Classroom management

L1 in the YL classroom. Bringing up the child

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It is funny how, sometimes, a particular topic lands on your table all of a sudden. I’d say ‘L1 made a cameo appearance’ but it would not be very accurate. It was defininitely not a cameo appearance. I am thinking more of a scene from Harry Potter, the one in which the Dursley’s living room gets flooded with the envelopes from Hogwarts after uncle Vernon tries to hide the one letter to Harry for a few days…

This was the use of L1 in the EFL classroom, especially when you are teaching kids. There were some conversations with my trainees, during the input sessions and during the private consultations, there were a few sessions at the Warm-Up Conference from Masha Elkina. Then I found the book by Shellagh Deller and Mario Rinvolucri with whom I had a pleasure to learn years ago so I automatically reach out for their books whenever I see them on any shelf. Last but not least, there was my own teaching this summer.

One conclusion: I think I know what the next post is going to be about…

As regards, the book, I need to read it first and to find a few activities that I would love to experiment with in my lessons. Luckily, the new academic year is about to start so there will be at least two groups that will help me with it. The post will come out of it, too.

In the bibliography you will also find a few of the most recent articles available online (yay to the easy access) but I have to admit – I haven’t read them yet, the bibliography today will be my ‘saved for later’ type of a list. I will be dealing with them later but maybe you will get there first.

I have written about the use of L1 on this blog:

This summer’s teaching and why it made me think about L1

This summer, apart from my regular students, I am also working at a summer camp in the city, mostly with primary students and with a few younger ones, who usually come with their older brothers and sisters. We have a programme designed specifically for the summer classes, without any coursebook and with the adjustable level of the literacy content, focusing on developing vocabulary and structures and the speaking skills, with a lot of CLIL and task-based learning activities that can be adapted to the needs of a mixed ability group. If you are curious about the actvities, I have been keeping my summer camp diary here.

The biggest issue that I have had to deal with during this summer camp was not the mix of levels and age groups but the very essence of a summer camp, its short duration or, perhaps, not only the duration on its own and the fact that we teach students for only two weeks, usually, but the fact that during this kind of a camp, some students may join the group on only some days and even only for a part of the day. I would like to stress that we all had fun and we learnt a lot but, all these factors really did get in the way of the effective establishing of the class routines and introducing and implementing the class rules.

This has become especially important because my group was made of amazing individuals, aged 6 – 9, however, these were the individuals who had absolutely no idea how to be a group and how to try to be a part of a group. This is precisely what made me think about the advantages of using my students L1.

A few case studies, to get us started…

Imagine, dear reader, that these are the things that happen while mid-air aka while in class, teaching, engaging, motivating.

Case study #1: Two brothers, Sasha and Sasha, play in pairs and they start debating the rules of the game which quickly turns into a fight. It all looks serious, especially that these are two brothers taking part and, unwillingly, they bring into this conversation everything else that has gone on between them since that very morning or week. One of the brothers wants to play the game according to the rules that we have used so far (good, he has learnt), the other one wants to play according to the new rules that we have just introduced this morning and which his brother has missed. I actually want to laugh out loud because they take it so seriously, our games rules, but it is very serious for them and it is getting even more serious by the minute. There are six other kids in the lesson.

Case study #2: One of the girls, Sasha, suddenly comes across an obstacle in the lesson, for example, one of the other students tries to help her with an answer. Or she cannot find a pencil that she wants. Or she is not the first one that the teacher asks a question. Regardless of how minor this obstacle might actually be in reality, she automatically withdraws, tears up, loses control and, if there is any paper, around, for example a drawing, she crumbles it and throws it into the bin. If she had been an oyster, she’d snap shut. Sasha attends classes only three days a week, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and this kind of a reaction usually happens on her day 1, every single week. Later on, during the week, she calms down, feels a bit more comfortable until the following day 1 when the anxiety levels go up again, as if she had forgotten that she is in a safe environment.

Case study #3: We are playing a competitive game, in three teams. One of the students, Sasha, struggles with accepting the idea of a competitive game. He is over the moon when his team is winning, when they get many points, when they find a nice surprise but, at the same time, every time he is not, he starts shouting out all what he thinks about the game, ‘It’s not fair!’, ‘I never win’, ‘They only win’, ‘I always get the stupid boxes’….A very interesting case of an extremely short-term memory loss because, literally, a second ago, this student was celebrating his achievements in the game.

Case study #4: We are doing a creative task. Sasha has a great idea, she presents it and it really is great and a lot of fun. We all laugh. The following student, Sasha, also decides to include it in his contributions. Sasha girl reacts immediately with: ‘Oh, no, you are copying from me!!!’ Both Sasha are not happy.

Case study #5: Sasha is not happy with the behaviour of the group and she decides to assume to role of the teacher, or, perhaps, to help the teacher in the way she feels is appropriate and she makes a very decisive and authoritative comment, a very adult comment if you think about. She says: ‘You are very loud. Stop it. I am beginning to get a headache’. The group, naturally, does not approve and it is all obvious and written all over their faces – they are on the verge of deciding not to like Sasha at all. The funny thing is that this is just the group’s reaction to this particular song and it is within the boundaries and rules established in the summer camp group. Sasha, however, doesn’t know it because she joins the group only for an hour, in the middle of the day and, of course, she brings with her the rules that she learnt in her regular English classes at school. She is also a bit older than the group so perhaps that is why she feels she is obliged to take on the role of the ‘expert’ and to show the way.

(Here you can find a whole huge post that I am really proud of, about the competitive and non-competitive games in the YL classroom.)

The teacher sighs and makes a decision

All of the case studies described above come from the last few weeks of teaching, all of the Sashas are real people and I will have to go over the text again in a moment in order to make sure that the kids’ real names have not been typed up by mistake. Real students, real situations, real problems…

In all of these, there have been only one question that I had to ask myself, namely: What am I dealing with here and how can I sort it out in the most effective of ways? And, since you have been reading this post for a few minutes now, you can probably guess the answer already.

Having taken everything into consideration, the kids as a group, the kids as individuals, the details of the particular situation, I decided to deal with all of these in the students’ L1. Here is why:

  • All of these situations involved some kind of distress for my students and not dealing with them at all would be impossible as they were all very likely to snowball and to have more implications for the individual students and for the atmosphere in the group. Some action was necessary.
  • Because of the age and the level of the students, relying on the kids’ mother tongue gave me an opportunity to ensure that the kids will really hear me and, with using L1, I could have a real conversation. Asking questions, eliciting, asking the kids to reflect with pre-A and A1 students is only possible in their L1. Taking the kids’ real development into account and thinking of all of these situations as an opportunity to develop as a human, to develop the kids social skills and to help them notice the other children in the group, there is no doubt that L1 had to be used. As an educator, I had no doubt about that.
  • As a teacher of English, I did feel a tiny (tiny) bit guilty about not trying to do it in our target language but, having had enough time and plenty of those situations as I have been teaching at the camp over the entire summer this year, I know I made a good decision. The context is different in our permanent, regular classes. First of all, we develop the language in a more organised way and it is easier to smuggle the appropriate langauge to talk about emotions or rules there. Second of all, there is more time and the framework is more regular and structured. You start the year slowly, adding elements, games, interaction patterns as you go along and when the kids are ready for them. If the group returns after the summer, even if there are new students joining in, the skeleton of the rules, routines, rewards and patterns is already there, in place, and it really needs only some dusting, perhaps. Summer camp is an academic year in a nutshell, or pehaps, even better, it is like a time-lapse video of the academic year – all the stages and processes are the same only at a much faster pace. Of course, there are consequences of that.
  • As for the solutions and the situations described above in my five case studies, they were dealt with in a variety of ways. Sometimes, it meant putting the lesson on hold and having a short conversation with the whole group. Sometimes, it was limited to only comforting the student, offering help and giving her a moment to calm down. Sometimes it meant a quick chat with the two main participants, in private, without drawing the attention of all the other students. Sometimes, it meant a bi-lingual input, like in the case study #4: explaining that the student copied the approach and the idea only because it is a great idea in L1 and then, reinforcing it, or rather, claiming the key phrase (‘Wow, it is a very good idea!’), hoping that we will be able to add it to our set of the functional language in the classroom. Apart from that, I was working a lot on buidling the community, in the context that we were in, for example working in teams, working in pairs, working as one big team, letting the kids make decisions about the lesson and letting them lead the games. I would like to hope that all of these helped the kids develop their social skills, too.

Coda

There are no real take-outs here. This is only a description of an experience from this summer that has made me reflect on the ways of using and keeping the kids’ L1 in the classroom. And, certainly, it is not the last post in that category…

Bibliography

Sheelagh Deller and Mario Rinvolucri (2002), Using the Mother Tongue. Making the most of the learner’s langauge, Delta Publishing

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

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

Using L1 in the classroom, TEFL Online

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

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

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

Happy teaching!

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

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Ingredients

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

Procedures

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

Why we like it?

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

Happy teaching!

A balancing act. Non-competitive EFL games for kids

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It happened way too many times…

Here is a situation that I witnessed many times during an observed lesson with young learners: a teacher and a group of kids start playing a game, for example riddles. The teacher models, then the kids take over. One student sits in front of everyone, chooses a card for the other students to guess or to identify. Kids start shouting out words, one of them gets it and the teacher takes the flashcard and hands it over to the student who shouted the correct word. The game goes on and it takes about three rounds more for one of the students to get offended / upset / angry / sad about not winning. More often or not, someone starts crying. Oups.

It is not only about losing, although, to be honest, this is a serious problem, too. Here, however, the ‘failure‘ of some kids is clearly visualised with a flashcard. Frequently, it is also very unfair because it is the faster and louder kids that get the point and these are not necessarily the kids who really know the answer. Also, there is another dilemma in a situation when two students shout out the correct answer at exactly the same point. Will the teacher tear the card into halves? No, of course not. Sigh.

That issue, frequent as it was, was always addressed during the feedback session and I am pretty sure every session on games for VYL and YL included the commandment compressed down to ‘Don’t use flashcards as reward points’. This was the bread and butter of a trainer / VYL ados.

My real shock to the system was an invitation to volunteer at Sheredar, our rehabilitation camp for children who went through serious diseases a few years back. I had a chance to go there a few times and teaching kids was an amazing experience. However, before I went, our contact and coordinator, Ksenia, said: ‘They will be one big mixed ability group but you can choose any topic you want. Actually, do whatever, just don’t play any competitive games. These kids have fought enough’. It took me about a minute to understand that I have no games to play. All my favourite activities, those that I frequently used in my lessons, with kids, juniors and teens, all of those favourite ones were competitive. ALL OF THEM.

Should kids even be playing competitive games?

I have been looking for sources on competition in the EFL classroom and I have found…nothing. I started to look around for any texts on kids and competition and it turns out that getting engaged in competitive activities such as sports, for example, can be very beneficial for children.

  • competitive activities can be motivating and encourage kids to improve their skills
  • playing and losing and winning helps children to learn how to deal with competition and with the fear of losing
  • they are also an opportunity to learn how to deal with pressure and how to win and how to lose
  • they are good for building self-confidence
  • they teach kids about the existence of the rules that need to be obeyed
  • they can help form friendships and relationships, with peers and adults
  • and, also, even if they are sports, they can lead to improving academic performance in children

Although, of course, they can also have some drawbacks, such as too much pressure, negative feelings in children and for their self-esteem.

On the whole, competition is a good thing, although it is not a given that all the children take to it naturally. Some of them might struggle, which is natural, bearing in mind that not all the adults have learnt to deal with it successfully, and they should be given help and support.

EFL and competition

As regards our EFL classes, especially those with the younger learners, primary and pre-primary, it would be just reasonable not to abandon all the competitive games althogether but to keep an eye on the balance and on avoiding a situation when all the games and activities that comprise a lesson have promote competition. Apart from competition, there are the other beautiful C-words such as: cooperation, colaboration, cognitive skills development that can and should be the foundations for our classroom life.

Not to mention that everything that we do in our lessons, namely learning a language, is against the very idea of competition. All the kids learn for themselves and although they have the same linguistic aims, their overall results or results in certain areas of language learning do not depend on the results of the other participants. What is more, their progress is measured against their previous results and achievement, although, admittedly, the situation is slightly different when it comes to learning a langauge in the context of a state school where kids’ progress is graded at every step of the way.

Things to consider

The most important thing to remember seems to be the fact that we, as teachers, should not take things for granted and assume that all the kids in our group like competition and competitive activities and that all of them are equally prepared to win and lose with grace.

The other factor to take into consideration is the age of the students. The younger the students, the less likely it is that they have already had a chance to participate in those kind of activities and acquire these skills and that they have enough life experience to be mature about it. It is a combination of their age, cognitive and social development as well as life circumstances such as having a chance to attend kindergarten, playing at home with parents and relatives, having older siblings and so on.

Equally important is the bond between the students. A group of children starting to learn together in September is a completely from the same group in January or even in October, especially in the context of after school groups or afternoon language schools where children might land in a group of complete strangers with whom the only thing they have in common is the age and the level of English, not the family ties, the address or the school. The more they get to know each other, the more they bond, the easier it will be for the teacher to set up activities, including competitive games, and for the kids to handle ‘failure‘. After all, it is easier to lose and get over it when you play with friends.

What it comes down to in real life, with real children, is keeping an eye on the kids, checking how they react to different stimuli and then introducing some competitive games, carefully, step by step. However, with my youngest students, this non-competitive period may span over the entire length of the pre-school EFL. With the most recent group, we started to play only half-way through our third year together and even then it was the whole group vs the teacher (who always lost).

Every little helps

Here are some of the tricks and techniques that a teacher can use in the classroom while introducing competitive games or taming of the competitive games we often include in our lessons (tired and tested):

  • Playing the familiar games such as riddles or pelmanism in a less competitive way. First of all, we do not award points for the boardrush OR we award points to both teams for competing the task, not only to the team who is faster (especially that with boardrush at least it is sometimes very tricky to establish who really was the first one to touch the board). Points here can be pluses or hearts on the board or flashcards given out to the winner in a particular round. Instead, we finish the round, the praise everyone and we simply move on. The game itself (the fun of participating, the language produced or used) is the reward itself.
  • We do not determine the order of participation based on the successful participation, for example in riddles, when the student who guesses the word is the next one to play. Instead, all students take turns, one by one to make a riddle for the whole class, regardless of how good they are at guessing.
  • Playing ‘Simon Says’ without excluding the losers by asking them to sit down after they make a mistake, especially that a growing number of non-participating students is very bad for the overall classroom and behaviour management. Or, in the same way, playing the Treasure Hunt without establishing who the winner is. We all look for clues around the classroom or the school, we all participate for ten minutes and in the end all check our answers, without counting the points or the number of the elements or stages completed.
  • With pelmanism, instead of playing 1-1, with kids uncovering two cards at a time, the whole group can do it in pairs, with two kids always participating, ideally in different combinations. As soon as a pair is found, the teacher and the kids cheer for everyone, and the cards are put aside or given back to the teacher.
  • Play the game in the format of the teacher vs the whole group, to create the support for the individual child. If they win or if they lose, they will do it together, with all their friends, nobody will be singled out. Ideally, in such a situation, the teacher loses and has a chance to model the mature behaviour and how ‘a failure’ can be handled, but, of course, bending the rules in order to ensure that might not always be easy to do. If you are looking for ideas, I would recommend pelmanism. It is very easy to get distracted and to forget (or ‘to forget’) where the other card from the pair is located.
  • Any game can be played in teams, a team vs a team, instead of individuals competing with each other. This way, again, the support, the safety net or the safety blanket is created. Enjoying the victory or handing the loss is easier with your team. Even if there is one child who does not handle ‘the failure’ very well, there will be other children in this situation, too. They will serve as role models.
  • Having the teacher participate, as one of the teams, can also help soften the blow of the defeat. Again, the teacher will be the one to model the langauge use, the game rules application and the player’s behaviour, too.
  • If possible, talk to the parents whose children struggle with controlling their emotions while losing the game. If nothing else, it would be great to find out whether there have been any factors that could have played a part, whether the child reacts this way in other situations and to simply inform them what happened in class. Perhaps parents will be willing to discuss this topic at home, to reinforce what the teacher does at school and, perhaps, to also play games at home, to help the child tame that beast.
  • In one of the posts (see bibliography), I found another great tip. What is necessary is a quick game that can be played a few times, in a quick succession, in the same lesson. Some of these will be won, some will be lost, but the quick pace and the repetition will make either of the results, the victory or the defeat, not so relevant anymore and easier to deal with and to even forget.
  • Another approach that I have been using in some of my summer camp groups was the Points Poster that we used throughout the entire camp. It was very simple, only an A3 piece of paper, with the team’s name, displayed on the wall. Every time we played a competitive game, there were points, for example two or three stickers for the winners, a star for everyone else. All the kids took very well to it because winning the stickers was great but the joy lasted a brief moment only and very quickly the stickers won today would quickly get lost among all the other stickers won on all the other days. The defeat, on the other hand, was perhaps not the most pleasant thing in the world but it didn’t matter much because the students knew that they would be another game on the same or on the following day. What is more, because I was using some leftover stickers, of all kinds, sometimes it was more fun to choose one huge sticker for your team rather then three little ones…
  • Finishing each game with the teacher and the kids thanking each other for the game, with a simple handshake and ‘Good game‘, just like all the football or volleyball players do at the end of the match.
  • Any activity that can work towards bonding and building a community is also welcome
  • If there is the students who struggle with dealing with their own emotions while playing games, I have so far tried two things. One of them was pairing this student up with myself, in 1-1 games, in order to be better able to model, to monitor and to help the child control their emotions during the game. I have also experimented with pairing up with this child in the games that we played in teams because, again, losing (or winning) in one team with the teacher was easier to deal with.

Non-competitive EFL games

First, an anecdote. The heading of this paragraph is what I put into my google. Would you like to guess what the amazing Uncle Google came up with? Nothing.

‘Fun games’ – yes, ‘no prep games’ – yes, ‘exciting games’ – yes, sure. There was one post from the British Council (see bibliography) but not many of them are appropriate for kids and not many are actual games. And one article about an activity that still has winners and losers…Nada, nada, nada.

Here are some suggestions from the non-competitive games that I have played

  • Musical flashcards: a simple movement game, an adaptation of the musical chairs game, only without any kids dropping out. The teacher puts out all the relevant flashcards on the floor, kids move around with some music playing. When it stops, every child picks up a card and makes a sentence for example: I like bananas (topic: food), I haven’t got a cat (topic: food), I am wearing a blue t-shirt (topic: clothes) etc. Afterwards, the flashcards go back onto the floor, the teacher puts the music on for another round of the game.
  • All the logical games such as Find the difference (for example those that we have in the YLE Movers and Flyers) or Odd one out (for example YLE Movers) that can be easily adapted to any topic. A similar activity will be also based on the silly picture scenes that I described in an earlier post here.
  • I Spy: a variation of the game with a set of visuals such as a poster or an illustration from the coursebook. Kids work together as a group (in the early stages) or in pairs, they describe something in the picture, with the relevant sentences, depending on the age and level (I spy with my little eye something. It is big, it is green. It is next to the cat. etc). The student or the students who listen find the relevant object. This game is not competitive because there are no winners / losers and the game goes on until the child / children guess. As the game proceeds, the kids can offer more information and support to help their partner, for example the first letter / sound, the gestures etc.
  • Riddles: the same principle and procedure as above but it can be played with flashcards or a set of word cards or a set of words prepared by the kids.
  • Back to the board: it is a very popular game that can easily be played in a non-competitive way and this way it can go help build and develop a sense of community and give the whole group a chance to work together. One of the students sits on a chair in the centre, facing the group. The teacher writes a word or a simple sentence on the board and signals how many words it includes. The group work together to help the one student guess and recreate the word on the board. With the lower level kids, flashcards can be used instead of words although using simple sentences works wonders for the students to learn and to work better with the grammar, the sentence structure and, progressively, with the meta language.
  • Monster game aka Hangman aka Let’s save the little human: I love playing Monster Game with the lower levels because it helps the students work with literacy, spelling and blending and we always play it as a whole group with all the students contributing and working together to guess the letters and the words and to help the little human who is slowly losing parts of the ladder, the boat or the hotair balloon. To make the game less cruel, the element of getting points can be added (i.e. when the kids guess a part of the word or when they guess the most common letter or when they get all the vowels etc) and with my summer camp group the game finished with the kids drawing some food for the hungry monster because they developed empathy for someone hungry, even though it was a monster.
  • Telephone: this game is a variation of something known as ‘Whispers’, with the whole group sitting together and passing a word or a simple phrase, from the end to the beginning of the chain. This is not a very generative game or a very communicative one but it helps the kids work together towards one goal and it is easy enough even for the youngest kids.
  • Stations in the classroom: this is not really an activity but a format of completing tasks with kids. The teacher sets up a few stations in the classrom, for example in the four corners of the room. Kids move from one station to the other and complete the task such as unscrambling words, completing a simple handout, matching words and pictures, playing a round of pelmanims and many more. Kids complete a few tasks during the lesson and their job is done when they complete a full circle but they do not compete with everyone else in the group. It is up to the teacher to decide when then task is done and they can move on and in this way, even the ‘weaker’ students can play and participate without any pressure from the group.
  • Community building games: on of the 30 Creative Team Building Activities. I haven’t tried these yet but these definitely caught my eye: Cross the Line (22), Paper Chain Race (30), Shrinking Classroom (18), Building a tower (6 and 10). Or 22 Fun Team Building Games and Activities for Kids. Here I really liked: Forehead Dots (4), Some of them have the ‘choose the best / fastest team’ element which works to some extent as it helps the kids to bond within their team but I would still skip this element altogether.
  • Last but not least, among the things that has been on my wishlist of the things to try out in the classroom is the parachute and all the parachute games. Some ideas can be found here.

Coda

But, perhaps, the situation is a little bit better than it seems. While working on this post, I asked my audience on the social media about their opinion and I was very happy to find that those who responded use a mix of competitive and non-competitive games. At the same time, the teachers admitted that they have to deal with the competition-related stress in the EFL classroom, although not all the time and ‘some games, some days, some kids’ was the most popular answer.

What about you, dear reader? Do you play any non-competitive games with your YL students?

Happy teaching!

Bibliography

Teaching children to lose gracefully so they can lose with dignity as adults (oregonstate.edu)

Pros and Cons of Competition Among Kids and Teens (verywellfamily.com)

The pros and cons of competition | BabyCenter

How To Teach Children To Cope With Losing | Casa de Corazón (casaearlylearning.com)

6 Tips for Teaching Children How to Lose — Better Kids

australiansportscamps.com.au/blog/benefits-children-playing-competitive-sports/#:~:text=Competition Can Improve your Child%27s,high school and tertiary studies.

Six collaborative games for competitive English language classrooms | British Council

ETF 57/3 pg14-23 (ed.gov)

Problems with Games in ESL/EFL Classrooms (and Solutions) – BINGOBONGO (bingobongokids.com)

Why you DON’T want to mix age groups and levels. Adventures of a teacher

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Sigh.

This was my first reaction to the context I had a chance to teach in last week. To be honest, I am still sighing because an experience like that does not wear off too easily. Yes, it was not a positive experience.

Now, even being just dead inside and very very angry (not a contradiction) at the time it was taking place, I was still a devoted teacher and, even more importantly from the point of view of this post, I was a trainer, reflecting and assessing. So here we are. For you, what not to do and why.

What happened

Last week I had a chance to teach an extremely mixed ability group. I am an experienced teacher and an experienced trainer and, over the years, I have had an opportunity to work in a variety of contexts with different students and mixed ability groups in all shapes and forms and types of a mixture. Last Wednesday I reached a new level.

There were nine kids in the classroom. Three of them – real beginners who should be learning colours and their first hellos. Seven of them – pre-literate students who would require an alternative set of materials. Two kids – of a higher than ‘just pre-A1’ who should be in a more advanced group. One child, aged 5 (according to the information from the admin) and aged 4 (according to what he told me) – a pre-schooler who should not be spending in the classroom more than 30 minutes. Three kids, aged 10 – who should be in a completely different group where they are given a task on a higher cognitive level of challenge than just a picture to colour. And yet, there we were, myself and all nine kids (all of them called Sasha, traditionally), in the same classroom, for 4 academic hours of a lesson.

We all survived. Here are some notes from this memorable day.

The youngest Sasha…

  • The youngest Sasha was completely out of place. He did not understand what we were doing and the only reason why he even stayed in the classroom was that his older sister was present and involved. He was trying to join in, though, and the result of it was a little boy babbling in some kind of a newspeak, that was neither pidgin, nor Sasha’s L1 and not any langauge known to mankind. Albeit, to be honest, it to someone who did not know English, it might have sounded like English, from afar. My heart was literally aching at his efforts.
  • The youngest Sasha had no idea of the way you interact in the classroom. On countless of occasions, he would get up, come to the board, pick up markers to draw on the board (since the classroom was not baby-proof, I did not expect a pre-schooler), to try to nick a few post-it notes. He did not understand why he did not get a set of mini-cards (and some kids did, the leaders of all the small teams) and when he got a small heart for the other activity, he did not want to give it back. Because why would he? At one point, I felt like being on the playground and ‘fighting’ over toys.
  • It was beyond the little Sasha’s understanding why we would even dictate the colours for each other to use in a colouring dictation. ‘But I want to colour it blue and green!’, he said, already on the verge of tears and, later on, naturally, he was thoroughly confused that his picture was different from the teacher’s, his sister’s, all the other kids’ and he kept asking if he did a good job and if he completed the task well.

The Sashas in the middle…

  • Generally, these Sashas were under control. After all, they are the kids who have spent the longest period of time in the classroom and they are the kids who have had a chance to experience and to benefit from the routine of the previous two weeks. High five to the teacher who made an effort to build this routine. It was worth it. These are also the children who constitue the biggest group and the activities were generally designed for them and graded to their linguistic, cognitive and social skills. They did participate, they did produce, they did work well in pairs and, unknowingly, they were the kids that the teacher was looking at and sighing with relief. ‘Not all is lost’, thought the teacher. ‘I have not run in vain’, thought the teacher, quoting her favourite quote from the Bible, albeit a very un-religious one.
  • But, still, the atmosphere of the lesson, chaotic and messy, unravelling and tense (my bad, I know that) also took its toll even on them. My amazing twins were on the edge and, at one point, a heated debate broke out because one of them wanted to play a simple gussing game (as intented and as they were instructed to) whereas the other wanted some hints and suggestions (because that is how we played in the previous weeks). ‘Why aren’t you miming? Why aren’t you telling me if it is big or small and if you like it?’, he was asking. They ended up getting upset with each other and breaking up for a minute. The other pair, Sasha girls were sleepy and tired and on the verge of tears and even though they did play, they also spent a moment discussing whether they should just divide the cards into two piles or take them from the same pile and how much time is necessary to make a decision which word you want to use to talk about (Answer: not too much, the sooner, the better).
  • The day is quite long and the kids like to ask how much time is left. We have established a routine that when they want to know, they should ask (‘What time is it?’) and the teacher checks the watch and writes how many minutes are left until the nearest break. I don’t quite like it but they are quite young, they cannot tell the time using the clock and, still, they need something to understand and to manage the lesson time. We have drilled the question, it is always on the board and, although it is slightly annoying to hear the same question over and over again, it gives me an idea of how involved the group are. The more frequent the questions, the more ‘trouble’ we are in. Unsurprisingly, in that particular lesson, this question was popping up again and again and again.

The oldest Sashas…

  • The oldest Sashas finished the task way too quickly for teacher’s liking and we all had to wrap up a bit faster, although, indeed, they got convinced into taking part in some kind of an extension and it did buy the rest of us some time.
  • The oldest Sashas, because there were more than one, spent the lesson being on the brink of getting involved in some alternative, mostly illicit activities. In the end, they did not, with an experienced teacher present, but, oh Lord, there was so much potential for it. If there had been only one older Sasha, they would have been more easily contained. With two or three, at times, they could bounce their exciting ideas off each other, fueling the behaviour that were not quite welcome.
  • It was almost a miracle that the older Sashas enjoy colouring and that they got midly interested in completing the task. They were most engaged than I would have expected from children of their age. I can safely say that, yes, I did get away with it.
  • In an ideal world, these Sashas would be getting a much closer monitoring from the teacher to ensure that they are using the same material but producing a lot more langauge than the average student. Unfortunately, with the kind of mix that I actually had to deal with, it was not possible. Apart from the storybird activity that involved a 1-1 interaction with the teacher, closely supervised. Overall, the teacher was not happy at all.
  • I have also noticed that one of my older Sashas has got a very strong inclination for bullying. Nothing happened but I do not like the vibe and the way he behaves around the younger children (aka all the other children in the group). He is naturally a leader without any skill to be one and he has absolutely no one to look up to and to be inspired by. He would benefit more from being in a group of older children in order to develop his social skills and to learn from the other kids.

If I could think of a metaphor for that day…

A sweater that is fraying uncontrollably, at three different ends.

Washing the windows in a flat ont the top floor, in a blocks of flats. Standing on the chair and reaching out to this little piece in the corner, thinking that this may all end up in a very, very bad place.

A flooded kitchen, with you trying to make decisions quickly and to save something, to wipe the floor and not to let the flood spread to the neighbours below you.

A three-course dinner for ten, prepared by one relatively skilled chef, on one hob, with a pot and a pan.

A herd of cows that your grandma asked you to bring back from the pasture, walking them on the main village road, with all the tractors and all the combine harvester coming back from the fields and using the same road AND all the neighbours and villagers standing by the fences of their houses, watching the god-damn show because a city teenager trying to manage a task she had no preparation or knowledge of. Speaking from experience, in case you are wondering.

Any of the experiences that you spend hating every second of and yet you go on and you survive. Exhausted. And then you just sigh and vent in a post on your blog.

Coda

There is not much to say here apart from this one thing: all these kids should not be learning English together. There are too many factors that come into the picture that make it an almost impossible task for the teacher. It is true that English language groups are rarely homogenous and it is especially true in case of young learners groups and, especially especially, in case of primary school students. Teachers are simply obliged to deal with that issue on daily basis. Managing a group of kids who are on the same level of English but who are of different ages – it is possible. Managing a group of kids who are of the same age but have different levels of English – it is manageable. However, this kind of a mix, different age groups, different levels of English, different levels of literacy skills, cognitive skills and social skills development with such a number of kids is simply not a good idea. If you have a choice, please, DO NOT DO IT.

Happy teaching!

The first primary lesson survival kit

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Context: it is a new place, a new group of kids. In lieu of an induction, one line only and it goes: ‘You will be in room 5, miss Anka. Don’t forget to fill in the electronic register after the lesson.’

Lesson aims

It is all very simple: this particular lesson happens to give the kids a chance to meet the teacher and to give the teacher an opportunity to see the kids in their natural habitat. Since there will be quite a few new things for the children to deal with such as the class, the teacher, the first lesson in a foreign language, the coursebook, the classroom, the songs, games and the content, it might be best to keep the expectations on a reasonable level. It is a lot more important to focus on the child, on the student and on the routine, rather than on some ambitious linguistic aims. After all, there is going to be a whole year for the latter.

Before the lesson

In a perfect world, it would be possible for the teacher to see the classroom before the lesson, to take stock of the environment and all it can offer and to plan building the routine around the actual classroom. Is there any area without too many pieces of furniture which can be used for the movement games or for the start or the ending of the lesson? Is it possible to move the furniture to create a circle or are the desks to heavy for that and you will have to sit in rows as they do in their regular classes?

In a perfect world, it would also be possible to get the register of all the kids to figure out how many we are to expect and, last but not least, to talk to their class teacher to get to know them a bit before the lesson or, in a super-perfect-ideal-over-the-rainbow world to find out what they did in the previous academic year (if we are talking about year II and year III kids).

Alas. More often than not this is not going to be possible so I will base this lesson on the worst-case scenario: there is no chance to see the classroom, there is nobody who knows anything about the kids or the English they might or might not have had.

This is the worst-case scenario but it is not the end of the world, surely.

The overall structure of all these lessons will be the same but I will include some ideas for the year 1 and year 2/3 kids which might have had some English.

Entering the room

If the lesson takes place in a new classroom which you are entering together, line the kids up in front of the room. If they are entering with you or if they are already in the room, come in, say hello and do the roll call. It will help you remember their names and associate them with the place where they are sitting. It might be a good idea to write them all up on the board, in the order in which the kids are sitting. However, if there are more than eight or ten, this will take forever and will be counterproductive.

The official start of the lesson

It is great if this part of the lesson is marked in a special way.

You can:

  • ask the kids to close their eyes (please demo), count from 10 to 1 (or from 5 to 1) and say ‘Open your eyes’ and say and wave Hello to everyone.
  • ask the kids to stand up and do a bit of gymnastics (stand up, shake your arms, clap your hands, march (on the spot), dance, touch your hand, tummy, back, shake your friends’ hand, say hello), with the teacher demonstrating and participating, too.
  • clap once and ask the kids to clap once, clap twice and ask the kids to clap twice, clap three times and ask the kids to clap three time, say: Hello, kids say: Hello.
  • Whisper: Hello, have the kids repeat, then have them repeat: Hello Anka. Repeat a few times and then officially reply: hello everyone. Repeat with all the kids in the room:
  • Hello Piotrek (point at Piotrek) Hello everyone (says Piotrek)

Even if you don’t know or can’t remember the kids’ names, the students will help you. These types of activities are great because they mark the start of the real lesson and of communicating in English, they involve everyone in an easy way (clapping, touching, saying Hello) and there are a bit out of the ordinary hence fun.

Hello song

I would say it is a definite must, even in the very first lesson. First and foremost, it is something that the whole class can participate in, even if they don’t speak too much English because there will be gestures, rhythm and music involved. Second of all, it is great to start building the routine from the very first lesson and a routine or the lesson framework for primary school children must involve a song.

If possible, take your students to a safe corner (at the back or in the front of the room), go there yourself and call your students, one by one, to join you. Use their names. As soon as they get there, use one of the punctuation marks to signal the start of a new activity. It can be clapping, counting from 10 to 1 or just asking the kids (‘Are you ready?’ ‘Yes, we are’). This will help the kids navigate around the lesson and to get ready and to focus for whatever is to come next and it is especially useful in the beginng of the course. As the course progresses, it can be used less and less frequently because the kids develop the habit of tuning in.

Show the gestures for the song and go through a few dry runs, with you modelling and the kids repeating, in the correct order and in a random order. One of my greatest hits is Hello Song from Super Simple Songs. It is fast and cheerful and it includes 6 different, easy to mime emotions (if you need ideas for the gestures, have a look at the song video). There is an easier song, also by Super Simple Songs, Hello Hello, Can you clap your hands? This one includes some few verbs that will get the kids moving (clap, stomp, turn around).

After the presentation and the mini-rehersal, we listen to the song and try to take part as much as possible. It doesn’t matter if all your kids are not one amazingly coordinated choir. After all, it is the first time they hear the song. Things will get better in lesson 2, 3 and 15.

Both songs are accompanied by videos, of course, but I tend to skip those in the first few lessons, focusing instead on audio only, not to overload the kids as there are too many things in the first lesson anyway. Afterwards, we clap to thank each other and we sit down. Again, the teacher calls our students, one by one (or in twos in really big groups) to invite them to sit. This might take some time if the group is really big but it is the time well-invested (building the routine!) and it helps to avoid the chaos and the noise. As soon as the kids get back to their seats, use your punctuation mark again.

If there is no space that can be used as the dancefloor, these can be done while sitting or standing by the table, although then I would use the first song, the emotions can be easily demonstrated with everyone sitting at their tables.

New material: Class I

These kids will be brand new, straight out of the box, with no English whatsoever, although, of course, you might get a few that attended some classes in pre-school. For that reason, revision as the next stage of the lesson will not really work as there is nothing to revise.

In such a case there are a few options to go for

  1. start introducing the colours because, more likely than not, this is going to be the first topic / unit in the coursebook. Another advantage is that even without any specific realia the kids will have plenty of colours on them and there will be plenty in the classroom and these can be used in a variety of games. There is no need to prepare any special flashcards either and a set of markers, coloured pencils, blocks or even pieces of coloured paper can be used instead.
  2. rather than colours, go for pets of jungle animals for the first lesson. It will be necessary to prepare the cards here (or any kind of visuals) but the obvious advantage is the fact that animals are likeable, fun and at least some of the names will be familiar to kids and/or recognisable (cat, giraffe, zebra, lion) and the animals create lots of opportunities for a variety of resources: animals produce sounds (and can be used in a guessing game), animals move in a certain way (and can be mimed), animals have specific shapes and colours (and can be recognized in game ‘through the keyhole’).
  3. Another good topic for the first lesson is school objects. The objects themselves are not as cute and fun as the jungle animals but these are definitely the things that we are going to be using in every lesson and that makes them worth investing in. Not to mention that they are already in the classroom and that each student will have a set and they can be used in a simple call out activity ‘show me your pencil’ etc. They can be also used for miming (with a bit of imagination) and for some guessing games, too. Most of them are small enough to be put in a Magic Bag and used for guessing. And through the keyhole can be used, too, with realia or with flashcards.

Regardless of which topic is chosen, one of more of the following activities can be used:

  • Introduction and drilling using a variety of voices (saying it with emotions, different volumes of pitch, pace etc)
  • Creating simple chants by organizing the cards on the floor / board and saying them in a rhythmical way ie

‘Yellow, yellow, blue. Yellow, yellow, blue. Red and green, red and green. Yellow, yellow, blue.’

‘Pencil, book and ruler. Pencil, book and ruler. School, pen, schoolbag, pen. Pencil, book and ruler.’

  • The cards can be put up around the room and with the teacher (or the kids) calling out single words, the group have to listen and to point at the tiger, zebra, lion and monkey.
  • Riddles: the simplest version of it is the teacher miming the words for the kids to guess or playing the audio for the kids to guess or drawing a part of the picture on the board for the kids to guess.
  • What’s my secret word? Kids, chorally in the first lesson, guess which word the teacher is holding. After a few rounds the kids can take over.
  • In the same way, a simple memory game can be played, too, either with the realia (ie markers or books of different colours) or with the flashcards displayed on the board or on the floor. Kids close their eyes, the teacher removes or covers one of the items, kids open their eyes and guess. It might happen that at least some of them will be answering in their L1 at this point and it is ok. Please praise them and provide the word in the target language.
  • Bearing in mind that this will be the kids’ first language lesson ever, five new words seems like a very good number for the first lesson.

New material: Class II and III

Essentially, all the activities mentioned above can be simply used with the older kids, too. Any of the topics will be a revision for kids and if the youngest of them can deal with that, so can the older ones. It might also be an interesting activity for the teacher to evaluate the abilities and skills of the kids against each other as, most likely, the year III kids will be able to participate more freely and in a bigger number of games mentioned above and with a bigger number of key words.

If the teacher is more adventurous it would be a good idea to involve the kids in an activity that will help them show off as regards the vocabulary (or structures) they have learnt so far and those that they remember. This can be done in the form of the alphabet game.

There are practically no resources necessary, apart from the alphabet, as a poster and small cards any picture scene, either a paper poster or one of the beautiful illustrations in the YLE Starters Picture Wordlist which can be displayed on the electronic whiteboard or printed and displayed on the noticeboard.

The teacher demonstrates by choosing one of the letters of the alphabet and calls out all the words in the picture begining with that letter. The kids join in, too.

The game can be played in teams, with the class divided into smaller groups, with each team working on one of the letters. It would be good to avoid scoring the kids as some of the letters are more friendly or generative and it would simply be unfair. It is also not necessary to introduce a lot of competition in the very first lesson. The teams can be awarded a point for completing the task, regardless of how many words they produce or remember. It might be also a good idea to remove all the unfriendly and rare letters from the set (ie x, v, w, y).

One more advantage of this game, especially for the first lesson, is that it can be played for as many rounds as there is time for. It can be stopped at any time.

Music and movement

Depending on the classroom, this stage of the lesson can be done in the back of the room or at the desks. Again, the kids are called out, and they join the teacher, one by one. Again, the punctuation mark is used to mark the start of a new stage.

It can take a form of a gym break (see above) or it can be another song. One of my favourites for the first lessons is ‘Head and shoulders’ or ‘Open Shut Them’, both for the same reason: they involve lots and lots of movement and are easy to mime and all the kids can be involved in taking part. As in the case of the first song, gestures go first, then the music and the song itself, also without any video.

Table time

Ideally, this element would be included in the lesson, too. In my primary groups I like to give them a chance to produce something, with class I or II to check whether they can write their names and in case of class I – how well they hold the pencil.

At the same time, it has to be something simple and perhaps the simple handprints aka autumn leaves might be a good choice here. This kind of an activity will only involve minimal resources (paper, pencils, crayons or coloured pencils), it does not take a long time and it can be made more or less complex ie only the handprint, the stem and the veins or the leaf, the veins and the colouring, the name written by the teacher, for class I students or the kids decorating their leaves in the way they choose and writing their own name. The leaves in class I can simply be displayed on the noticeboard at the end of the lesson, the older kids from class II and III can also be encouraged to describe their leaves and to compare (ie Sasha: My leaf is green) with the other kids raising hands if theirs are, too. The older kids’ leaves end up on the noticeboard (or the door or the wall), too.

There is one great activity perfect for this age and level that we used to on every first day of the summer camp: a folder, homemade and highly personalised. In class, the kids would get an A3 piece of paper and they would decorate it following teacher’s instructions (first write your name in big letters, draw your favourite fruit, draw your favourite drink, draw your favourite sport etc). After the lesson, the teacher would add another piece of A3 and staple each of these into an envelope. We used to keep those in class, on the shelf or on the window-sill and everything we produced during the sessions would be nicely collected in these folders at the end of each day. This activity takes a bit more time and might not be appropriate for all the context but it can also be used in its basic form: a personalised name poster.

At the end of the stage, the kids help up with cleaning up by putting away their pencils, crayons and handing the posters to the teacher. The teacher uses the punctuation mark again.

Goodbye

Since the kids will be still at their tables, it might be best to say goodbye just there. The teacher says ‘Thank you everyone’ and to all the kids individually. If the group is very big, it might be a good idea to do it super fast and in twos (Thank you, Masha and Sasha) but it is a nice touch and going over all the kids’ names, once more, really helps to remember them better)

I personally like to include a goodbye song also with primary, at least in the beginning of a new course to help create a framework for the lesson, for example Bye, bye, goodbye or See you later, alligator but later on, with the limited lesson time, we replace it the final game.

As regards homework, it might be a good idea to skip it during the first lesson. This element of the everyday routine can also be added later.

Instead of a coda

  • The list of the activities and the format of the lesson will depend on its length. If the lesson lasts 60 minutes, the teacher can use two, three or even four flashcards games and extend the leaf making. If the lesson is only 40 minutes’ long, it is better to focus on fewer activities, without rushing the kids. It might be a good idea to skip ‘the paper’ altogether, with no coursebook but also with no handouts or crafts, focusing on building the routine and interacting with kids in the target language. In that case, the leaf or the poster activity would be done in the lesson 2 of the course.
  • The same applies to stories, videos or online games. They are great resources and can be introduced later on in the course. The first lesson will be made of many new things anyway and it is better not to overload the children and to save some surprises for later.
  • As for the rules and the rewards’ charts, these are of course very important with a group of primary school kids but this also can wait until a bit later than the very first lesson. The lesson plan might be introduced from the lesson 2 as well.
  • There is one more element of the first class with primary that has not been included here but only because it is a very important one, it deserves its own post and this element are the parents. Regardless of whether we like it or not, the parents of our younger students will be in the classroom with us and it would be necessary to acknowledge their presence. A face-to-face meeting would be ideal but a note or a message in the electronic register or in the Whatsapp group will do to get you started. The parents might be coming from different background and have a different previous English learning experience, as students or as parents. That is why it is absolutely necessary to let them know how you are going to work with your students and their kids. More of that soon!

Here you can find some tried and tested activities for primary school kids (although perhaps not necessarily all of them for the very first lesson!)

If you are also about to start teaching your pre-primary, you will find some ideas here.

Here you can find my first VYL lesson survival kit and a post about what I wished I had known before my first VYL lesson.

And here the series of the unexpected in the classroom aka landing on Mars, with the pre-school group.

Here you have a set of great posts from Sandy Millin devoted to all three age groups and everything that you might want to know before you start.

Happy teaching!

What an old dog learnt… A YL teacher goes back into the adult classroom

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Me and one of my best friends, Roman B. No old dogs in this photo. Only the amazing ones (The photo: courtesy of Yulia. The doggo: courtesy of Jill)

Back to the future

It just happened: a dedicated YL teacher (and a teacher who spent the last ten years doing her best to stay away from teaching adults (minus the trainees!) all of a sudden found herself in the classroom with some serious corportate clinets and their Business English, General English, English for Finance and Banking, A2 – C1. Full time.

It has to be said out loud: that was not a direction that this teacher dreamed of or the developement that the teacher planned or solicited but, at the same time, there is absolutely no need to wring hands or shed tears over such a giggle of the Fate. After all, the teacher is an experienced one, with an oh-dear number of years in the classroom (and different types of classrooms, everywhere) so the teacher will be just fine. After all, teaching is teachings, the students are great, the fun is being had. All the details are here just to set the context.

The old dog aka the adult classroom through a YL teacher

This particular started with a most random thing. I don’t even remember what we were doing and with whom, but, suddenly, I caught myself thinking ‘Blin, even my kids can do THAT‘. There was no anger in it or desperation, only curiosity and bemusement. I started to analyse the details and bits and pieces of this THAT and the reasons for that. It started with a sigh but it got interesting very quickly.

Here is a new post and an attempt at looking at the adult EFL learners through the eyes spoilt by her young students.

One. Inhibitions

This is something that is almost non-existant in the YL classroom. Minus all these cases in which the kid have had a negative first experience with English, at school, with the tutors or parents or when they are naturally introvert and shy and they simply need more time to settle in the group and to feel comfortable enough to talk. Most commonly, the kids enter the room, eyes wide-open, ready to discover and to enjoy the world of the English language.

Then, there are adults, a completely different picture. Naturally, there are quite a few factors that can contribute such as a lower level, a long break in learning or using the language, some negative previous learning experience or studying in one group with colleagues from the same company or being a low-level speaker of English when you are already a top manager.

The result? Silence in the classroom.

I guess that is the silence that is the time they need to think about their answer, to choose the words, to gather the courage to let them out and, naturally, they get it. They do have the right to the freedom of silence. For me, the teacher, it is also an interesting exercise in patience. I realised that I have been spoilt with hands shooting up into the air and the opinions voiced almost instantly. Here, I am getting used to breathing more and waiting for the students to be ready.

I am beginning to think that building up the students’ confidence suddenly gets the priority among the lesson and the course aims as regards the adult learners of English. Everything else, the vocabulary, the structures and the skills development will follow. Hopefully.

Two. Teacher-oriented communication

On the one hand, the YL classes are definitely more teacher-centred than the adult classes. That is, to some extent, fully justified. Students, especially the younger ones, are in need of the teacher and the adult as the lesson leader. But only to some extent. I strongly believe that this should be one of the main aims of the course to create the conditions in which the students will be learning to interact with the teacher BUT also giving them a chance to learn to interact with each other. After all, whatever happens in the classroom is only a warm-up, only the preparation, only the training before the real life interaction. In which, most likely, the teacher is not going to take part. For that reason, the students should be given the tools and opportunities to talk to each other, to lead the activities, to take part in pair-work. There is no need to wait with it until they turn ten or fifteen. Some elements of that can be introduced even much earlier and pair-work is feasible in pre-school.

Somehow, it is not a given with the older students. Adults, either because they are more inhibited or because they see it as a sign of respect towards the teacher, they hold back, they wait, for the teacher to call their name out or for the teacher to at least signal that it is their turn to speak. I have realised that sometimes I have to specifically highlight that I am stepping out of the conversation, that the students, in pairs or as a whole group, have to take responsiblity for the interaction and that I will not be encouraging, keeping it up and, of course, leading it. We have been studying together for about three months now and I can already see some improvement in that area. Hooray to that!

Three. Communication strategies

Communication strategies is one of my true professional passions and that is why it was chosen for my first research within the MA programme. Inspired by Haenni Hoti, Heinzman and Mueller (2003) (or, rather ‘taken aback by the comments of’) that claimed that young learners use a very limited range of communication strategies, basically limiting those to translation and code-switching (aka using a combination of L1 and L2), based on the gut feeling from the classroom, I decided to check it out. And, to prove them wrong. Hopefully.

Although my research was a very small scale and low-key and by a beginner researcher, I found out enough evidence to get me even more interested in the topic. My little students proved to be already effective communicators who work hard and who have a good range of different techniques to get the message across such as all-purpose words, approximation, direct appeal for help, indirect appeal for help, self-repair, other-repair and mime. The range was much wider. Translation and code-switching were used, too, and they were the most frequent ones, however, they were not the only ones.

Then, there are the adults and guess what, these adults, ‘Come as you are’, before I get to work on them, they know only one communication strategy and that is ‘translation’. falling back into their L1, straightaway, whenever something is unclear, unknown and uncertain. I am not even sure why it is assumed that the learners (let alone the young ones) will use these strategies of their accord. I haven’t researched that properly, yet, but perhaps it has got nothing to do with the age of the student or, rather, not only with the age of the student, and more with the learning experience and the opportunities to be acquainted with and to develop these strategies.

The adult students (my adult students) struggled in that area and if they didn’t know, they would immediately switch to L1 and they would expect an answer. Working around that by delaying the translation, encouraging them to try something else or, also, providing both, the L2 only and the translation was quite a challenge and I know that some of them were surprised that I don’t just provide the required service aka translation, that I am trying something else. They had it written all over the face. I can’t say my job is done here, far from it but we are working on it. And it is a bit better now.

Four. Sharing ideas

Teacher beliefs are a slippery topic and most of the time we don’t even think about them. It was only last year (and somewhere by the end of it) when I realised why I am a teacher and what I want from my lessons.

Everything happened thanks to one Sasha who joined our group and who, despite the eight months spent with the rest of the team, in a very welcoming and friendly environment, despite the fact that she got on with everyone, Sasha still would keep quiet in class unless I asked her a question and unless I called out her name. I had never even thought about it and only then did I understand that I want to create such an atmosphere in the lesson in which my students feel free to talk because they have something to share with the rest of the group, not because they have to, not because the teacher made them, not because the teacher asked the question or because the teacher is testing them. They talk because they have something to say. And I want them to feel that they can. This is something that we have been working on from the very beginning.

It was one more thing that was ‘not so obvious’ for my adult students. They stalled. They do, still, sometimes. Again, it might be due to a whole range of factors, the natural shyness, the lack of confidence, the level of English, the relations in the workplace, if they come from the same company, or even the natural politeness. It is not a given that everyone will be speaking during the lesson time because speaking and developing the communicative skills is the reason why we come to class.

Five. All ideas are good ideas.

That is a sad fact: adulthood and reality kills creativity and imagination. Long gone are the days of fairy tales and fantasy travels with Frodo or magical battles with Harry. Well, in most cases. For that reason, if the question is about playing football and the student does not play football, the rest, dramatically, is silence…With kids silence never ever happens, and that is especially amazing, because, more often than not, we do things that have nothing or very little to do with the real life. All these menus for the monster cafe, all these school trips around the world, or to the moon or, our life as pirates…Silence is a rare event. Thank heavens.

This post is not to be read as a huge, one thousand word, complaint about my adult students. It is certainly not. I am doing a good job, I like them and we are making progress. I am just positively amazed that with my young learners, we have done SO MUCH (and to be honest, so much we have done by accident, unwillingly, joyfully, just for laughs) to enable the kids and to ensure that they are effective communicators.

I would like to think that my kids are not in danger of being scared to scared, inhibited, with a strong affective factor. This ship has sailed.

This line, so frequently used in my kids classes, started to appear in my adult classes.

See this is basically what happens when you send a YL teacher into the adult classroom. There is a lot of dedication, professionalism and lots of good lessons are happening. But the teacher has a one track mind and everything is somehow YL-related:-)

Bibliography

A. Haenni Hoti, S. Heinzmann and S. Mueller (2003), I can help you? Assessing speaking skills and interaction strategies of young learners, In: M. Nikolov (ed), The Age Factor and and Early Language Learning, De Grutyer.

Happy teaching!

My adorable monsters. About the long-term work with a group

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This post, like many others, starts in the classroom…

The thought falls on my head out of nowhere.

We are playing the game with the first conditional. There are only four of them, on the day, in-between the holidays, so we don’t even bother to go into the breakout rooms, we are playing together. It is not even a real game, either. Someone starts a sentence, someone else, called out, thinks of an ending, action – reaction, a situation – consequences. And they are just producing. Coming up with great ideas, some of the sentences just down to earth and realistic, some of them, as we call them, ‘creative’, just for laughs. And so we laugh out loud. A trainer in me suddenly realises that the lesson plan (if there had been a formal lesson plan) should include not only the traditional elements, like the staging and ‘the teacher will’ and ‘the students will’. The trainer in me realised that it might be worth considering to include a laughing fit and the necessary calming down part in the timing, in the assumptions and the potential problems and solutions…We laugh a lot with my kids.

Unavoidably, I realise, I get those constant flashbacks, those mini-trips into the past and I am looking at my students, today already 10 and 9 (or 8 and 7, still, some of them) and I remember how we walked into the classroom together, for the first time, me on my toes, all eyes, all ears, and them cautiously taking every step and every action. I do remember how we learned to say ‘Hello’ for the first time with some of them and how we first said that we don’t like broccoli ice-cream (except for Nadia, my little rebel). How I used to need lots of miming and scaffolding and modelling, with every single activity and how they’d start with single words, then move to phrases and to sentences.

And I, who was present, 99% of the time, over those seven years, I cannot believe my own eyes and my own ears now, how they throw the language at me, storytelling, or using the Present Perfect in free speech. Or the first conditional.

What does it mean for a teacher to continue for an extended period of time? What does it mean for the business? How does the methodology change? Does it change at all? What do the parents think? And, last but not least, perhaps it would be better to change the teacher once in a while?

This post will be very personal. This post will be very emotional. But I would like to look at it from the other points of view, too, thinking like a trainer, thinking like a methodology expert and, also, inevitably, thinking like a teacher and like a human, too.

In order to make it a bit more objective and more like a research, I asked my teacher friends for help. This post was written with the help, support and contributions from my amazing colleagues: Ekaterina Balaganskaya, Nadezhda Bukina, Marina Borisova and Tatiana Kistanova. Thank you!!!

Are you still up for such an adventure? Follow me.

Over to…a teacher trainer

  • You know your students very well, in every aspect, including the interests, their motivation, the family situation, the strengths, the areas that need improvement, the interaction patterns that they favour, their best friends in and outside of the group, their favourite activities and games, their role in the group. This helps a lot with lesson planning, shaping up and choosing the activities and, later on, in class, with managing the activities, the lesson time and the interaction patterns.
  • Giving instructions is much easier, after a while. The students know you very well, too, that they are almost able to read your mind and to react to any, even those less formal hints and clues. Quite likely before you give them.
  • You need to be creative because after a while, your students might get bored with the activities you usually use. This might not sound like something positive because it means that you are at risk of running out of anything that you normally keep up your sleeve in terms of games, classroom management techniques or ways of checking homework, for example, but I would like to see it a more positive light. Working with a long-term group can be a wonderful catalyst for your creativity and, as a result, there are more new games, classroom management techniques and ways of checking homework!!!
  • It is perfectly natural that with any new group, a teacher strives to build up the comfort zone in order to ensure the conditions for the effective teaching and learning. However, once that comfort zone is created (and after a few years with a group it is likely to be a very stable comfort zone, a very cozy and safe ZPD, hello Leo Vygotsky), the teacher can start dreaming of venturing out and trying out new things on a much more advanced level. Not only a new game to practise vocabulary but a new approach that you may have heard about such as introducing a new approach to storytelling after you have found out about PEPELT, setting up journals with your students, just because you read that one research article or just taking your lifelong passion for teaching English through another level. Or, actually, you might even want to start a blog at one point. An experimenter is, I believe, one of the most important teacher roles!
  • Teaching long-term, you are moving on, together with your students and that means changing and adapting the approaches and techqniues to match them to needs of the kids who are growing up. With time, kids are becoming more mature and more capable of producing the language and dealing with more and more complex tasks. They say that a rolling stone gathers no moss and the same can be said about teachers who are growing and developing with their students. Sure, some of that can be achieved within one year, but there is definitely a lot more potential for the changes and the evolutions if the learning process takes a bit longer than just one season.
  • My colleagues also mentioned the impact on the learning process and the very shaping of the curriculum as it was adapted to the particular needs of the students. Instead of just following the book (or the curriculum whichever form it came in), as might be the case with a less involved teacher (although, of course, I am not implying that working with a group for a season only equals lower quality service), with a longer term group a teacher is able to introduce a circular / spiral curriculum, introduced to the world by Bruner and to me be Ekaterina, with the teacher returning and revising the crucial elements of the language, regardless of what the coursebook or the pacing schedule says. For example, working on the past simple (served in manageable chunks) from the beginning of the year instead of waiting until April when that topic appears in the book. This was Ekaterina’s example and I realised that we have been doing the same with my kids, simply because I wanted us to have the language (or some bites of it) for us to be able to talk about the weekend and the holidays and the day at school. Tatiana also mentioned it as one of the key benefits as knowing the group helps the teacher set the pace that will be most appropriate for this particular bunch of children.
  • Over to… a manager
  • Students staying for a few years are basically your returning customers, your loyal customers and your dream come true. As they would be in any other area. They come back, month after month and year after year and they make the world go round, basically.
  • What’s more, these students are also likely to bring in other students, their friends, brothers, sisters, cousins or even parents, to join your groups or the other groups at the school. Since there has been a positive experience in the family, so to speak, these are also likely to stay.
  • The fact that you have worked out the patterns and the procedures of managing the finances, the group, the assessment or the festivities, will mean that these will be easier to implement.
  • This will be a huge advantage, should there be any changes to adapt to, even those unexpected and unplanned, as in case of the pandemic. Perhaps that was not the case in all the countries and with all the groups and students but, in my experience, many of those that went online, smoothly, were the long-term students and groups and they basically trusted their teacher to transfer online or, later on, to study in the hybrid classroom.
  • That also means that a strong bond and trust will be built and the parents will be more likely to accept any changes or even any complications such as the need to move online, the need to change the timetable, the need to make up for the class or to run the lesson online, or even, to have a cover class.
  • Staying with ‘the old’ teacher might also be easier for the parents which was a very important point made by Ekaterina. Parents are busy, they might not be able to devote a huge amount of time to looking for a new teacher, a new school or a new group and they might also worry that their child would not fit in the new set-up. Some parents fear that due to the previous negative experience, either with the school, the group or even the teacher’s professional competence. Staying is easier.

Over to… a teacher

  • The first one to mention here will be the enormous sense of achievement that a teacher can get from working with a group for an extended period of time and the opportunity to observe and to assess the same students, not only from September to May, from the beginning to the end of the level but over the years, from pre-A to A2 or even further.
  • Teaching a group over any longer period of time provides the teacher with plenty of opporunities and a lot of data for formative assessment, as pointed out by Ekaterina. It will apply to all the language skills as well as vocabulary and grammar, accuracy and fluency. Let’s take the past simple as an example. There will be the series of lessons devoted to the topic, a series of lessons per level or coursebook even, and the students might do well in these lessons. However, it will be up to the teacher to track whether and how accurately the students use it to describe the past events in free speech, recalling the events of the day at school or retelling a story. The aims of these two activities are not the freer grammar practice per se but, for example, settling in and checking understanding after a reading skills development stage. It might (and it will!) take a considerable period of time for the students to finally assimilate the structure and to start using it freely and correctly. I have also noticed in my teaching that with time I tend to prioritise formative assessment over summative assessment but this is a new discovery and I need some time to think about it before I write about. A new post? Who knows)
  • Creating a positive atmosphe in the classroom, creating the environment that will be beneficial for learning, learning about your students and their needs is something that we, as teachers, do regardless, but there is something special in the connection that you build with a group over the years. You accompany them in their lives outside of the classroom, all the good marks and bad marks, all the competitions, holidays and birthdays. You get to meet their parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters and all the pets. You take part in the important family events, such as the births of baby brothers and sisters or even those more traumatic events like an illness or a death of a family member and, whether you want it or not, you bond. To an outsider it might sound strange but there must be a reason why so many teachers refer to their students as ‘my children‘ or, sometimes, when in a non-teaching environment, ‘my educational children’.
  • Then, there is the pride in all their achievements and progress that they are making. Going back and reminiscing about all the milestones, all the firsts is a truly wonderful journey for a teacher to take: the first lesson ever, the first time we made full sentences, the first time we started to create in English, the first letters scribbled, the first story we did and the first time they asked to be allowed to take over the story reading, the first test, the first real grammar lesson, the first ‘OMG, I cannot stop them from chattering away‘ day or every time they took an exam, Starters, Movers, Flyers, KET, PET, FCE or, finally, also, CAE.

Over to…a human

‘If you meet with the same people twice a week for 8 – 10 years, you can’t help loving them‘ (Marina)

‘It’s a joy to see them grow, to see the progress and the results. Develop relationships and see them enter a new age group‘ (Nadezhda)

‘The best thing about it was that I knew them and they knew me, the rapport was strong‘ (Tatiana)

‘When I was moving a country, they were devastated. Luckily, we could continue our lessons online‘ (Ekaterina)

  • The group is a community. Ekaterina mentioned that the kids in the group she has been teaching for seven years became friends outside the group and that they all meet offline when that is possible, even go out for pizza or to a museum. Even when those outside events are not possible, the group can celebrate together either because they get a Christmas-themed lesson or because they all bring snack and have a little party at the end of the lesson. Even if it is an online lesson.
  • It is interesting that the personal preferences work both ways and that the resistance to change the teacher might come from the students, too, as you will see in the stories for teachers that I share in the paragraph below and that, as Marina highlighted, the fact that some students stay with you (and, of course, not all of them will) is based also on their personal preferences and attachement to the teacher. Staying for longer may be seen as a result not some intertia, the inability or laziness to find a new teacher, but, simply, a conscious decision on the part of the parents and the students.
  • Or on the part of the teacher, too. As pointed out by Tatiana, it might be related to the teacher’s own personality, if the long-term connections are important for them, as humans. Or, it might be the impact of the context in which they are working as the changes, imposed or not, are more likely to take place in different educational institutions whereas the teachers who work freelance would probably be in favour of keeping the students, unless, of course, it is impossible due to any external circumstances.
  • As for me, personally, well, I love what I do. Yes, there are sometimes duties, tasks or even groups that I am not entirely wildly excited about but, overall, I enter the classroom, online or offline, with joy and looking forward to the lesson. And one of the reasons for that are my students and, especially, my educational children aka my adorable monsters. It is thanks to them that I have blossomed as a creator, as a teacher and as a trainer. It is thanks to them that I was able to cope with the strains of the lockdown and it is thanks to them that ‘I am still standing‘, as Elton John might put it, when the world is what it is right now.
  • At the beginning of the pandemic, when we were about to transition online and change our EFL lives forever, I remember how I felt about the big unknown and how, pretty quickly, it became apparent, that no matter what (really, no matter what) we are what we are, a small (and a bit loud) community and that we had had enough experience of each other worked out and accumulated and that we can take it elsewhere. I remember one morning, just before the lessons were about to start (the first real lesson, not the free online trial and getting to know each other with zoom) how I felt the panic creep over. But I also remember the thought: ‘Hold on, they are my kids. That’s is. We will just do it, under slightly different circumstances‘. And, guess what? We did.

A change would do you good? The other side of the coin

Because, of course, there is one! Changing the teacher might be beneficial! On the one hand, as Nadezhda mentioned, the teachers themselves might feel the impact of the long-term interaction, some form of material fatigue, and in such a case a change is more than welcome. In such cases a change of a teacher might be the solution. A new teacher means new methods, new approaches, a different sense of humour…

Sometimes this ‘tiredness’ and the call for a change may come from the fact that students are growing and transitioning into another age group and the students might welcome a more official confirmation or recognition of that process. Perhaps, the change of a teacher might do the job here. If, for example, it is Mr Alexander is the teenage groups’ teacher then him taking over the group from taught so far by Miss Carolina is going to be some form of a rite of passage.

However, it needs to be mentioned, it is not as straightforward as it might seem. First and foremost, the students may not want to change the teacher at all and, in such cases, it is enough to tweak the format or the routine a bit. Then it might be that the outside circumstances change and they sort the problem out. Ekaterina shared her story of one of her groups with whom she started to consider the possible change of a teacher as the kids’ growing up and changing into teenagers resulted in some discipline issues and, as a result, the lessons not being as effective as they previously had been. However, here, the problem sorted itself out – due to the pandemic the class was transferred online and it turned out that the physical separatation (or the space and the own territory that the students gained) was the only thing that the group needed. They still continue with Ekaterina as their teacher.

This brought my own group to mind. The kids were still in pre-school, year 3, when we were asked to give our cosy kiddies classroom to a younger group. We moved and the most surprising thing was that it turned out to be an important stepping stone for the students. ‘We are real students now!’, they kept repeating and back then I was just listening to them and giggling inside that the big desks and big chairs can make anyone so excited. Today, when I look back at it, it seems to be this perfect moment in the life of a group when a change was needed. And it did take place, although, yes, without changing the teacher.

The most important thing to consider here is how the students can benefit from the new circumstances. Marina brought it up, too and, Ekaterina gave a perfect example from the British schools. In the schools her children attend, there is an obligatory change of a teacher every year, with Miss Elena only teaching the 4th-grades, Mr Peter only working with the 6th graders and so on. The system was introduced in the school to ensure fairness. This way, all the children get a change to work with all the teachers throughout their school life and the is no chance that, due to some ‘preferences’, class 4A only gets ‘the best teachers’. Not to mention that this must contribute a lot to bonding and building of the community as little Pasha will know all the teachers personally and all the teachers, after a while, will have had Pasha in their classrooms.

The end is the beginning is the end…

The most interesting thing is that, from among the teachers who waved back at me and wanted to chat about the long-term teaching of a group, there was nobody who would be a strong proponent of the Change the Teacher Every Year approach. Can it be considered a sign? I have no idea but, if, by any chance, there is anyone among my readers who has had an experience with it, please, pretty please, get in touch, I would love to talk to you!

Happy teaching!

All’s well that ends well. Activities to finish the lesson with*

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No, not the ice-cream)

A lesson is like…

There is nothing like a good metaphor and I use it a lot in the classroom, to give feedback to my students (‘Your essay is a bit like a skeleton, all the good bones but no muscles at all’), to explain grammar (‘Reported speech is basically telling stories’) or to manage the behaviour of my younger students (‘This desk, Sasha, is like your island and these other desks are other island. We don’t travel there. Never ever ever!’).

I also started to use metaphors in teacher training and, of course, you can read about it here and here and this is how this post started, too.

I asked my trainees ones how they would describe a lesson in terms of a metaphor and I found out that a lesson is a lot like: playing football, playing a game of snakes and ladders, a journey, a frame…I am getting goosebumps now because I know that there WILL BE a separate post about that, soon.

A lesson is like a story

Oh yes, it is! In a good story you absolutely need a good opening line (this is how I choose my books, yes. Because if the author did not bother to make an effort to say hello properly, why would we even be talking, eh?), a set of interesting characters, some adventures, some challenges and achievements, a climax and the ending.

In terms of a lesson, these would stand for a warmer activity (a good opening line), the community of the teacher and the students (yes, we are the characters), some engaging activities (our adventures), some new things, some learning and development (or the challenges and the achievements), one amazing focused task because all the roads lead to Rome (and this is our methodological climax) and….a good cool-down activity aka the ending.

We absolutely need the ending!

First and foremost, a lesson needs an official round-up, the final touch, the coda, the summary of everything that has happened during the lesson. Since one does not walk into the classroom and start the lesson without saying ‘Hello’, nor does one leave without saying ‘Goodbye’, there should be the first real activity of the lesson and the last real activity, too.

What’s more, a good ending of a lesson is also an introduction to the following one. If the lesson finishes on a high note, the students will leave the room looking forward to coming back next time.

Move! By Super Simple Songs! If you haven’t used it before, find it asap!

# 1 Finishing with a song

An easy and no-prep resource, especially with the younger students. A song is a signal for the students that we are finishing but it can be also a signal for the parents waiting in the hallway. It can be the same good-bye song in every lesson but it can be a song that the students choose to finish the lesson with. This is an especially useful trick with the older and more advanced children, who might eventually get bored with the same song. With one of my online students we had a tradition of choosing one of her favourite songs, in Russian, to listen to and to dance, after the offcial lesson time, just as this thing that we did together (and I had a longer break in-between classes and I could spare a few minutes). One of my trainees, Nathalie (lots of virtual hugs here), also built in a dance into her class routine. At the end of the lesson, the kids would choose one of the Super Simple Songs, for example, get up, find a place in the middle of the classroom and just dance and sing, together with the teacher and then go home.

I have yet to start experimenting with songs with my older students.

# 2 Finishing with a story

Admittedly, that is a part of the routine that is something of a staple food in my pre-school and primary school EFL lessons. Stories, both storybooks or videos, can be used either to revise the key language or to introduce and practise the new language, not quite related to the topic of the lesson. From the point of the view of the lesson, the story is a part of the ritual and something that helps to build the class community.

In the classroom, we clean up after the focused task, set homework and go back to the carpet (preschoolers) or to our hello circle (primary), we choose a story and read or watch it and talk about it. Then, the only thing left is the goodbye-song. And stickers).

This is, probably, one of my favourite ways of finishing a lesson, because we get a chance to settle, to bond, to practise the language and to express opinion, all in one. I am wondering whether and how my older students could benefit from these, too. Something to experiment with in the next academic year, perhaps?

This is the feedback the kids left after the first week of the summer camp activities

# 3 Finishing with a feedback session

There are many ways of organising a feedback session after the lesson, depending on the aim of the feedback session.

  • Self-reflection when the teacher is simply irrelevant (in a way). The main aim is to give the students an opportunity to look back at the lesson and to consider the learning process. In this case, the students work in pairs or small groups and share their views, answering a set of questions, such as: What did you like? What was the most difficult / interesting / boring / the easiest part of the lesson?
  • Feedback for the teacher: students can leave their comments on the board or on the wall (or the door!) if the feedback is to be anonymous or they take part in a discussion in small groups or as a whole class.

It is up to the teacher to decide how frequently any kind of feedback can be carried out: once a week, once a month, after each test or after any lesson with a new element in it such as a new activity or a new game.

This is our feedback after one of the tests

# 4 Finishing with a self-reflection task

This activity is an extension of the previous point but it focuses more specifically on the content and, even more specifically, on the vocabulary. My students (primary and teens) had their notebooks which we used for taking notes and for the self-reflection tasks, too.

At the end of the vocabulary lesson, the kids take their notebooks and look back at the lesson and categorise the words according to a number of the following categories: the difficult words, the easy words, the useful words, the words that look strange, the words that sound strange, the words that may not be very useful…

They can either create their own lists by copying the items from the board or the coursebook and by categorising or colour-coding them. A short speaking activity would follow in which the students explain their choices to their partners in pairs or small teams.

# 5 A revision task

That is another set of tasks that we sometimes use also based on the key vocabulary in each particular lesson and it has got a lot to do with everything that is written on the board already such as the new language or the emergent langauge. The main aim here is to give the students one more opportunity to use the target language. Since these games have no definite ending, their length can be adapted to the amount time left in the lesson.

The students work in pairs and can play one of the following games:

  • Definitions: student A calls out the word / phrase, student B: provides a definition and an example, then they change, the teacher helps out only when necessary (aka the word has already been forgotten)
  • Synonyms and antonyms: student A calls out the word / phrase, student B: provides a synonym or an antonym
  • Questions: student A chooses a word / a phrase and asks student B a question that includes that word / phrase. Then they swap roles.
  • A story: students work in pairs, they take turns and tell a story, using different words / phrases from the board
  • Pairs: students take turns and they try to find connections between different items on the board, based on meaning, pronunciation, grammatical category or associations

Sometimes we also play the memory game with the whole class: the students take turns to close their eyes, the teacher erases one or two items, the students open their eyes and try to recall the words that have disappeared as well as all the other words and phrases from the previous rounds. The class listen and help out with definitions and associations. The bonus? The board gets cleaned))

# 6 Finishing with an introduction to the following lesson

This approach to the finishing the lesson was the result of the reality of the teaching life. No matter how well you plan your lessons and how many optional activities you have up your sleeve, it might still happen that everything has been done and there is still some time left but not enough time for the teacher to properly spread the wings, be it in a game or in any other fully-fledged task.

In such a case, it might be a good idea to introduce the topic of the following lesson, without properly setting the context (no, time, remember?) for example by:

  • introducing the title of the reading, the topic, for example through a game of hangman and a discussion about the students’ expectations and prediction
  • talking about the visuals that accompany the following topic, without going into any details
  • three questions to help the students relate to the following topic for example: What do you think about…? Have you ever…? Do young people in your country often…?

This will create a link between the lessons and it can be further extended by a homework along the lines of: ‘Find out more about…’. All of these can be easily adapted to almost any topic.

# 7 Finishing with a game

The games chosen to finish the lesson with should be fun (the students are already tired and less able to focus), fast (if there is a lot of time left, perhaps it should be devoted to something else) and offering some flexibility to the teacher (aka games with no definite end or result that can be stopped or paused at any given point).

We like to play:

  • Categories aka STOP: students work in pairs or small teams, they write one word in each category beginning with a specific letter, afterwards the teacher awards the points.
  • The Game of 5: each team or pair prepares a list of 5 in their category (a separate and unique one) such as 5 irregular verbs, 5 cities in Europe, 5 farm animals etc. Afterwards, the teams have a minute to guess all the words their partners have come up with. They can get 50 points in each round, 10 points for every word they manage to guess with the team setting the task getting 10 points for every word their partners did not manage to guess.
  • One-Minute Game: this a game that requires a set of flashcards (very easy to prepare) or a set of word cards (prepared by the teacher throughout the year, can be easily recycled). Students work in small teams as they take turns to explain as many words out of the set (definitions, associations or miming) to their team within one minute. I am pretty sure that this was loosely based on some kind of a game show but I have no idea which one. Oups.

In order to better manage the game and time in class, we started to play these with the same teams over a series of lessons, pausing when it is time to go home and recommencing in the following lesson.

The stained glass project: in the making

Bonus: An Art Project

‘Anka, what’s this?’ the kids asked when entering the classroom and noticing a few boxes of the stainglass paints.

‘These are special paints. We used them to make these special pictures with the little kids.’

‘Anka!’ they said, in that very special tone of voice that my kids have mastered, the voice reserved for these particular occasions, to compain, to chide and to express disappointment. ‘The little kids? And what about us?’

So I had to think of a way of including this particular project in our classes. Making stained glass pictures is one of the coolest activities ever but it takes time as the various layers need to get dry before you apply the following ones and there is virtually no chance of completing a task in one lesson. Not to mention that it is a perfect decorative kind of a craft and trying to adapt it in order to maximise production would be simply counterproductive.

Instead, I wrote to the parents and I explained that, instead of a game, at the end of the lesson, for the next few lessons, we would be preparing our own stained glass pictures. The kids chose a template or designed their own pictures, they drew the outlines, they coloured them in and, as soon as they were ready, they took them home to cut out and to display them. All in all, it took about 5 minutes over a series of four lessons.

The Chameleon Day!

Bonus: The Chameleon Day aka Google Search

Choosing virtual stickers is not a new idea and thanks to Miro we have lots and lots of fun and we can keep track of all of our stickers throughout the entire year, if necessary. Here you can read how we deal with that with my primary students.

Further reading

The 9 Best Ways to Finish EFL Lessons from the ELT Guide

End of Lesson Activities for ESL Classes from English Teaching 101

7 Best Ways to End a Lesson from Busy Teacher

How to Finish Your Lesson Effectively from The TEFL Academy

15 Awesome Wrap-up Activities For Students from Class Craft

Happy teaching!

*) This material was collected and put together for the online training session organised by National Geographic Learning for Russia in October 2021 where I had the privilege of sharing the zoom stage with Dr Joan Kang Sheen and Tatiana Fenstein.

Crumbs # 32 Online stickers with a twist

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Ingredients

  • Miro board or a word document
  • Kids and their ideas

Procedures

  • We prepare the document, write the date
  • One of the students chooses the theme of the day i.e. The Chameloeon Day (not a real holiday, although it could be. There are plenty of ideas to find here.
  • The kids take turns to choose their favourite variation, as featured in the picture above: the cake chamelon, the black chameleon, the artistic chameleon, the Christmas chameleon, the cute chameleon, the police chameleon, the robot chameleon and the lamp chameleon.
  • The teacher opens the google search and keys in the requested phrase. The student who suggested the specific variation chooses their favourite picture (i.e. line one, number 2).
  • The teacher copies and pastes the chosen picture, then pdfs the whole collage as soon as it is ready. The collage is then sent out to parents via Whatsapp.
  • (!!!!!) For the purpose of protecting the kids from the inappropriate images that google might display, especially when the unusual combinations are made, I key in the requested phrase first and only then share the screen with the kids as some of the images might be too scary, explicit or simply not always appropriate for all ages.

Why we like it

  • It is fun.
  • The kids love it. They ask about the stickers (we don’t always use them in every lesson) and they remind me to send them to the parents in the end.
  • It is a great way of finishing a lesson.
  • It is a great way of building a community, especially if you keep your stickers throughout the year. With my group, we still have some of the stickers we found during the first stages of the pandemic in spring 2020 and we had a lot of fun finding them, looking through them and remembering whose they were and why.
  • It gives us a chance to practise some of the computer language in contex (go / scroll down, go / scroll up, stop, I’d like …)
  • It offers some opportunity to practise describing objects in a detailed way (it is the big one, the small, the one with the green nose etc), especially the adjectives.
  • We can create, express ourselves and express opinion on what other people choose.
  • My advertising people tell me that this is something that you do while researching and brainstorming new ideas, too, in order to ensure that yours is, indeed, a fresh solution that no one has ever thought of. So, in a way, my kids are also getting ready for the market research, too!
This is one of our pandemic 2020 stickers)

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #29 How do you feel today? The alternatives

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From the series: The Beautiful Life

Ingredients

  • None, almost. In some cases, it might be necessary to write some of the ideas on the board, to serve as an inspiration. See procedures

Procedures

  • Students work in pairs. They share their ideas. If there is time, the students can change partners and repeat the activity. To round up, students share some of the information they have found out about.
  • This stage is always present, in each lesson, and it takes about 10 minutes. We keep the same variant for about a month and then we choose a new one.

All the variants (so far)

  • Verbs: the teacher writes on the board all the basic verbs in the past tense: I went to, I saw, I ate, I drank, I talked to…about…, I watched, I played, I bought, I wrote, I didn’t…The kids choose 5 and they build simple sentences about their day, week or weekend. I like to start it with my students even before we officially cover the Past Tense (as soon as they are ready to differentiate between the present / the past form of the verbs) and it really does help the kids to practise and to remember the verb forms.
  • Did you go…: a variation of the activity described above. The teacher puts the question form and the short answers on the board. The kids work in pairs and ask each other questions. The student who provides answers uses ‘I did’ and ‘I didn’t’ but they are also requested to give a brief explanation (because…)
  • Tell me about your day: the teacher writes the name of the activity and a list of topics which can be also elicited from the students. The regular set might include: the weather, the school, the teachers, my best friend, lunch, getting around, marks, tests, pets, brothers and sisters, homework etc. The students work in pairs and they have to choose three topics to talk about. They take turns to share stories about their day and they follow-up each story with a question.
  • The B-words: this one is a slight variation of the above, only here the teacher writes a selection of words starting with a certain letter as the list for the students to choose from and to be inspired by. Some of the words might be completely random but they also encourage the kids to produce the language. Later on, the students can choose the letter of the day and then can also help make the list of the words, too.
  • This is how I felt today: in this variation the teacher puts up the words to describe emotions and feelings. The list can be a simple one (happy, sad, angry, sleepy, hungry, tired, bored) and then it can be extended to include more interesting ones, too (confused, excited, chatty, exhausted). Again, the students choose 3 or 5 of them to describe their day.
  • Superheroes: this time the list on the board is made of names of superheroes, famous people as well as characters from books and films, for example Superman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, Chebourashka, Winnie-the-Pooh, Santa etc. The students are supposed to think of their day from the point of view of these characters and describe it talking about how they felt. ‘I felt like Superman because I got three good marks today’*)
  • The superlatives: the teacher writes on the board a list of superlatives (the best, the worst, the funniest, the tasties, the most difficult, the easiest). The students choose 3 or 5 of them and use them to describe their day, for example: The best thing was that I had only three lessons etc.

Why we like it

  • A stage of that kind is absolutely necessary as the time for the students to settle in
  • This is also when they learn how to communicate without any preparation and outside of any set-up frameworks since each day might be different and each day may involve a different set of verbs and nouns
  • At the same time, it is an opportunity to practice the past tenses or the perfect tenses as for many of the students, many events repeat themselves (going to school, writing tests, having a good day or a bad day etc)
  • It is a fantasic opportunity for the group to bond, to share the great things that happened during the day or to vent about all the disasters that they had to deal with, the tests, the teachers, the piles of homework

To be continued. Soon. We are quite likely to get very bored with what we are doing at the moment…

Happy teaching!

*) My favourite so far! It is amazing how my students come up with their own metaphors and associations, both the teenage group and the kids. Here are a few quotes: ‘I felt like Chebourashka because I was a bit confused’, ‘I feel like Robinson Cruzoe because I am locked up at home now’, ‘I feel like Masha from Masha and Medved because I am a bit crazy today’, ‘I felt like Santa because it was my friend’s birthday and I had a present for him’, ‘I feel like Superman because I did all my homework really fast’…