Are you looking for more (and new?) ideas for practising vocabulary with juniors and teens (or adults)? Well, here are some of my favourite ones. Some of them I have come up with myself, some of them I have found in places. If I remember where, I will reference them.
The main idea is that we have a set of vocabulary, words, phrases etc, not necessarily connected by the topic, a situation that is quite common with higher levels when we just go beyond learning about clothes, food, money and sport or for the vocabulary that we work on in relation to the text we are reading or listening to. In Russian, we say сборная солянка or a hodgepodge, of sorts, that is difficult to come up with a context and a meaningful activity. And that is precisely why these activities here were created or adapted to the needs of the EFL classroom.
All ideas are mine but you will see that the inspiration came from a variety of sources. All of them have been tried and tested with my students, although, to be honest, writing about them has led to even more ideas for adaptation and use. Yay to that.
They all start in the same place: on the board, with a list of words. Sometimes we also use the same list on the A4 paper or on separate cards. Sometimes, some additional scrap paper is necessary, too.
Whenever we try a new game, we play with the whole group, for everyone to learn the rules and to feel comfortable. Only later (perhaps only in the following lesson or the next time we play the game) do we move onto the pair work, just to get the students used to the format of the game and the way of thinking of the words and what we can do with them.
You can download them here! And after you have used them, please come back and let me know how it all went.
This was my first year in teaching and my first year in teaching in a state school. As it happened, I was assigned all the year 1 of middle school classes. That was and would be entertaining enough, even with the most amazing students (which most of them were, anyway).
One of them was class D, an unfortunate by-product of the educational reform in the country. Unlike all the other classes at school, it was made up of children coming from the villages surrounding my town (so that they could all go home together on the school bus) with a few students that were repeating the year. A rather unfortunate combination because it not only labelled them as the weak class academically (yes, at the time at least, the students coming from the regional schools did not achieve as good results as the city students) but it also set them apart as the ‘village class’ with all the preconceptions and biases. When it comes to English, they were the only class that was not given the privilege of mini-classes for the purpose of the English lessons (just because their total number did not go over 24).
I did try and I did have some superstars in this class, too, clever and dedicated students, but, overall, I also had quite a few weaker, not very motivated students, too, and a few really difficult cases. One of them was Sasha. She used to be a bright student in primary, with great results but then, due to the neglect in the family that the system could not really handle very well, she just resigned herself to being ‘a weak student’ and ‘a troublemaker’. They are there, in every class, and you just learn to manage them and I was doing ok, for the first-year teacher.
A morning from hell
Now, that particular day was different. Some handymen were in the classroom, during the break or before the lessons and they were fixing something there. They must have been in a hurry because they had left a hammer behind. When we entered, together, because the students were not allowed to be in the classroom without a teacher, it was just lying there, on one of the cupboards.
We got in and everyone got down to their regular start-of-the-lesson routine – sitting down, taking out coursebooks and pencil cases. Sasha, however, my dear student, Sasha, saw the hammer and the opportunity to create mayhem.
Before I had a chance to react by hiding it, she dropped her bag at her desk, ran back to the cupboard and grabbed the hammer. I did ask her a few times to put it down, but, of course, she did not pick it up just to put it down just because I was asking her to. At that point I knew I had lost, the class they I had lost and Sasha knew I had lost.
After a minute of this theatre, she just laughed in my face, opened the door and ran out into the hallway. And was running up and down, laughing. An empty hallway, at the time, but with a row of huge windows, potted plants, framed diplomas, cups awards glass cupboard and, potentially, a few late-comers wandering in the hallway. Not to mention the harm that she could have potentially inflicted on herself. Joy!
The dilemma
There are two ground rules that they teach you pretty quickly. One is that you should never leave the students on their own in the classroom because they are you are responsible for them with your life, pretty much. The same applies to any student that, officially, should be in class at the time of the lesson. You are responsible for them, too.
The other rule is that once you are in the classroom, the kids are your responsibility and if you need help you should ask for it in such a way that does not show your weakness. No matter who is going to come to the rescue, parents, mentor or headmaster, the lesson time is your kingdom and you should rule it. No one will do it for you. By asking for help too openly or by referring to the outsiders you are digging your own grave because it will become clear, pretty quickly, that you are not capable of handling it all by yourself.
So here was my dilemma that I had about a second to think about: I cannot leave the room because I cannot leave the kids all by themselves, I cannot let Sasha just ran in the hallway and I cannot really call anyone for help, really. Or that, rather, I should not.
Obviously, I wouldn’t have had any of those dilemmas to deal with if I had managed to remove the hammer in time but, in my defense, this is definitely something that I could not imagine being in the classroom and so there was no way that I could have prepared for that.
The last act
So I did what had to be done. I told the kids to stay in their seats, no matter what and I left the room but I kept the door open, to signal to anyone else, passing by that we are dealing with some kind of an emergency. And, walking past Sasha, still running and shouting in the hallway, I did go directly to the headmaster’s office. I needed help and I had to get it. I entered the office and I think I said three words: Mr Headmaster, Sir. Sasha found a hammer in the classroom and is running in the hallway. Please, help.
He did. I left him to deal with Sasha and I went back to my classroom. I was out for three minutes. Nothing happened. They sorted it out, talked to her, she came back to the classroom about 20 minutes into the lesson. We went on.
I am not sure what other choices I had at the time. To send one of my more reasonable students to inform the headmaster? Maybe. To inspect the entire classroom before we all get in? Possibly. To raise hell afterwards in order to find out why the hammer got forgotten in the classroom? Probably.
I am not sure whether what I did was the best way out. I am glad that the school where I work now is small enough and I only need to open the door and call out for help, in case of an emergency without having to leave the kids on their own. I am also curious whether the state schools, with many more students, in large buildings, have any system of early warning in place. In case of a hammer, a nosebleed, a loss of consciousness and what not…
There were twelve of them, year one. I would come to their school, to teach them for 30 minutes, four times a week, during their siesta break, after they had had their lunch at the school canteen and while their friends and peers were running wild during the remaining part of the break.
Probably, the problems were partly rooted in that very set-up because sometimes the kids were waiting for me in the classroom but sometimes, I had to take them off the playground, interrupting the game and replacing their doing nothing time with yet another lesson, no matter how good, already in a difficult position. This, of course, was something that I had no impact on and could do nothing about it. That was the set-up and that’s what I did deal with.
And overall, very successfully. I loved working with these kids. We did build the routine, they were responsive and, with time, I did learn how to manage their energy and to make the lessons effective. They were the perfectest kids in the world. All went well. Too well.
The Easter Break disaster
Somehow, when we got back in April, after only a week away, everything changed. Until this day I have no idea what actually did happen and I am none the wiser despite the fact that I spent hours discussing the group with my mentor and trainer on the IH CYLT course, the YL advisor and colleagues. It was, literally, as if someone had snatched my lovely students and replaced them with a bunch of wild, rebellious kids that behaved as if the previous seven months had not happened. They just snapped. It was or it felt like a proper rebellion. Imagine a pirate ship, in the middle of the ocean, with the whole crew pretending they had never heard about you being their captain.
I mean, it does happen, especially with the younger kids and especially after a longer break. They do forget the language and the routine and you have to invest a little bit more time in re-establishing yourself in the class. Whatever did happen that year, was a complete disaster, a capital D: D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R.
The recovery
The first lesson, well, it almost did not happen, not according to the definitions of ‘a lesson’ in my dictionary. I focused on surviving. The number of students involved? Two (2): most of the time and zero (0): at times.
Getting ready for the second lesson was like preparing for a battle. I prepared a super cool craft activity, a monkey that could move legs and arms and that we would use to learn and to practice I can with different verbs. The monkey was my ferret. It got some of the kids’ attention and at that point, half of them participated and we had a better (but far from good) lesson.
Over the next few lessons, I had to bend over backwards to come up with more and more supercool-OMG-I-got-to-have-it activities and slowly, over the next two weeks, I got all the kids on board. Back on board. And we did plough through and I was lucky as there were only a few weeks left until the end of the year. Survivable. But we never got back to the state of bliss we had achieved before Easter.
As I have said already, I did discuss this case with many people and no one could offer any solutions and ideas why it would have even taken place. I still do not understand what I had done wrong and really cannot see what I could or would have done differently in the classroom in order to make it better.
But there were things that I could have done outside of the classroom. It was years ago so I am going to presume that this is why I did not think of that back then. I was at the state school, my group was in fact only a half of a class that had studied together, a class that had their own parents and a class that had their own form tutor. Today, I would have asked to talk to their class teacher to find out if there was anything at all that did happen at school but outside of the English hours that could have affected the atmosphere and the behaviour in my classes. Or, I would have asked for her or for the parents’ help to help me resolve that problem.
Lessons to take out of this nightmare?
You are not alone. Talk to your boss, mentor, supervisor and collagues. The kids may have other teachers, too and it is a good idea to talk to them. The kids do have parents or carers, too! You are not alone.
Don’t give up! It is always easier to start off the right foot than to reintroduce the law and order.
Happy teaching!
And don’t forget to read about the other epic fail stories, for example this one, here.
Once upon a time, there was a young ADOS that was supposed to be observed for the very first time formally by a senior teacher trainer. It was supposed to be an observation with a group of year 1 of primary or, in other words, something that the said ADOS was supposed to be very good at as she had just been appointed to do. It was a small group, four boys that she had been working with for two months. The observation was arranged, the lesson plan was prepared, all good. Only not quite.
Kids during an observed lesson
This is now a hobby of mine, observing how the students behave and react whenever there is an alien element in the classroom. It can be a fellow teacher that has popped in to do some peer observation, or the parents during the open lesson or, of course, an observer during a formal observation. Why? Because anything can happen.
When the group is ‘under control‘, usually nothing happens, the kids treat the additional human as a piece of furniture, almost, they don’t pay attention at all. It must be that the routine is already so strong and the balance so ideal that it cannot be tilted by another human visiting. When these humans are parents, emotions do take over and it can go in many different ways. Either the kids are too excited and want to show off in front of the parents and behave themselves or they do not behave themselves or they are shy and are not there, almost.
There is one more option, too. On the day when the teacher trainer came to observe, my boys decided to put on a show. They were so dedicated to that noble task that I actually did manage to catch them repeatedly glance at the observer, then at me, do something that we would not really want to have and then look again at the observer and at me. I was being played. That was not fun, of course, but I did manage to stay still and more or less in control…apart from the rewards chart thing.
Enter rewards chart.
One of my students, let’s say Sasha, was really not in the mood for anything resembling good behaviour. I did have a rewards chart on the board and I would award smiley faces after each stage of the lesson. All the other students got a smiley face and Sasha got a sad face. Then, the next stage of the lesson took place and the situation repeated itself, a smiley face for everyone and a sad face for Sasha. Then, one more stage and again, all the other students were working, Sasha was not so I had to be consistent (yes) and so everyone got their smiley face and Sasha’s got his third sad face. And that was the end of the game for me. And for Sasha.
At this point, having those three sad faces right next to his name, on the board, for everyone to see was too much for him to handle. I completely lost him. He was not interested in anything at that point (luckily we were close to the end of the lesson) and I just let him be there. Really.
Thank Heavens, we were a few minutes away from the end of the lesson. I was, indeed, saved by the bell.
I did not fail the observation, not formally at least but it still keeps coming back to me, all the little details of it. They come to haunt me, almost like the Ghost in ‘Hamlet’…
The lessons that I have learnt
We need a rewards chart (although there are also teachers who oppose to them) but then need to be used not only consistently but also in a clever way
It is better to withhold a reward (a smiley face) rather than award a fine / a punishment (a sad face), nobody wants to see their name on display close to sad faces which are also accumulating
There must be chance for the student to make up and to catch up with the rest of the group. Here the teacher is in charge so another smiley face can be awarded to everyone when Sasha displays some attempt at working hard. His efforts should be acknowledged (Catch them being good) or else it is going nowhere and there is nothing that can be done to get the student back.
Happy teaching!
Have you read about a rebellion in a primary EFL class yet? You can find it here.
It started with something Michael said. He is a fellow teacher and he was telling me a story of how Teacher X went to peer observe an experienced colleague, Teacher Z and how the lesson was, well, not very good, bad, horrible, ‘a disaster’…It was not a very pleasant experience for Teacher Z, of course, but a learning opportunity for Teacher X, nonetheless (and for Teacher Z, too, actually). ‘This is what I want to hear, that even with the best intentions, it can all go ‘tits up’ but nobody is prepared to say it‘.
I got inspired. I am ready to share. I don’t mind. We repeat that to our students, constantly, that mistakes are noble and that we can learn from them. If our students can, so can we, the teachers. The same principles apply.
By the way, the Epic Fail Award is actually a real concept. It is a real award given out to employees at Hill Holliday agency, since, as Robert F. Kennedy once said ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly’ (apparently, have a look at the whole article here)
With that in mine off we go, to the first of my personal disasters or ‘When things did not go to plan‘.
One: The (stupid) Christmas tree craft
Here it is, look!
Did you go ‘Awn’? I bet you did. I did when I saw it and so did my kids when I showed it to them, during the pre-Xmas lesson. It did take place three years ago, I think and back then I was already an experienced teacher etc.
I did a great job, preparing for the task. I did prepare all the materials; I did make the tree at home. I did think of the staging. I did plan to teach the kids the verbs we needed to make it (fold, press, pause). I did think of how old they were and I knew them, they had been my students for over two years at the time so I could imagine what they were or were not able to do. We had done plenty of craft activities, we had worked with the pipe cleaners in a few different arrangements. I did pre-cut the triangles and tied pipe cleaners (three of them joined would be necessary to cover one tree). I punched the holes at the top of each tree. I wrote the main steps.
You would have thought the conditions were perfect. Yes, yes, they were. And yet it was the biggest craft disaster known to mankind. In my kingdom.
It turned out that even with all of these preparations and the previous experience and knowledge, the task turned out to be too tricky for my students. They were involved, yes, they loved the idea but we soon discovered that if you do not press the pipe cleaner real hard, applying all the strength (that the 5 y.o. did not quite have), it starts sliding, coming off and not looking at all as this ‘Awn’ model that I had already shown and that everyone had already managed to fall in love with and to start dreaming about of taking home.
The point of no return, in other words. Stopping, pausing or aborting the task was completely out of the question at that point. We went on, with me helping to complete eight Christmas trees simultaneously, perhaps singing the song to keep everyone occupied (though, really, I cannot be sure) with me hating absolutely every second of it and swearing that this very craft will never be seen again in any of my lessons. This or any craft, actually.
Everyone survived. Apart from all the leftover trees. I binned them all. With a lot of vidictive satisfaction. The one you can see in the photograph was recreated for teacher training purposes.
Today, I think that the craft is actually child-friendly, provided that you don’t go too minimalistic and that you keep the real Christmas tree-shape. Or that you at least cut the edges of the simple triangle in a few places, on both sides, to ensure that the pipe cleaner has somewhere to get attached and to stay in one place and still look ‘Awn’.
But it is also true that with this particular craft, I did allow myself to fall far the ‘awn’ effect and its strictly decorative value. Linguistically, there would be very little for us to do with it, apart from a few verbs and a few functional language phrases that we use and practise with any craft activity. Maybe, just maybe, I should not have fallen for it and, as a language teacher, first and foremost, I should have prioritised the linguistic aim.
Well, lesson learnt, that’s for sure!
P.S. It was unpleasant but I have not given up on craft! Experiments will sometimes lead to great achievements and sometimes to disasters but the best thing is – we learn, one way or another!
P.S.S. There is more to come in this chapter! I will see you soon with more epic fails stories. If you have some that you would like to share, please, do in the comments below!
What a wonderful book this is, The Worst Alphabet Book Ever, by Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter. In a way, it has inspired this post here, on all things related to homework for pre-primary EFL students.
Mine is a very messy alphabet, with some letters in, some letters missing, all of them in a very un-alphabetical order…
The Worst Alphabet Book Ever
S is for ‘Should we even think of setting homework for preschoolers?’
Some of the arguments against:
Kids are too young
It is too much pressure, too early. They will grow up, start school and then they will have to really learn what it means to be a student.
Kids forget to do the homework.
Parents forget to do the homework.
Parents may not speak English well enough to help with the homework task.
Parents work and are essentially too busy to deal with the homework tasks.
Some of the arguments for:
We are teaching the kids English but we are also teaching them how to be a student. Doing the homework and taking responsibility is a part of that process.
It has to be the homework task that is appropriate for the students’ age (2 – 6 years old) and level of English (pre-A1) so also something that non-English speaking parents will be able to do and something that will not take a lot of time
Certain procedures for setting the homework and checking the homework should apply to ensure that the tasks are not a hassle for the parents or the children
Homework is a wonderful way of creating a link between different lessons
So the short answer to the question in the heading would be ‘Yes, we definitely should’.
The Worst Alphabet Book Ever
E is for the extended exposureand R is for results
This is one more argument in favour of the VYL homework, so important in fact that it is going to have its own paragraph here.
Usually, pre-primary students who learn English as a foreign language have a very limited exposure to the language as they come to class twice a week for 45 minutes or, in some cases, for only 45 minutes once a week. That is not a lot but it is enough to get good results if the time in class is spent well. Or, if there is an opportunity to extend this English exposure time by homework tasks.
In practice, in might mean only the additional five or ten minutes or fifteen minutes per week but it will be the important link that will provide some additional practice between the lessons, which will be very beneficial for the children and it will help to recycle and keep up the language from Tuesday to Thursday and, even more importantly, from Thursday to Tuesday.
As it happens, a few years ago, me and my colleague-teacher, Anya (hello Anya!), we had a chance to be a part of a very informal and very small scale classroom research or an accidental experiment. We both worked with the same levels onsite (at one of our IH schools in Moscow) and, at the same time, offsite (at one of the kindergartens). All the kids were amazing, very bright and a pleasure to teach. They had the same teachers and they were following the same programme and yet, we realised that the onsite students were making more progress. We tried to analyse the situation and the only difference between the groups that we could put a finger on was the fact that our offsite groups were not getting any homework, according to the arrangements with the client.
Then, there were my other groups, a few years ago, that all of a sudden started to make lots of progress and, surprisingly enough, we did not have to devote so much time to drilling and practising the new vocabulary, right after it was introduced.
Normally, the first two lessons with the new material were filled with a lot basic games whose aim was to provide the exposure and the controlled practice before we would move onto more complex vocabulary games and introducing structures. Until, that is, I noticed that all this drilling was not necessary and, in most cases, already in the second lesson the children were using the new vocabulary with a lot of confidence. What it did look like in class, of course, were my students’ faces quickly losing interest in ‘just’ repeating the words with voices and emotions and, even, random comments (or, shall we say, feedback) muttered, here and there, ‘Да, мы уже все это знаем...’ (‘We already know all that...’)
I would never complain about that, we could move on and do the more interesting and challenging things but it took me a while that it was connected to the additional practice opportunities that the parents were providing at home. Just because they wanted to.
The Worst Alphabet Book Ever
P is for the parents
It is not a secret that in case of all the young learners or non-adult groups, the parents are the third party involved in the process and, one way or another, they will have to be included because, really, they are our clients, not the students themsevels. This is particularly true in case of the pre-school groups, mainly because children are very young and if we want to make the learning process effective, with homework or without it, we will be dealing with parents, too. Even more so, we need parents to make it all work.
Parents always want the best for their children but many of them are also taking their first steps in the EFL world, this time through their children. They might have had different previous learning experience (their own or of their kids’), they might have different expectations and aims that might not always coincide with ours, with our previous teaching experience or with our school’s policy. That means that we cannot take things for granted and that we should always talk to the parents, to explain what we do and why we do it. That applies to the homework tasks, too.
Some parents might really not be able to spend time with their children, some might choose to spend the time they have in other ways, not working on the English homework and we should accept and respect that. However, there are also parents for whom the English homework will not be so much of a burden but rather an opportunity to do something together in English. We can help them by showing them what can be done at home and the actual homework task is the first step here.
The Worst Alphabet Book Ever
N is for nuts and bolts
Here are some things to take into consideration
The homework should be short. Our students are still two or three or five and will not be able to remain seated for a long period of time, in class or at home.
It should be easy to complete, too. The students are still two or three or five and tasks that are very complex cognitively will not be appropriate for them.
However, the fact that the task looks like a simple colouring page (see below) does not mean that it is just colouring because the actual physical task will be connected with the language produced that is presented and practised in class with the teacher, practised at home with the parents and then practised again, with the teacher, during the homework check in the following lesson.
Ideally, the homework task should be consistent, in form and in content, with the focused task completed in class. This way, we do not only provide additional practice of the vocabulary and structures that we currently work on but we also ensure that the students will know how to complete the task because the instructions are the same, for the focused task and for the homework task. Of course, that is not always possible but it is a good aim to set for yourself while lesson planning.
For that reason, the longer I work, the more convinced I become that in an ideal set-up, I would rather work with a coursebook only, without any activity book whatsoever, in order to give myself the flexibility to match and to better combine the programme, the focused task and the homework task. This is, of course, only my very subjective view and I am aware of the fact that it would not be everyone’s choice.
The task should be set in class, with the students. After all, these are the ones who are learning to be responsible for the task. For the teacher and the students this is, yet another opportunity for practice. The teacher can bring another copy of the handout or the book and do the task together with the students.
The homework task should be explained to the parents, too, because, they will have to remember to take the task out and to complete it before the following lesson. There are different ways of doing it. The teacher can explain the task after the lesson, alone or with the help of the students, the administration of the school can be asked for help, too. Some teachers like to leave the notes about the homework on the door of the classroom and, nowadays, we all have the whatsapp groups which we can use to communicate with the parents, too.
The homework checking is a part of the routine and another opportunity to practise the language and to talk to students, one on one, as they walk into the classroom (more about the line-up routines here). In the past, I used to reward my students with stickers for the homework but I stopped doing that when I realised that not everyone does or brings their homework and that is precisely because mum or dad or granny forgot…Now, I only acknowledge the hard work with smileys, suns, flowers, ‘Fantastic!’ and ‘Excellent’ and I keep a spare handout, my homework or any visual in order to be able to have a little chat also with those students who are without a homework task on the day.
The Worst Alphabet Book Ever
B is for the basic homework tasks
Here are some of the staple food tasks that work well as homework tasks. All of these were created using the miro board. These are not actual handouts but only sample tasks in each type.
a)colouring: task: students colour the objects and produce simple sentences ie ‘The apple is green’ or ‘It’s a green apple). This kind of a task is especially appropriate after the new vocabulary has been introduced and colours can and should be revised throughout the course.
*****
b) drill: task: students look at the the sequence of words, name them, using a single word or a sentence and make a decision what should be the final word. This is also a task appropriate in the beginning of the unit. Here, some students might choose to colour the picture but that is not obligatory.
*****
c) odd one out: task: students name all the objects in the sequence and decide which one does not match the others. We usually use very simple langauge here for example: Goodbye, cat.
*****
d) matching: task: students look for the same objects in both columns and connect them with a line. This is also a task more appropriate for the beginning of the unit and for younger students, too. The older students can complete it, too, but in their case it would be a good idea to encourage the kids to produce a full sentence.
*****
e) finish the sentece: task: students try to build simple sentences by naming the elements of it represented by visuals or symbols and by choosing one of the elements.
*****
f) categorise: task: depending on the language, students can categorise the objects into those that they like or don’t like, big or small, animals that can fly or swim or even words beginning with the same sound if you have started working on developing literacy skills. They can either colour or circle different categories with different colours, at the same time producing the target language.
*****
g) count: task: students look at the picture and count all the apples, bananas, kiwis and nuts, they write the number.
*****
h) maze: task: students trace different lines in order to produce the required sentence, for example ‘I’ve got a doll’ and similar. Again, thanks to the fact that all elements of the sentence are represented visually, an activity like that is going to support maximising production, here full sentences.
*****
i) collage: task: in class, students make sentences about mum, dad, grandma (my mummy likes apples) glueing simple pictures in the appropriate part of the handout. All the leftover pictures are given out as homework. Students glue them onto the handout and produce similar sentences but now about brother / sister, grandpa or friends.
A is for the alternatives
Normally, the homework task is set as a handout (or in the activity book) but the pandemic and the lockdown of 2020 has changed everyone’s way of looking at homework and, fortunately or unfortunately, it has closed some doors but it has opened some others. During the lockdown, not all the studnets had access to a printer so sending out homework for the parents to print and complete was not always possible. What is more, not all the students even had coursebooks and so these could not always be used as the basis for homework tasks.
W is for Wordwall
This website has been a real revelation and a milestone in tasks for age groups of students but especially for my pre-primary studnets. Wordwall is available for everyone and free in its basic version. Anyone can register and gain access to all the tasks and games that have been created by the community and made public. These games can be used in class and shared with the parents to play on any device available at home. Another advantage is that each of the tasks or games is available in a few different formats (or ‘templates) which means that the parents (or the teachers) can still practise the same set of vocabulary or structures but in a slightly different game.
If you are willing to invest a small sum of money, you can choose your own plan and start creating your own activities to match the programme or the curriculum of your group or school, too.
Here are some examples of the games that I have created for my pre-primary students
a) Let’s count, created for the students who were in the beginning of level 1
b) Categorising, created for level 2 students (farm animals which can fly, swim, run, jump)
c) Tell me about this picture, created for my level 3 students to practise opposite adjectives.
All of these we played in class, first and then the same or a similar task was shared with the parents.
L is for homemade listening tasks
These are lightly more complex but a real lockdown revelation for my primary and pre-primary classes. You can read more about them here.
Happy teaching!
P.S. All the samples of activities were created using the images on Miro and all the in-text photos come from the same wonderful book, P is for Pterodactyl, The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter and illustrations by Maria Tina Beddia from Sourcebook Jabberwocky, which by the way can be (and will be) used with my teens. More on that later:-)
*** This post was based on the talk I gave at the 2020 IH YL Conference.
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
She is five years old and is a big sister to a baby brother. She is in the second year of our EFL course. The group in which she is studying is not big at all, only four kids, two boys and two girls. We can meet only once a week, on Saturday morning, for two real hours.
It happens in the second half of the lesson. The kids are completing the literacy development activities, tracing letter M and gluing in a few pictures with mum, a mouse, a monkey. They are having fun because at the same time we are playing our new favourite game: what colour is it? Which is about making up new names for all the colours. No more ‘green marker’ then, no more ‘purple marker’. They have been rebranded as ‘a cucumber marker’ and ‘an aubergine marker’. All of a sudden brown is the new black because we all call it ‘a chocolate marker’ and everyone wants to use it.
Just then, both Sasha and Andrey reach out for the same marker and Sasha waves her hand so unfortunately that she hits Andrey, not very hard to make him cry but hard enough to cause discomfort. Andrey gets upset.
The teacher says ‘Oh, Andrey, are you ok? Sasha didn’t mean it. She will say sorry. Sasha, please say sorry.’
But Sasha shakes her head.
Teacher continues ‘Sasha, you are fantastic and you did not mean it. But Andrey is sad. If you say ‘I am sorry’, he will be happy’ (all that navigating carefully between the buoys of acceptable English and English graded to the pre-A level, with all the gestures, soft voice and empathy). Andrey is calmer but Sasha shakes her head. ‘Sasha, please say sorry’
And this is when she raises her head, looks at the teacher with defiance and says, in her L1 ‘You can’t tell me what to do. You are not my boss’
The teacher sighs, struggling to keep a straight face because it is hilarious. Even more so because the word she uses is very formal, strong and way above the 5-year-old range. A corporate culture vernacular, she has picked up somewhere. The teacher gives up and once again smiles at Andrey. ‘It’s OK, Andrey. Don’t worry. It’s going to be OK’
The lesson goes on…
The kids go back to tracing the letters. Just then, Sasha suddenly stands up and starts walking. The teacher looks up and says ‘Sasha, please sit down’ but this is when the little girl looks at the teacher again, right in the eye. The last traces of defiance are gone and now she is something new about her, something in her eyes, as if she is saying ‘Please, let me do it’. The teacher nods her head.
Sasha goes around the table, behind the other kids’ backs, until she reaches Andrey. He looks at her but she bends, with her hands cupped around her mouth and his ear and says in L1 and in that child whisper that absolutely everyone in the room can hear clearly ‘Andrey, please don’t tell anyone, it is a secret. I am really sorry. I didn’t mean it’. The she just goes back to her seat and finishes her task, as if nothing has happened. Nothing at all.
The things that I have learnt from this story
Kids are different and even the bravest and the most outspoken ones will not feel very comfortable with all the limelight and attention on them, positive or negative, even if the audience comprises of only four other people that they know really well.
The teacher has to react to any unwanted behaviour to signal that this is not what we are going to tolerate, however, it is also up to the teacher to decide how long this ‘reaction’ should last. When does it stop being effective and turns into ‘torture’ and ‘punishment’
Is it always a good idea to encourage or to make the kids say that they are sorry there and then even if they don’t mean it and don’t want to do it? Debatable. It might be a good idea to leave some room for the learner and human autonomy and let them sort it out themselves, under a teacher’s supervision, of course.
What Sasha said to the teacher could have been potentially interpreted as a lack of respect but it was something that was clearly overheard at home and applied in a different context, in a similar situation. It never happened before and it never happened again afterwards and, to be honest, the only difficult thing about it was that I had to keep a straight face, although inside I was rolling with laughter.
Sasha did understand very well that she was the responsible one, she did not feel comfortable with it and wanted to signal her discomfort to the world. And, in a way, she did and effectively so. Perhaps a sad face or tears would be a more typical way of reacting in such a situation, a more predictable one but children are different and they react differently.
We did have our happy ending but if I were to give any advice to this teacher (well, myself from a few years ago), I would suggest telling Sasha a secret, instead of drawing even more attention to something that she did do.
Why this series? Child development is one of the key areas when it comes to the teacher education in the area of primary and pre-primary. At the same time, whereas the other two areas, the knowledge of the language and the appropriate methodology, are better taken care of, child development for the EFL teachers is still waiting to happen. Hence this series.
I hope that some of my adventures will contribute to understanding who the little people in our classrooms are and how to approach them.
All of this really did happen but we want to protect real kids and their stories so for the purpose of this little exercise here, everyone will be a Sasha as it can be a boy or a girl and the name is used worldwide, too.
Enter Sasha.
On the one hand, there is nothing unusual about it, really, there is always one child in (each) group that is going to be your space cadet, daydreamer, lost, your head in the clouds, moony, your Luna Lovegood, your Tigger, Little Miss Scatterbrain. There is always one and it is perfectly fine.
My Luna was a boy, aged 5, Alexander, although this name was too big for him, so we just called him Sasha or Sanya.
Sanya could not stay focused…
…throughout the lesson for as long as all the other kids, and despite the fact that it was year 2, with plenty of time for him to get used to the routine and the length of the lesson. He did not pay attention, he would switch off, he had to be called back. He would come late every now and again and very very rarely did he bring the homework.
He did not interact with the kids well, either.
He did not make friends with the girls, who stayed in their own circle but he did not seem to be getting on very well with the other three boys in the group. Grisha, the youngest always chose to sit with his older brother and Artem refused to sit with him. Of course, they did play together and interact during the lesson, I did take care of it, but they only did the absolute minimum.
And yet, Sanya, did look for this interaction only his methods were not approved of by the boys. For example, one day, in the middle of the lesson, he went to Artem and hugged him to which Artem pushed him off with ‘Don’t kiss me, you are not my mum’…All of it was rather unusual and a definite change of behaviour.
But even before I managed to get in touch and talk to Sanya’s mum…
the truth revealed itself. One of these days in November, the lesson finished and Sanya was still there in the classroom. When I asked ‘Where is your mummy?’, he explained that today his mummy is not coming to pick him upstairs (3rd floor) but that he should walk downstairs those six flight of stairs and meet her on the ground floor, by the cloakroom, a strange request and a real challenge, in that building. I let the assistant know and I said ‘Let’s go’ reaching out my hand. And because it was a long trip, step by step by step, hand in hand and because he was a little gloomy, I decided to talk to him. Now, mind you, he was still a pre-A level and so I did speak English and he replied in Russian. We counted stairs, I praised him for the lesson and then, I decided to ask, just making small talk, ‘Sanya, who is coming today, mummy or daddy?’ and this is when the heartbreak began. And the understanding.
Sanya just answered the question and because it must have been something that has been bothering him, he just went on talking.
‘My uncle is coming today. I don’t have a daddy. He doesn’t live with us anymore. He’s got a new home and a new baby son. We live with the uncle, my mummy and me’
At the age of 5, Sanya had already been through his parents’ separation, at an unknown cost and stress, his half-brother’s birth and who knows what else. No wonder he was a little bit off. No wonder mum had other issues to deal with rather than the homework. No wonder he needed some more attention from the other kids and from the teacher.
Back then I was still a very young and shy teacher.
I did not talk to Sanya’s mum. What I focused on was making Sanya’s time in class a little bit more bearable: no stickers for homework, homework replacement that he could do in class when I was checking other kids’ tasks and deal with his in the end, praising him and putting more effort in creating opportunities for him to bond with other children, making sure he is fine.
And walking him downstairs to the cloakroom after the lesson.
Today, it would have been different. I would have more energy and more confidence to talk to mum and voice my concerns and try to work with her more closely.
Once upon a time, there was a world in which children were developing their reading skills, imagination and creativity with storybooks read by mum at bedtime.
Then, the Wicked Witch of the West came and replaced all the books with apps, tablets and games. The Wicked Witch of the West said that it is all easy, available, accessible. All the parents and all the teachers applauded. The books lay forgotten and deteriorating, and a few years later, the time came when one of the dinosaur teachers by accident said ‘open your books’ in class and a little Masha raised her hand in the first row to ask ‘What is a book, Miss?’
Luckily, we are not there yet and, hopefully, we will never be. Of course, the pandemic was / is / has been a huge challenge for us in that department but, nonetheless, I do continue to stand proud in defence of paper and in defence of magic.
May this very post to be the introduction and the directory to everything that using storybooks in the classroom can be.
One thing that it definitely is not, is just opening the storybook and reading it out loud. This is what it can be.
One. Baby steps
At the start of the level 1 of any pre-primary or primary course, the kids are real beginners, they have no language, no structures and no vocabulary. It would be rather optimistic to hope that a teacher is going to be able to use a story with all its richness. However, that is also not a reason NOT to include them in your lesson plans. After all, storybooks are something that the little kids are familiar with, they know what dealing with them involves and that they are part of life. For that reason, they can and they should be used with children.
Simple vocabulary revision with a different tool: the teacher points out at pictures in the book and calls out the colours, counts them, asks if they are big or small, if the children are happy or sad, if the students already know this vocabulary. This might happen only at the level of the colour (It’s green) and not necessarily with the actual noun (It’s a green fish), although, admittedly, there is some potential here, too, to learn the new vocabulary through storybooks
Simple functional language practice: Hello Pete, Goodbye Pete in the first lessons with the book and then according to what the students know.
Storybook reading-related language: something that will be introduced gradually but that will come in handy throughout the course, for example ‘It’s story time!’, ‘Sit down’ ‘Are you ready?’ ‘Turn the page’ ‘Do you like the story?’
Two. Role-play
This way of using a storybook will involve the students a little bit more as they will be retelling the story together with the teacher, as soon as they become more familiar with it. Naturally, not all the stories will lend themselves to this activity, only those that include some repetitive language, even if it is only one phrase. Stories that can be used here can involve
Dear Zoo (‘I wrote to the zoo to send me a pet’)
Where’s my baby? (‘Is this your baby, Mrs Monster?’)
We’re going on the bear hunt (‘We’re going on a bear hunt, we’re gonna catch a big one. Oh, what a beautiful day. We’re not scared’)
Any other story in which you might want to implement a structure that the kids might already know or that they might benefit from knowing, even if, originally, it is not in the story. For example, ‘…., Senor Croc’ is a storybook for kids in Spanish about the birthday party of the main character Mr Croc, by introducing the following ‘Let’s’ (Let’s open the presents, Let’s dance, Let’s eat the cake)
Three. Vocabulary practice
The storybooks are there and we can use them and the beautiful story and illustrations in any way we want. The story is not really read but told, with the language graded to the level and needs of the particular group.
Most frequently I choose the storybooks to go with the vocabulary that study in the unit. This way, the children can participate in telling the story and continue working on the vocabulary that they are learning. It will start with producing single words but it can lead to producing
How to lose a lemur – to teach and revise transport
Dear Zoo – to teach and revise animals
Julia Donaldson’s The Smartest Giant in Town – to teach and practise clothes
Go Away Big Green Monster – to teach and revise body parts
Marvin Gets Mad – to teach and revise emotions and verbs
Four. More vocabulary practice
Taking one more step in that direction, any storybook can be used to teach, to revise and to practise any vocabulary, even if it does not feature explicitly in the storybook.
The first storybook that I have used in that way was the traditional story ‘The Three Goats Gruff’. The story is lovely all by itself but I have been using it to practise and to revise the food vocabulary. Only in my version of the story, every time one of the goats tries to cross the bridge and the troll attempts to eat it, they always have some food on them and they try to buy themselves out by asking ‘Troll, do you like bananas?’, which, of course, the troll never accepts.
Five. Storytelling without storybooks?
Absolutely! For example, because you realise that your own precious copy of Dear Zoo has been misplaced / lost / stolen only a few minutes before the lesson in which you want to use it…You do not give up, naturally, you only wander around the school, find a few flashcards and a box. As an experience it is unpleasant and stressful but, in the end, you realise that, hey, a storybook itself is just a tool and a story can be told without it. And it is lots of fun.
Another sources of inspiration for that kind of approach to storytelling, can be a series of storytelling videos produced in the 90s by the Brazilian TV Cultura. This example here is in Portuguese is a story about a crocodile, a grasshopper and a spider, with a scotch dispenser starring as the spider, a pair of scissors as the crocodile and a table tennis ball as grasshopper.
This kind of pretend-play with the use of the everyday objects or toys is something that children do in L1 as well and it can easily be implemented in our EFL lessons, too.
Six. I can read!
This is a big moment for the teacher and the student when they can finally take an active part in the proper reading of the story. For that reason, the storybook should be carefully chosen.
‘Bear on a bike’ is easy enough because the whole story is told through illustrations and single words or short phrases, some of which are also repeated. ‘Apple, pear, orange, bear’ follows a similar pattern
‘Llama, llama, red pajama’ includes rhymes and some parts of it are easy enough for the primary beginner students to deal with
Graded readers and phonics stories that were specifically created for beginner readers
Seven. Storybooks for everyone!
A few years ago, at the IH YL Conference in Rome, Beverly Whithall from IH Braga gave a fantastic seminar on using storybooks with teenagers and adults. The older students, because of their maturity and the level English, can properly appreciate the story, its language, plot and illustrations and every story can be a starting point to a discussion. Just imagine a typical literature lesson that you had in school, when you are looking not only at the story itself but also at the bigger picture. Seen from that angle
Rhinos Don’t Eat Pancakes is really a story about a family and about loneliness
Elmer is a one big question of whether one should be like the everyone else
Giraffes Can’t Dance is about bullying
Up and Down is whether we should always follow our dreams
Questions
How to choose a storybook? It might be a good idea to start with the classics but also to keep your eyes open while visiting bookshops and browsing, to find out more about the beautiful world of the storybooks and to learn more about how they can be used in the lesson.
How long can I use the same storybook? Well, definitely more than once and as long as the students are interested. It might be a good idea to put the book away for some time and then return to it, letting the students choose which book they want to read or ‘read’
How do I adapt the language? Like with all the lesson planning, for any kind of an activity, choose the aim first (functional language, structures, vocabulary practice, revision or introduction) and them adapt the book to help you meet that aim. The gestures, the visuals, the voice and the universal story magic will help children to understand. Translation will not be necessary.
Do I need to include storybooks in every lesson? It is not absolutely necessary, it is like the other tools and techniques, they are definitely beneficial for the children but there is no absolute must to have them in every lesson. More likely than not, with time, you will see the positive impact of storytelling on the students, on the classroom management and on yourself and it is for that reason that you will want to include them in every lesson or almost in every lesson.
How do I start? Slowly! Practice makes perfect.
Tips and techniques
Let the children look at the story, all or some of the pictures, before you start telling the story, unless, of course, there is some big surprise in the end which should not be revealed too soon.
This demonstration can be done in silence or the teacher can point at certain pictures and elicit the words from the students.
While telling the story, point at the crucial elements in the illustration and pause to elicit the language from the children.
If the kids are already familiar with the story, start telling it with mistakes and wait for the children to correct you. They are going to love it.
Include gestures and physical actions that will accompany your story. This will help children first to understand the story and then to retell it and to really remember the language.
If possible, use some prompts such as realia (toys, plastic food, clothes), flashcards or mini-flashcards.
If possible, try to recreate the atmosphere of the story by preparing a soundtrack i.e. the jungle sounds for story set in the jungle, the beach sounds for the stories set by the sea etc.
Don’t forget to use your voice, this is the teacher’s most important and powerful tool.
Get ready and rehearse, think how you are going to position yourself, how you are going to hold the book, where the children are going to say.
If you are not using the original story, try to remember what changes you have introduced in order to be able to retell the story in more or less the same way every time you are using it
The storybook is never used in one lesson only. It is only in lesson two or three, when the students are already familiar with the story and with the language, that they can really enjoy it and participate in it fully.
Here is my favourite character who would be a perfect amabassador for ‘We want more‘, my professional obsession (you might have noticed:-) and some of my favourite solutions for the classroom.
Trick number 1: The language
Regardless of what coursebook is used or what curriculum is followed, there are certain language items that can be included even in the pre-primary programme that will enable children to communicate and produce more language.
Some of these language items include:
descriptive adjectives, such as big – small, long – short, happy – sad, beautiful – ugly, serious – funny, old – new, etc. Introducing them in opposites will make it easier for the students to understand and to remember
simple linkers, introduced gradually, starting with ‘and’ (‘blue and green’, ‘cats and dogs’, ‘I like bananas and apples’), then moving on to ‘because’ ( starting with ‘I am happy because it is sunny’) and perhaps even ‘but’ (‘I like dancing but I don’t like dancing with a bear’, like in the song from Super Simple Songs).
introduce Present Continuous, because it will be easy to play with it in all the miming games and it will come in very handy while describing pictures and telling stories.
talking about other people. Personalisation is very important while learning language, not only with the little ones, but it is also a good idea to start introducing other people and the language we need to talk about them such as ‘she/he is / has got / can / likes’
Trick number 2: The freedom of speech
This freedom of speech has got very little with the civil rights. It is all about the degree of freedom that the students are given or, in other words, about the scaffolding and the support that are slowly removed in order not to limit the students and to enable them to choose what they want to talk about.
One way of doing it is shifting from closed yes/no questions towards more open-ended questions. ‘What do you like to eat?’ is more likely to generate more language that only ‘Do you like bananas?’ which will lead to one-word answers or maybe even only gestures. ‘Tell me about‘ will be a lot more generative.
Using this approach while working with illustrations, pictures or any kind of visuals will give students the opportunity to choose for themselves what to talk about. And it is quite likely that they will pick the topics (elements or aspects of the picture) that they are either more interested in, have more knowledge of or are better prepared to discuss. In any case, more language is likely to be generated.
Examples or real activities? Here you are:
Pairs is a speaking activity that uses a simple material of a set of pictures. The students put them in pairs, in any way they want. They also have to justify their choice. In case of the younger learners, this principle can be the colour (‘Panda and zebra. They are black and white’) but kids can also choose any other reason for that, like ‘Zebra and horse, they have 4 legs’ or ‘Bear and deer. They live in the forest’.
This activity can be also used with the older students who are given a list of words and have to put them in pairs, according the knowledge and the language they have.
Below you can see the end of the game with my pre-primary student. It started off slowly, with simple sentences about the colours that the animals have in common but as the activity progressed, the categories changed, too and we have here an example of animals that have a long tail (a lizard and a monkey), animals that live in the forest (a bear, a fox and a deer) or animals that like meat (a tiger and a lion).
This is the final product of our Pairs activity, using the visuals on Miro
Tell me about is another activity that uses a visual, for example a set of pictures with animals or a picture scene. Students choose an element for their peers to describe, for example Tell me about this boy’ and it is easy to imagine the variety of responses that these can generate. Students can choose to talk they boy’s clothes, feelings or actions.
Trick number 3: The appropriate activities and materials
Our students do what we want them to do. It is assumed so, precisely because we are teachers and they are students. The roles have been assigned once and for all. The question to ask yourself, though, is Would they really want to do it, if they had a choice?Is there anything in the task itself that would encourage them to? Or not.
Certainly, it does not meant that all those less-exciting-but-crucial activities will be renounced forever, because even though they are not always fun from the point of view of our students, they might still be necessary and useful, but it is an interesting aspect to start taking into consideration while lesson planning.
Here a few activities that use that principle
Yes or no? This is an activity that also uses visuals as the basis. In the first stages of the activity, the teacher describes the picture using very simple structure ‘I can see’ when some of the sentences are true and some are false. Students listen to the sentences and correct the sentences. In case of the pre-primary students, this is likely to be one-word production but with time, they are learning to respond in full sentences. Later on, when the students are familiar with the format of the activity, they are invited to take a leading role in the activity, also producing true or false sentences about the picture for the teacher and their peers to correct.
Kids love the game because they can correct the teacher’s mistake and they are allowed to create their own un-true sentences about the pictures and to try to trick the teacher. I have used it both with primary and pre-primary students. The younger kids, naturally, needed more time to adjust and to start producing full sentences, in the beginning they would only provide the key information, for example the colour or the number of objects but, eventually, they were comfortable enough with producing full sentences. At approximately the same time, they were ready to lead the game, too. The older, primary students could make this transition within a lesson.
This is how we were telling our own version of ‘Pete the Cat. I’m rocking in my school shoes’ using the visuals on Miro
Storytelling for pre-primary is based on picture description. Here, the easily available materials might involve the stories from the coursebooks for pre-primary, retelling together any other story used in class or even any of the materials in the YLE Starters materials. In this case storytelling is scaled down to simple picture description, in the appropriate sequence.
Storytelling for primary can also use the visuals but it can be more challenging with the use of storydice or a storytelling treasure hunt (see here)
The lion and the kitten is a simple boardgame that has been very helpful in encouraging the students to produce the language. It was created and used with the online 1-1 pre-primary students. The game does not use a dice. Instead the students can choose the box where they want to go next and in each round, they have to talk about one of the pictures hidden under the yellow, orange and blue diamonds. In the beginning the sentences are very simple and focus on simple vocabulary (‘It’s mommy‘), later on these can be exchanged for a more detailed description (‘Mommy is happy‘ or ‘Mommy is dancing‘) and even further extended with the use of ‘because’ (‘Mommy is dancing because she is happy’) or in any other way that is within the children’s linguistic ability.
This game gives children a lot of freedom and almost a guaranteed victory. The cards can be changed easily, especially in the online format, and even if not, new sentences can be made every time the game is played. With a group of children, a dice would probably have to be used.
This is the board for our boardgame, also created using the visuals available on Miro.
Are you in the park? is a simple guessing game turned into a role-play. Each student has a city plan (since this was the language that we were working at the time) and three stickers which they glue somewhere ‘in the city’. They keep their picture secret and they try to guess where their partner is at the time.
Student A: Are you at the bank / park / market?
Student B: Yes, I am / No, I am not.
After a while, they can ask for help.
Student A: Please help me.
Student B: I can see…I can hear…I can smell….
Student A: You are…
Initially, the stickers were introduce only to prevent the kids from ‘cheating’ but they absolutely loved having random leftover stickers all over the place. In the first lesson we play, it was pirates, in the second one, it was farm. They laughed a lot about having little pigs and chicks all over their cities. The other incentive was the opportunity to imagine and to describe the places from the angle of what they saw, heard and smelled in different places in the city. The kids had the full control over the game and they were making the decision themselves when to move to the second stage.
