Square…

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Just a lesson…

…is the name of the series of great posts collected by Naomi Epstein in her blog. Naomi asked a great bunch of people about their Teaching During the Pandemic Experience and I had the pleasure of being one of these teachers. You can find my post here.

Don’t forget to check out her other posts, too! Highly recommended!

When you suddenly land on Mars with a pre-school group

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How the lesson planning starts…

Well, hello! Welcome to Mars!

This is the second post in the series devoted to no/little prep activities that might save your teaching skin (and sanity) when unexpectedly you find yourself in the classroom and no Earthly rules apply, due to the unfortunate combination of factors. Today, a lesson for the little people.

Pre-scriptum #1 Don’t forget to check out the introduction to the series, here and the first episode, here.

Pre-scriptum #2 All the photos in this post are the memories of all these blissful days when there WAS time to prepare…

Pre-scriptum # 3 Just as a reminder, these are the rules of the game: due to some combination of factors, regardless of who might be to blame, a teacher unexpectedly finds herself (himself) in a situation when there is no lesson plan, very few resources (perhaps nothing or almost nothing from The List) and you still have to survive a lesson with an age group. Here are some ideas on how to survive that. And the kids are about to enter the room in 3…2…1…

Before a two-hour summer camp lesson for VYL. You need to prepare just a few things)))

First things first

No matter how little time you have and whether you have been to this particular Mars before (I mean the school), do not let the kids into the classroom before the lesson. If you want to read more about why not, you can find my earlier post here.

If it so happens that your students are already in the classroom, don’t worry, nothing is lost. You can just take all the kids out first, line them up, count them and take them into the classroom, one by one. You are not going to do it in order to kill the lesson time, quite the contrary, it is going to help to re-introduce the order and to show the children who is in charge. Even if they don’t know you or, especially if they don’t know you. They will be curious and it will be easier to manage them.

If you really don’t want to take them out or if it is impossible, you can move to step two: try to include an activity that the whole group is going to be involved in. Get everyone to sit in a circle (on the stools or on the carpet) or to stand in a circle, wait for the kids to calm down (counting from 10 to 0 showing your fingers might help) and the proceed with a few miming activities. There is no need to give very specific instructions or to explain what you are going to do, use ‘a punctuation mark’, for instance (3,2,1 everybody is…) and add an activity. ‘Everybody is clapping’, ‘Everybody is marching’, ‘Everybody is waving’, ‘Everybody is dancing’, etc. For the kids it will be an opportunity to be involved in some movement and it will help them to focus in the following activities. It will be also a chance to do something together, as a group. For the teacher it will be a chance to show authority and to see how follows the rules.

Say hello and get the kids’ names will be the next step. The kids will have already listened to you, they have started the lesson in a fun way and that is the best time to find out their names. If the group is a new one, I like to put their names on the board (ideally using different colour markers so that the kids can recognise their names, too, or by adding a different symbol for each child, something that is easy to draw i.e. a flower, a car, a star etc) .

Revision might not be applicable but regardless of the kids’ level, I would like to go back to something that they are likely to know and respond to well, and one of such topics are colours and numbers. Some of the activities that are easily implemented can include:

  • counting a few times, first chorally, then individually, using different voices (happy, sad, angry, sleepy) and pace (very fast, very slow)
  • counting forward and counting backwards or counting with skipping one of the numbers or by skipping every other number and replacing it with a random word. Here, I would use ‘a banana’ or ‘a zebra’ because they are the same in Russian and they are definitely not a number so they will be easy to use in this activity. You can count again but in a crazy way, for instance ‘One, zebra, three, zebra, five, zebra, seven, zebra, nine, zebra’ etc.
  • counting things in the classroom ie boys and girls present, all the hands, legs and noses present, lamps, windows, pictures. It is not a given that the children will know all these words but they can still count them with the teacher.
  • colours: first revise the colours with all the objects that are available in the classroom. Kids usually wear colourful clothes so your students alone are quite likely to have all the colours on them already.
  • I can see, I can see, I can see something….blue, which is a version of ‘I spy with my little eye’ but with a slightly easier rhyme and much easier to show (I tap my chest twice for ‘I’ and ‘can’ and then I point to my eyes). When the kids hear the colour, they point at something of that colour. If the group is strong, the students can take turns and be the teacher. It might be also possible to add two adjectives here ‘big’ and ‘small’ and then it turns into a real game, with the entire classroom.

Before an online fruit lesson (Carrot in the role of ‘Surprise, Surprise!’)

Option 1: there are flashcards on Mars and, if so, I pick up the folder with animals.

  • Why? Because animals are one of the coolest topics that most kids can relate to, a generative topic appropriate for the more or less ‘advanced’, a topic that can be made digestible because at least some of the animals can be chosen based on principle ‘the same / similar as in L1’, this topic lends itself to a great variety of activities.
  • new vocabulary: introduction using voices, drilling, riddles (What’s this?), missing cards
  • miming: first the teacher mimes the animals for the kids, then the kids mime for each other
  • new structures: a variety of structures can be used here ie I am green / yellow / blue, I am big / small / happy / sad / angry, I can run / fly / swim, I like grass / meat / fish / fruit
  • focused task: based on my craft activity ‘don’t you just love a circle’. The original activity involves some additional resources (coloured paper and glue for kids) and preparation (pre-cutting the circles for each child, had to be done before the lesson) but it can be skipped, too as all the circles that are used for the basis of all the animals can be drawn by the kids. You can start with drawing circles in the air and drawing circles with a finger on the desk. Only afterwards the teacher gives out a piece of paper and a simple pencil per student. The teacher asks the kids to draw five circles on the paper and, step by step, the kids transform all the circles into animals. The cat, the frog, the bird and the fish are among the easier ones. The kids are able to draw their own as long as the teacher leads them through the activity and transforms the circles into animals, step by step, drawing on the board for the kids to copy. Afterwards, if there are crayons or markers, the kids can colour the animals. If not, they can do it at home.
  • focused task production: once the circle animals are ready, they can be used in a listening / speaking game. The teacher makes sentences about animals, using the first singular and the structures that the students have practised ie I am big. The kids listen and point at one of the animals. Afterwards the kids take turns to produce sentences.
  • songs: I would probably go for ‘Old McDonald’s’ because this is a song that can be sung from memory, almost forever, with different animal voices that the kids will be able to join and I am sure that nobody will mind if our farm of Mr McDonald also houses tigers, elephants and seals…
Before a craft lesson with fingerpaints. Rehearsals

Option 2: there are no flashcards on Mars and, if so, I choose the topic: shapes

  • Why? Because shapes are one of the topics that is definitely under-loved and under-appreciated in all the coursebooks, despite the fact that shapes are everywhere around us and that shapes is teaching logic, maths and developing cognitive skills. Children are familiar with them and they can be used in a variety of ways.
  • new vocabulary: shapes flashcards are very easy to produce, even if there is no coloured paper or no time to colour, they can be easily cut out of white paper, in the worst case scenario. I would use these to introduce and practise vocabulary. If there was no time to cut things out, I would draw them on the board or on a piece of paper, while already in class, and this would be my main tool to work with the new vocabulary.
  • practice: drill the new words using different voices, point at the shape, draw the shape in the air / on the floor
  • movement: make the shape with your hands, make the shape with your friends with kids holding hands, standing on the carpet, the circle will be the easiest to do and to start with, all the other ones can be started with the kids standing as the tops of the angles in each shapes
  • Can you see a circle?: the teacher draws one of the shapes on the board and asks the kids to look for circles in the classroom and pointing at them (‘I can see a circle’). These circles can also be counted.
  • focused task / production (1): the kids practise drawing in the air and on the desk with their fingers. The teacher gives out paper and pencils. The teacher draws a circle on the board and the kids on their papers. The teacher draws the eyes and the smile, the students choose the emotions for their shapes. They proceed with the other shapes. Apart from the circle, the other shapes might be challenging for some children and they need to be taught how to draw these. The teacher can start with marking three dots for the triangle first and then connecting them with lines and the same for the other shapes. If time, the kids can turn their shapes into characters by adding legs and arms. The teacher and the students describe their shapes ie My circle is happy.
  • focused task / production (2): the kids practise drawing in the air and on the desk with their fingers. The teacher gives out paper and pencils. The teacher dictates and models, the students draw the shapes, one by one. The teacher says ‘It’s a circle’, then she covers the circle and turns into something else ie a ball, a clock, a flower, a balloon, etc. The teacher says ‘Abracadabra, it’s a clock’. The kids turn their circles into a clock. The teacher says ‘It’s a clock’, the kids repeat. Then the same procedure with the other shapes: the square (a house, a picture, a book, a present), the rectangle (a robot, a car, a tower), the rhombus (a kite, a flower), the triangle (a boat, a house, a volcano).
Before a craft lesson and making cards…lots and lots of pre-cutting

Coda

I wouldn’t like you to think, dear reader, that I do not care about the standards and that, as a teacher or as a mentor, I might accept the approach in which the teacher enters the classroom ‘just to hang out’ or ‘to babysit’ perhaps following what Reilly and Ward (1997) have been promoting in their book (the two quotes that I still haven’t forgiven them for and I doubt I ever will)*. That is definitely NOT the case.

We are teachers and we are professionals, we enter the classroom to impart knowledge, not to kill the time. However, there might be situations in which you actually are as if on another planet and you want to use the lesson time as well as it is only possibly, albeit with very limited resources and no time to prepare. I hope that never happens to you in real life but if it does, now you are better prepared for that. Hopefully.

Happy teaching!

Sorting out the pencils in August…

P.S.

Here is a real life account of a first lesson with VYL from Sandy Millin, with some more ideas.

P.P.S. The unforgiven

Quote 1: ‘There are certain advantages in teaching the pre-school age group. One of the main bonuses for the teacher is that there are usually no strict syllabuses to follow, no tests, and no performance objectives to be met’ (Reilly and Ward, 1997: 7)

Quote 2: ‘However, if you have been using English, they will have been learning even if you have not done a single thing on your lesson plan’ (Reilly and Ward, 1997: 8).

Both quotes come from the book by Vanessa Reilly and Sheila M. Ward, Very Young Learners, published by OUP in 1997. I do appreciate the authors as for a very (very, very, very) long time (20 years!!!!), this was the only book that teachers could use to get any idea about the age group and the activities that might be used in the classroom. I will be eternally grateful to the authors for being there to support many generations of VYL teachers. BUT at the same time it makes me very unhappy that these two quotes found their way into the book (even in my 2011 edition) and that for two decades these VYL teachers were learning that, essentially, it does not matter what you do with your pre-schoolers as long as you do it in L2. It does not matter whether they speak, it does not matter what they take out anything of the lesson and whether there is any progress at all.

That is, of course, not true. I doubt it was true in 1997 and it definitely is not true in 2021. So there.

Beware of the trainer. YL clichés.

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My name is Vader, Darth Vader. I am a teacher and a teacher trainer, I work with VYL and YL teachers.

Well, not really. I would like to think that, as a trainer, I smile a lot, I am supportive and open to questions and debates and I only shout at football matches. But there are those moments, on the courses that I teach or just in the everyday mentoring life, when I feel I am taking on some of Mr Vader’s traits. Although even then it is more in the style of the Darth Vader in the photo above.

One of those Darth Vader moments is defnitely induced by some of the concepts and beliefs related to teaching English to young and very young learners. They are out there, in the world, and although they are entirely ‘wrong’ or ‘incorrect’, they have already become some EFL YL clichés that can cause more harm than good.

In the post below I will share with you my top five ‘Think Twice Concepts’ in the early years EFL. A very subjective approach, I must warn you. Are you ready? Fasten your seatbelts! Let’s go!

courtesy of Юлец

Bad behaviour

There is nothing that could be labelled as ‘bad behaviour’, not in the EFL classroom full of pre-schoolers. There is curiosity put to practice, there are emotions in action, there are boredom- induced replacement activities. There is fear that materialises itself as agreession and a general lack of goodwill. There is tiredness, hunger, possibly, or, on the contrary, the high levels of sugar from the chocolate bar eaten five minutes right before the lesson or the memory of the morning visit to the doctor and the unpleasantness of it that still lingers in the air (although the arm really did stop to hurt after a jab about three hours ago). There are, also, plenty of examples of ‘I will do what I have always done in such situations and if it has always worked so far with mum, with nanny, at home, at pre-school and at the playground, it is bound to take the required effect here, too!’

There is no bad behaviour, although sometimes we get to deal with ‘the unwanted behaviour’, that might be getting in the way of our lesson or other children’s physical or mental well-being.

Solutions: first of all, react, ideally to stop this unwanted behaviour, or, at the very least, to signal that it is not what we want to have. If one thing is certain, it is that it is not just going to happen, all by itself. Then, after the lesson, when everyone has already left and when the dust has settled – reflection. Was the first time that it happened? Does it always happen? Is there any chance that some triggers could be identified? Was it in anyway related to the activities, to what the teacher did, to what other children did? What happened later?

It is always a good idea to talk to the parents or carers, too. Not to complain or to blame the child or the adults but mostly to understand what really happened and why. And perhaps (but just unfortunately ‘perhaps’) this information will come in handy the next time it happens.

Egocentric

I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive Piaget for using this particular adjective to describe the little kids’ attitude to the world and to the people in it. It is a perfect example of a concept created by adults and used to refer to people who are not adult yet and whose attitudes and reactions are what they are simply because they have not had a chance yet to grow and to develop fully. In the EFL terms, it would be like sending a seven-year-old beginner to take an FCE exam and then scolding them for failing while they are simply not there, not yet and they should be seen nowhere near the exam room.

Of course, pre-schoolers might struggle with sharing the box of crayons, they might want to always be first and always hold the teacher’s hand. They may not like to sit next to Pasha today and they will not want the other children to touch the car they brought to class, to show off a little bit. They will not be happy about leaving their picture in the classroom for the teacher to display on the noticeboard. And they will all want the princess flashcard. But all of that happens because they are just learning how to be a person in the world full of people and a person in that particular group of children learning English.

Solutions: The most important of them comes from Mick Jagger because, indeed, ‘Time is on my side, yes, it is!’. The group of children starting to study together in September will be changing, from lesson to lesson, and even after a week or two or three, they will be a completely different bunch, only because they have had a chance to interact with each other, to do something together and to find out that a group is not Anka and five other someones but Anka and Sasha, Pasha, Kirill, Mitya and Olya, some of whom we like a little more, some of whom we like a little bit less.

Apart from that, there are also all the tricks that the teacher can use throughout the course, to help the little people bond and start noticing the other children and start to learn how to share the lesson with them.

So, no ‘egocentrism’ but ‘social skills that are still developing’.

A typical five-year-old child…

Apart from the knowledge of the language and the knowledge of the methodology, the knowledge of the child development stages is one of the three areas that an EFL teacher working with young learners needs to be familar with (Mourão, 2018: 429) and it is great to see that a summary of these characteristics have made it into the professional literature ( Mourão, 2020: 33 – 39) and are easily available online.

At the same time, there is a danger that teachers will be looking into these and applying them too religiously, without considering the differences between the individual children. As Mourão (2020: 215) says ‘Children develop holistically, show individual differences in development and progress at different rates’. That means that even if we had a group of only five-year-olds, all of them coming from similar environmenta and all of them provided with the same opportunities and, even, why not, all of them born on the same day, they could all develop their cognitive, motor, social or linguistic skills at completely different rates. As a result, despite the fact that the group would be theoretically homogenous, a teacher would still have to deal with a mix of abilities. It seems that a teacher equipped with a little knowledge and induced by this knowledge expectations of the children and of the lesson might be even more damaging that no knowledge at all. Because typical five-year-olds don’t exist.

Solution: an open-mind and an organic approach to the little people sitting in the classroom. Instead of applying strict frameworks and checklists and trying to make the kids fit in the tables (which they are more than likely not to be able to do, as a group or as individuals), reading and researching the age group in a close connection with the specific students whom we teach at the moment.

Short attention span

This is, without any doubt, one of the most important differences between an adult and a child learner and this is the one that gets highlighted most frequently. For a reason, too.

However, at the same time, any attempt at specifing what that attention span is or, even more, at quantifying is, simply, pointless. Much as it may give the (false) impression that once the concept has been assigned a number, it is not as scary and it will be easier to deal with, especially for those of the teachers who have little or no experience of working with the younger children. It is from them that I often hear that ‘an activity should not take more than five minutes’ or, even, ‘it is the child’s age plus one minute’.

Well, I wish it had been that straightforward.

In real life, the attention span will be very much dependent on a number of factors that nobody is able to predict or enlist, and, as such, it is simply impossible determine once and for all. Children’s attention span will be related to their age, to some extent (although it will materialise itself in a way unique for each child) but it will also be affected by absolutely everything that might have had an impact on the children’s mood before and in the lesson and the teacher’s mood before and in the lesson. Such as? Such as the first snow of the year, a spider in the classroom, a visit to the doctor just before the lesson, a swimming lesson just before the lesson, a birthday party attended, a grandma’s visit, candy eaten before the lesson…Or a teacher who has had an especially tiring or stressful day, any malfunctioning technology or a handout lost. Any of these and the tried and tested activity that has always worked with the same group or the same age group, that has had the kids in awe and involved for five or even ten minutes, can quickly turn into a failure or the most boring and unappealing activity in the entire world.

Solution: first and foremost, switch off your adult thinking of what happens in the classroom. The kids, young or very young, they will not be just sitting behind the table, patiently waiting for you to start what you have prepared for the day AND they will not stay involved in it for a prolonged period of time as long as you think they should. Second, while planning a lesson, think about it from your student’s perspective and ask yourself what your students might find interesting about an activity. Is there anything that would motivate them to engage in in? Anything else that just the mere fact of this being an activity done in a lesson.

Then, in the lesson, itself, keeping your eyes open and adapting to who (and in what state) you have in the classroom on the day is the best way of dealing with all the implications of the short attention span. And, although I would argue that this applies to all the age groups and levels, being ready to let go and teaching the students and not the plan, not the coursebook, not the handout and not the activity.

‘They don’t like singing’

Sorry, permission to disagree here and yes, even before I have seen you in the classroom and before I have met your little students. I don’t think it is true, simple as that. Why do the teachers say that then?

Partially, it is because, again, the adult perception of what song and singing is and should be gets in the way. On the one hand, when we listen to songs in our non-teaching life, we do just that, we listen and take pleasure in it, hopefully. There is nothing wrong with it, and, indeed, I believe that listening for pleasure should be sometimes included in our lessons, too. The only ‘problem’ with very young learners is that they might not be familiar with that kind of an exercise and after a minute or two, with no other task, they will be getting bored and distracted. And, possibly engaging in other, unwanted, activities.

On the other hand, when we use songs in the EFL lessons, we expect the students to sing these songs and in case of pre-schoolers or even primary school children, it will take them for them to master all the elements of the song, the music, the rhythm, the lyrics, before they are actually ready to sing. If the teacher expects a real performance in the lesson in which the song was introduced for the first time, they will be disappointed. Again, the children might remain focused for a minute or two and then, again, they will find something else to do and the teacher will arrive at a conclusion already mentioned in the heading to this paragraph.

It is true, that the word ‘singing‘ could be replaced with absolutely any type of a YL activity, ‘craft’, ‘miming’, literacy’, ‘animals’, ‘this game’ and the implications would be the same or almost the same. It is also true that music-related activities are more likely to feature here. Mostly because teachers often worry that they themselves cannot hold a tune or that they are not confident enough to sing in front of others.

Solution: forget about you and your pre-conceptions, your teacher previous knowledge and try. It might be that you yourself are not the world greatest fan of Baby Shark and of pretending that you are a…melting ice-cream (btw, one of the real ideas suggested for the miming game by my students) but the simple truth is, if the teacher does not make an effort and if the teacher does not get properly involved in a song or in an activity, it is almost a given, that the students will not, either. Especially, the little ones. And, really, the most amazing thing about the VYL audience is that they really do not care whether their teachers sing well or badly. The only thing that matters is whether they put their hearts in it or not.

And as for the other problems, be it music or craft, scaffolding and lesson planning is the answer and no two ways about it. If you need any more convincing to why we should use songs with children, please have a look here and if you are looking for some ideas of what can be done with a song to maximise language production, you should definitely look at this post here.

Coda

This post is not only about me having a little venting session on a Monday morning. It is not a critique on the people who use these terms and it is definitely not about my ‘What not to say’ list that I will be handing in to all my teachers and trainees from now on.

I decided to put this post together because it seems that all these clichés start in the very same place and that is when adults try to apply adult categories, labels and concepts to children and to how they see the world, how they learn and how they grow which might lead to misunderstanding, confusion and frustration in the classroom.

Perhaps there should be one more thing added to the list of skills and areas that a VYL or YL teacher should be equipped with, apart from the three mentioned by Mourão (2018)? The knowledge of the subject and of the appropriate methodolody is absolutely crucial and so is the awareness of the child development stages. They are an absolute must and a starting point. Still, they are going to be of little use in the real life if a teacher is not going to be willing to switch the perspective and to try to see the lesson and everything that happens in it from the point of view of a three-year-old or a seven-year-old.

As everything in teaching, nothing happens overnight, and it takes time to develop the ability to observe and to analyse your students and their behaviour and to learn from that. The good thing is that the very willingness to accept the fact that a different perspective is needed is already a big step towards success.

Sometimes, changing the perspective physically can make a real difference, too. In our teacher training courses, we sit at the big tables (of course, we are adults!) but there always comes the time when we transfer to the little stools in a small circle. We do it to practise different games and to reflect on them but this is also a great opportunity to experience how the furniture and the set up can influence the activities and the emotions.

This blog post can hopefully be a good first step, too!

What do you think, dear reader? Are there any other terms that you would add to this list? Please leave your commetns below!

Happy teaching!

P.S. All the amazing animals in the photos live in the streets of Yaroslavl. Mr Vader found a home in a coffee shop Free-da there. All photos – mine, apart from the rooster taken by Юлец and used here with her permission.

References

Development Matters in the Early Years Foundation Stage (2012), to be downloaded here

Mourão, S. (2018), Research into teaching of English as a Foreign Language in early childhood and care, In: S. Garton and F. Copland (eds), The Routledge Book of Teaching English to Young Learners, Milton Park and New York: Routledge, p. 425 – 440.

Mourão, S. & G. Ellis (2020), Teaching English to Pre-Primary Children, Stuttgard: Delta Publishing

When you suddenly land on Mars: Top 10 Favourite Resources

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It is one of those lines that you deliver, sometimes carelessly: ‘This is my favourite ….’, often followed by a softening line, ‘Oh, well, at least one of the top 10.’ I do it all the time. Carefreely. Until, last week, one of my readers and fellow teachers, commented, ‘Ok, but what are the other nine out of this 10?’

And I thought that it will be a perfect idea for a new post. So here we are.

One: Dice

Definitely, one of my favourites, the one that I always have in my bag and the one that I have managed to use with the little ones and with the older ones. There is already a post on that. You can find it here.

Two: Noughts and crosses grid

Another ‘love of my life’, something that I have been using for ages and adapting and perfecting on the way. Obviously, right now, I cannot simply live without this resource. Nor can my students. Some of the ways of using it, there are a few posts that you can read: here – a post about using noughts and crosses with primary or pre-primary, here – another one on using noughts and crosses in storytelling, here – on using noughts and crosses with visuals.

The super important advantage is that, if needed and there is no template and no handout, it can be easily re-created on the board or even by the students, on a piece of paper and filled up with words, phrases or even pictures for the students to use later.

Three: Wordwall

This is the online tool, (www.wordwall.net) that, for me personally, was the number 1 discovery of the lockdown times. For those of you who are not yet familiar with it, it is an online community that shares online games which can be used to learn English among subjects. There are a great number of templates available such as simple cards, a spinner, a quiz, a wordsearch etc. Anyone can join the community and the community library for free. Those teachers who want to create their own games and to share them with the said community, have to choose a plan. That part might be a bit of a hurdle for some, but $ 2.50 or $3.50 per month is a ridiculously small amount of money to pay for the privilege of creating an unlimited number of activities for the particular texts, coursebooks or videos that you want to use with your students, especially if you teach a few groups of the same level / coursebook or, if, like me, you want to share these activities with all the teachers in your school.

I am using these activities with all levels and age groups, both with my students and my trainee teachers, sometimes in class, sometimes as an additional homework.

Here are a few examples of the templates and the activities that we use them in

  • simple cards, instead of electronic flashcards, here ‘My day‘, just to introduce the vocabulary
  • a similar set of simple cards but used with a specific structure(s). This one here was used with my primary students to share opinions about different activities.
  • boxes used in a speaking game ‘Tell me about it‘: students choose one of the boxes and talk about the object, animal, person. They have to produce a required number of sentences and they get a certain number of points in each round.
  • pelmanism online. Here students have to match a country with a product and we used it as an introduction in a lesson on the passive voice.
  • a quiz to develop the early literacy skills with pre-primary. This one here was used to practise the letters, sounds and the key words for each of there.

Four: Mini-whiteboards / earasable notebooks and markers

In my classroom, we actually have both, three mini-whiteboards and about ten erasable notebooks and we use them with all my groups. With my pre-primary students and the first and second year of primary, they are our main tool in all the literacy-related activities. Holding a big and thick marker is easier than managing a pencil or a pen, writing on the surface which is smooth and almost slipper means that the students do not have to apply so much strength and can produce a line more easily and, last but not least, even if they make a mistake (or if they are not very happy with what they produce), it is very easily to repair a mis-shaped ‘a’ or ‘n’. All these features make these resources especially suitable.

With my younger students we use these in the following activities:

  • doing the lines (rarely, I prefer to set it as homework)
  • copying the words from the board
  • the game of ‘fake scrabble’ – students in pairs, using two markers of different colours, take turns to add more and more words to the initial word set by the teacher, during a set amount of time. The students earn points for each letter in their words. The longer words they add, the more points they earn.
  • the game of ‘scramble, unscramble’ – teacher dictates words, letter by letter, in a random order. Students write these down and try to unscramble the word. This is not a competitive game, no points are awarded.
  • the game of ‘how many words’ – teacher writes on the board a sentence in English ie ‘We love to play games in English‘, students work in pairs and try to make a list of new words that can be put together using some of the letters in the sentences, for example ‘lamp’ because all these letters feature in the sentence. Students can reuse all the letters, for example they can use the letter ‘s’ in quite a few words but the words which contain more than two letters ‘s’ because there are only two of them in the sentence. This is a competitive game and there are points at the end of the game.
  • the game of ‘lazy bingo’ – students simply make a list of seven or ten words from the set that is being practised at the moment ie toys. Teacher then calls out the words in a random order, the student or the team which crosses or erases all their words first, wins the game.
  • depending on the set up in the classroom, I sometimes use the erasable whiteboards to put up the langauge that I want the students to use or the questions to discuss, especially if we are sitting away from the board.

We use the same games with my older students but, apart from that, we also use these in these activities:

  • a variety of quizzes – students write their answers, either full words or simply letters ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’ in multiple answer quizzes
  • short story writing – writing a Flyers or KET story, whole class writing in which the students contribute only a sentence or a word at a time and then exchange the notebooks, etc.
  • the game of ‘A to Z’ – students work in pairs, write the letters of the alphabet in a column. Later on, their main task is to come up with one word for each letter of the alphabet within a certain topic. There is a time limit and the team or pair who can make the longest list, wins the challenge. In the follow up, we reflect on these words discussing the questions such as: What is the strangest word here? What is the best word? Are there any words you don’t know? Which words you don’t approve of? This game works best at the start of a new topic and it helps the teacher to understand whether the new topic is actually new to the group and, consequently, to adapt the classroom procedures.

Understandably, in all of the activities, the mini-whiteboards or the earasable workbooks can be easily replaced with a simple piece of paper and a pencil and the activities would work just as well. Using the whiteboards simply adds to the excitement and it can be a nice way of spicing up the lesson.

Five: Tornadoes aka Points cards

Long, long time ago, at one of the trainings, someone showed us how to play the game of ‘Guns, Bombs and Lives’. I do not remember who it was (but thank you, anonymous benefactor!).

It was a very simple game of gamifying any boring activity such any typical controlled practice exercise. Students were giving their answers and uncovering the boxes in the grid. If they found ‘a gun’, they lost one of their three initial lives, if they found ‘a bomb’, they could steal a life from one of the other teams. If they found ‘a heart’, they did gain an additional life. There was a similar version of the same game, called Tornadoes’.

It worked very well and it helped to encourage the kids to get involved and to stay involved in the controlled practice activities but, even with the older students, I did not like the idea of all the guns, bombs and natural disasters, all the destruction that I personally would be bringing into the classroom. The other contributing factor was the fact that, at the time, I desperately needed a system points that I could also use with my 1-1 students. The regular grid would not work (it was always created by the teacher). Our game of Tornadoes had to transform into something else.

It did. It underwent a proper evolution as with my student, Nick, we did come up with new ideas, cards and tasks and we would play it for a few times, like proper gamers, and then, based on the data collected, we would accept these new rules or reject them.

At the moment, in its 4.0 we have the following cards:

  • the simple: 1, 2, 5 points
  • donate 1, 2, 5 points (you give away some of your points to one of the other teams)
  • lose 1, 2, 5 points (you lose some of your points, no one gets them)
  • add 50% of the number of your points
  • lose 50% of the number of your points
  • multiply your points by 2
  • take away 1, 2, 5 points from one of the other teams
  • shield which you can use to protect yourself agains any bad luck which, if not used, turns into 10 points at the end of the game
  • the crown – whoever picks the crown is the ultimate winner, regardless of the number of points collected. We add this card to the deck only for the final round.

You can see the cards in the photo. I have been using them for about three years now and I have just realised that it is the high time to print and to laminate them…Here is my new resolution for the new academic year.

Six: Magic wand

Well, yes, this particular tool is used only with my pre-schoolers, but it is an absolute staple food with this particular age group.

Magic wands can be found in many different toy shops or kiosks but it is so much fun to be making one! It is actually so easy that it can be turned into a craft activity with preschoolers. At the same time, a magic wand is not even necessary. Kids are amazing and, really, if played properly a simple pencil will do the job just as well. For that reason, when we used to study online with my students, I was using my handmade magic wand and my students were using markers, pencils, whatever was lying nearest!

Magic wands are used in one activity that can have many different variations. Whoever is wielding the wand is responsible for casting ‘the spell’ of their choice. The whole group, including the teacher has to perform the action and to mime. We use a simple rhyme ‘Abracadabra, 1, 2, 3. You are…’ with many different endings:

  • verbs ‘You are dancing’
  • nouns ‘You are a cat’
  • nouns with adjectives ‘You are a happy cat’, ‘You are an angry princess’

Seven: Word picturebooks

If I were to go to Mars and take one set of resources, I would love to take a set of visuals. If, however, I had a limited space in my bag and / or no access to google, I would take the printed version (because I am lucky to have the hard copy) of Cambridge YLE Picture Wordlist, Starters, Movers and Flyers. These are beautifully done picture scenes, especially useful for those of us who prepare kids for YL exams but, at the same time, so lovely and colourful, that I could actually live with them in a teen or adult group.

You can download them from here: Starters, Movers and Flyers, and if only anyone even mildly related to Cambridge University Press is reading this, here is my message: please, print them and sell them! We are going to buy them.

Eight: Small pieces of paper (basically)

Well, this is so basic that it is almost disappointing but, looking at the regular proceedings in my classes, I have to be honest and say that, yes, small pieces of paper (A4 white or coloured cut up into 16 or 32) appear there regularly and frequently.

Sometimes, I prepare them myself, they are typed up, printed and cut up but, since this whole series is devoted to the minimal resources and last-minute solutions, I will not include these here. The main assumption is: no time for any pre-lesson preparations. All of the activities mentioned before start with the teacher giving out a number of cards to each student, pairs or teams.

  • vocabulary: My Words: working with a set of vocabulary (connected by the topic or the text), each student has to choose five favourite words (the best, the worst, the most unusual, the strangest, the most interesting, the most difficult) and write them all on separate cards. Students can explain their choices, ask their partner a question with the word, make riddles with these or exchange their cards and guess their partner’s choices. Afterwards, the students repeat the activity with another partner.
  • vocabulary: write five words from the set of the key vocabulary, work with your partner, take out one of your words, randomly, put it on the table. Compare the two words, either using comparatives (works best with animals, transport, countries etc) or just say if they are similar or different taking into account their meaning, pronunciation, use, the part of speech they are etc.
  • vocabulary / functional langauge: Have you got…?: it is one of my favourite games with all the students, based loosely on Go Fish (or at least this is where it started). There is only one set of words that is necessary and students can help make these. The game is played best in 3 or 4 teams. Each team gets a set of the key words and the students take turns to try to guess what they partners have. As soon as someone guesses the word, the team loses it and puts the card away. The winner is usually the team that managed to keep all their words secret (ro the team that has most cards at the end of the game). Everyone has to listen to everyone else, collecting information and drawing conclusions. With my younger kids, we often play with ‘Have you got’ or even with ‘Blue, please’ during the first lessons of the course. With my older students, we turn it into proper themed mini-roleplays, for instance while practising the airport vocabulary, they have to ask ‘Excuse me, where is the departure lounge?’ and their partners reply with ‘It is next to the souvenir shop’ (if they have the card) or ‘Sorry, I don’t know’ (if they don’t have the card)
  • grammar: write five questions to ask your partner using the key structure (ie Did you go to the cinema yesterday?) or write five time expressions to use in the past to later ask questions with these words etc.

Nine: Puppets

Thinking about my classrooms now, I think there are at least two puppets occupying the shelves there, Angelina and the Flying Cow in the older kids classroom and Teddy and Orange Cat in the pre-primary classroom. If you want to find out how we use them, please pop in here.

Ten: The indispensables

This short (?) will be devoted not to teaching resources per se but to a whole selection of objects that I cannot imagine NOT being in my classroom

  • a clock, a big one, on the wall, right above the desk or behind the students’ back so that I can always be aware of the time and to proceed accordingly
  • a big box of felt-tip pens because we all like a bit of colour and a bit of variety when it comes to writing materials. The students always have a choice between a pen, a pencil or felt-tip pens and very often they choose the latter. Colour rules!
  • a roll of painter’s tape because you can use it to attach things to the walls (treasure hunts), to the floor (the plan of our ideal city), to the tables and chairs (assigning who is sitting there) and clothes (who is who today). The best thing – you can write on it so the teacher does and the kids do, too!
  • a big fat pencil case full of colourful whiteboard markers which we need to make the boardwork more appealing and to write in our erasable notebooks

If I ever went to Mars to teach, these are the things that I would be putting into my Mary Poppins’ rucksack. And you? What would you take?

Don’t forget to look out for the series of posts ‘When you suddenly land on Mars…’ in which I am going to share my ideas for lessons with pre-primary, primary, teenage and adult students, based only (or almost) on what we can find in every classroom: pen and paper! I have already started writing them and I will be sharing shortly!

Happy teaching!

When you suddenly land on Mars…

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What do you mean you can’t suddenly land on Mars? Sure you can! You get ready for something else, as far from space travel as only possible, you arrange all the bits and pieces, you make your copies (because you assume you are preparing for teaching) and then, suddenly, due to a combination of factors (although the Russian phrase стечение обстоятельств somehow fits better here), you open your eyes, you open the door of what turns out to be a rocket and, ta dam, you find yourself on Mars!

Naturally, everything that you have prepared, on paper or in your head, is, all of a sudden, absolutely useless. The whole lot of it, so, immediately, it lands in the bin or, what we refer to as with my kids, ‘Our Tresure Chest’. Hence the photo.

Congratulations! One of the most amazing adventures of your teaching life (probably) is about to start in…3…2…1…

What really happened?

It was supposed to be a short summer course, for kids, primary, whose main aim was to be a revision and reinforcement of everything that the kids knew, based on games, speaking activities and project. It was a programme I prepared myself, a programme I had run in the past, a programme that had been tried and tested. There are no coursebooks.

However, on the day, due to this amazing combination of factors, all of a sudden, there are four great kids sitting in the classroom, a ten-year-old, a seven-year-old, an almost-seven-year-old and a five-year-old. As regards the levels, one of them is more of less a Starters level and three false-start beginners which means that they know an occasional number, a few colours and a pet or two. Plus, they have had some exposure so, rather than run away, they make an effort to listen and to follow instructions.

Of course, since it is the first day, they trickle into the classroom (a new routine is building up, also for the parents) and the lesson takes off three times in a row. It is an interesting feeling to become aware of the fact that the lesson is 120-minutes long (or very very long), especially when you have nothing ready.

By nothing, I mean ‘literally nothing’. All of the materials and the lesson plans I had prepared were lying on the nearby table, I could see them from the corner of the eye throughout the lesson. I knew that they were entirely irrelevant at the moment and that maybe, if I am lucky, I might use them later on, with some other group. Maybe, not during this particular lesson that I was very much a part of and responsible for.

What I learnt from this experience

Spoiler: Plenty.

First of all, finally, I was able to pinpoint what ‘being experienced‘ means. It’s been a while since I started teaching and another while again since I could label myself as ‘experienced’. At the same time, I have never really thought what exactly it means to me. Because, normally, you don’t think about it, do you? Unless, sometimes, you are asked to add the number of your teaching years while putting together a bio for one conference or another…Or when you bump into ‘a student of yore’ and you notice how much they’ve grown. And how much time has passed.

I was teaching, peaceful and quiet, thinking that ‘It’s ok. Everything is going to be alright. The patient will live’. I was not happy because I really hate coming into the classroom not having planned my classes. I was not excited about the potential challenge and an opportunity to experiemnt and learnt. But I was angry, scared or even stressed out, just teaching. Anyway, the kids were in the classroom already so, if not for anyone else’s sake, it would be recommended that I behave for them. I don’t know if it works for everyone in the exact same way, but for me, yes, the students’ presence (insert here: kids, teens, adults, trainees) has a calming effect on me. All in all, that would be the definition of ‘experienced’ for me.

Then, this particular lesson (or the course) has made me think again about the case when students, who belong to different age groups but study together. Of course, there is a reason why we take these two factors into consideration: the age and the language level and we want to provide the best service, always suited to the individual students’ needs. There is no doubt about that. However, at the same time, over the years, I have been in a situation when the younger were together with the older and it did work. Because it did work in that case, too. It has worked, rather, (we are not done yet) and I am trying to understand why and how.

I don’t fully understand it yet, I am collecting evidence, so to speak, but whenever that happens, I always think of siblings playing together and doing things together, despite the age gap.

The most interesting part of it was the teacher’s brain at work. At one point in the lesson, I realised that it was working on as many as four levels simultaneously. One – because I was actually fully involved in the activity that was taking place at the moment, a game that we were all playing. Two – because I was thinking fast on my feet, trying to plan the next few activities, until the break. Three – because there was also the second half of the lesson after the break and I had to plan this part, too and four – because I was doing all that and also reflecting, on the go.

It was not all about killing the time and making sure that the kids leave the classroom alive and kicking, happy and healthy. It was about making sure that the children learn something and that we meet our lesson aims, although, admittedly, these were the aims that were set in the course of the lesson. All in all, it was a successful lesson. We learnt and practised some vocabulary and the kids learnt the room as humans who can use ‘I like’, ‘I don’t like’ and ask the question ‘Have you got?’ because we needed it in a game. If I had been observing this lesson, I would have given myself a ‘To Standard (strong)’ or maybe even ‘Above standard’. What a relief:-)

The only problem with it is that the brain gets really, really tired with such entertainment. As soon as the kids left, I just slumped on the desk and took a 15-min power nap, then lunch. Then, I was good to go, as if nothing ever happened.

Coda and the follow-up

Last but not least, it made me think about all the less experienced teachers and how they might react in such a situation and what I could tell them to help deal with the stress and the students in such a situation.

For that reason, next blog series will be about that, landing on the teaching Mars and surviving. I am planning a post on the top ten resources that might come in handy and that will help to save the world (kind of) and on a three posts in which I am going to share my ideas for the lessons based almost entirely on paper. Soon in cinemas near you!

Happy teaching!

‘

Dice – teacher’s best friend?

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Good news: I am working on a proper article at the moment and having lots of fun with that.

Bad news: This one article is a priority at the moment and all the creative energy needs to be going towards that. Or I will never ever finish.

Good news: I have an article that I commited for the IH Journal in spring 2019, in which I am sharing some of the ways of using dice in the EFL classroom. Two years on, dice are still one of my favourite tools, so here you are, if you are looking for ideas.

You can find it here.

Happy teaching!

PS And as a bonus, here are the two posts from Naomi Epstein, my blogger friend.

This one here, the introduction to using different types of dice. The other one, here, about D.G., the angry dice. I really liked the story of D.G. and I am planning to use it in a revision game with my students as soon as they get back from their holidays. Something along the lines of ‘Roll. Give me 7 examples of…’ or ‘Tell me about. You have to use…(roll) 5 sentences’. Or something like that. We will definitely get back to it:-)