Set-up: a set of small chairs in a circle, in one super cozy corner of the classroom. This is where always start the lesson before we move to the serious part of the classroom and the lesson, with big tables, big chairs and coursebooks.
Time: 5 – 10 minutes in the beginning of each lesson
Materials: Angelina, dice and any visuals, especially flashcards, EFL posters (and at the school we do have a big and the most random collection of these from long-forgotten publishers and coursebooks), Starters, Movers and Flyers wordlist picturebooks which you can be easily downloaded (although we are lucky to have a few paper copies, too) and sometimes a whiteboard or a set of mini-whiteboards
Interaction patterns: all the new activities are first tried and tested with the whole group, to support production and to make sure that all students feel comfortable to be creative and to share their ideas. Later on, we split and continue in pairs or in teams.
Here a confession: ideally, of course, all of the interaction should be taking place in pairs to ensure that everyone has a go and produces as much language as possible but it is not what we always do. I have noticed that first of all, the children really do enjoy the whole group discussion, when everyone can contribute and when we do something together. I cannot quite describe it but it is almost palpable, this ‘team spirit’ and it does have a positive impact on them and on the atmosphere in the group. Plus, they are always curious about everyone else’s creative (aka crazy) ideas so they pause to eavesdrop, especially when there are giggles coming up from different parts of the circle. Because of that, we do both, a lot of whole class and a lot of pairwork.
Some of the activities to use in the Speaking Circle:
Tell me about that boy: the kids choose a person, an animal, a character or an object in the picture. The kids choose themselves what they want to conversation to be about and what information to include. The basic information usually includes emotions, clothes, activities or location.
Yes or no: the kids use the picture as the basis to make true or false sentences about the picture. The other students listen and correct the sentences when necessary.
Riddles: the kids describe something in the picture (the colour, the size, the location and the activities) for the others to guess
Which one is better?: the kids draw two cards out of the pile (animals, gadgets, food or anything else that we are studying) and they choose which one is better.
It’s a pair: the kids look for associations among different objects, people, animals in the set and they have to explain why they have put them together
Silly pictures: the kids talk about different silly things they see in the pictures
Silly stories: the kids come up with a character and they take turns in coming up with the adventures based on the set of verbs and / or other words that the teacher prepares in advance (displayed on the whiteboard or on the mini-whiteboards).
Angelina: the kids chat with the class puppet, ask and answer questions (pre-primary groups)
Hello dice: a new variation of the hello circle that can be introduced long before the kids actually study the Past Simple. They roll the dice, once, in turns and talk about their day, starting with the key phrase and we try to encourage including justification (‘School was easy because I have only 4 lessons on Tuesday’) or evaluation (‘I ate soup and it was very yummy’) etc. Sometimes we also play with the imaginary dice which basically means that everyone can choose what they want to talk about. Somehow, then number 6 is the most common choice. Perhaps because it is most generative of all of them and it is fun to say that ‘I didn’t go to Mars’, ‘I didn’t eat a fox’, ‘I didn’t dance in the park’ and what not. Not to mention that they just LOVE rolling the imaginary dice.
I kept it colour-coded to help them navigate among the verbs in the early days of this game.
Why we like it
The kids love it
They are very creative, they have great ideas and they want to share them
By being creative, they also develop their creativity, there are new ideas, new approaches and even more fun
Endless opportunities for revising without focusing too much on any specific vocabulary or structures.
Some potential for accidental learning and emerging vocabulary (although to make it work properly, I should start keeping track of it)
The activities do provide lots of opportunities for spontaneous (or almost spontaneous) language production where the only scaffolding devices are just the resources prepared by the teacher for the day and the langauge that the kids have at their disposal and, in many ways, we are just having a chat, despite being only A1 level.
Really, the part of the lesson that I really look forward to, every Tuesday and every Thursday.
Even only looking at the blog here, it is easy to figure out that I am passionate (or, well, let’s be honest: ‘obsessed’) about maximising production in young and very young children and I am constantly on the look-out for new techqniues, resources and activities that can help the youngest of my students produce more and more language.
This is how a few months ago I found Saffira Mattfield, who is a speech therapist from Australia (@onlinespeechie) and who uses colourful semanticswith her students to encourage them to produce more language, in full sentences. I have started using it and promoting it here on the blog, too.
Then, a few days ago, while searching for silly pictures that I could include in my lessons, I have found Allison Fors and her blog. Allison (@speech.allisonfos) is a speech therapist from California who creates resources for speech therapy (some are free, some can be purchased at a small fee) and who writes a lot about different techqniues used by therapists, parents and teachers that lead to enabling the little children to speak more and speak better.
If you think about it, EFL teachers and speech therapists have a lot in common. The context is different but the age group is the same: preschoolers and the aim is the same: get them to talk.
For example, when it comes to picture scenes, Allison suggests using them:
to have a conversation about the picture
to work on vocabulary sets as all the picture scenes have a theme ie the beach, in the kitchen, etc.
to work on verbs and Present Continuous as all the picture scenes usually involve a group of characters involved in different activities
to practise asking and answering Wh-questions
to practise prepositions, nouns and pronouns, directions and inferences.
Among some other ideas that I have found on her blog are using blank comics in speech therapy, using short videos or sensory play. Of course, the very young beginner learners of English as a foreign language, will not be able to produce as much language as the L1 speakers but lots of ideas that could be adapted to our needs.
Another source of inspiration can be Carmen Perez and her blog, although it is in Spanish so a little bit more difficult to access.
Perhaps this ia a new area to research and to be inspired by for us, too? What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
www.seanparks.net, also reproduced by allisonfors.com and aulap.org
Can you see what I see? Are you thinking what I am thinking?
This adventure started like many others, really, with google and one of those straightforwardly mindless searches and a hope that the engine can actually pleasantly surprise you once more. this time it was ‘silly pictures for kids, clip art’ or something similar.
When I came up, I tried to take in all the absurdities all at once but at the same time, my teaching brain was firing at me with the many ideas of how I could use it in class. If I had been an ancient Greek philospher, most likely, I would be running around shouting ‘Eureka’ but since I am only a humble teacher, the only reaction was a rather excited mumble ‘THIS is going to be SO good!’
Now, this Crumbs post is going to be slightly different. We are still in the middle of winter holidays so there hasn’t been a chance to properly trial and test it with mu kids. but I am going to share it anyway, now, and the real classroom experience is going to be added in a week.
Here are the activities I am planning for next week
Preschoolers: Yes and No.
With my second year preschoolers, we are going to use the winter scene as this one is most relevant due to the what’s happening in the world outside of our windows and because the vocabulary and structures that we are already familiar and this picture has a chance of being most productive.
Yes and No is a game that my kids are familiar with. The teacher makes a sentence about the picture, which can be true or false and the kids have to react to it and correct it, using either a full sentence or only a phrase, depending on their abilities.
For example:
T: I can see a girl. She is sliding on a doughnut.
SS or S 1: Yes / Yes, it’s true.
T: I can see a girl. She is wearing one yellow hat.
SS or S: No. She is wearing 5 hats.
https://www.pinterest.ru/pin/96686723224800785/
Primary: Can you see something really silly?
Step 1: Prediction
T tells the kids that they are going to see a picture of a campsite. T asks the whole class to guess what might be in the picture. To make it even more dramatic, T can ask the kids to close their eyes, imagine that they are in the forest and say what is happening. T may preteach some of the campsite-related words that kids might not be familiar with yet.
Step 2: Silly campsite
T tells the students that the campsite that they are going to see is a little silly. Kids work in pairs. T gives out a copy of the picture per pair. Kids circle and describe all the silly things they can see.
Step 3: What’s the silliest thing in the picture?
To round up, each student chooses one thing in the picture that they think is the silliest one.
www.seanparks.net, also reproduced by allisonfors.com and aulap.org
Primary: Silly pictures reading practice
This one was inspired by an activity I found on aulapt.org and, automatically, I wanted to have my own. Here is it, created on wordwall and it will be shared as an additional homework task.
Primary: Tell me about this boy…Because
All these silly picture scenes are going to be the main character in our free speaking activities that has become a regular feature in our lessons recently.
One of the easiest activities to apply here is ‘Tell me about this boy‘. In the beginning, the teacher is leading the activity, chosing the people, animals or objects to describe and the students, in turns, decide what information they want to share. Now we have reached the stage when the kids are comfortable enough with working in pairs and taking turns in choosing the parts of the illustration for their partners and describing what was selected for them.
Now, with this new resources and all the absurdity, I would like to go in the direction of looking for rationale for their actions. We will try to play ‘Because‘. It might not always be easy but since the students are in charge of their discourse (well, ok, their mini-discourse), they can focus on how the people are feeling, what they like or don’t like or what they did before that might have had an impact on their non-standard behaviour now. Especially that we have just started talking about the past, using was/were and the affirmative forms of the regular and irregular verbs so that might be just a perfect opportunity to practise these.
Stage 1: Extended modelling
T: Tell me about this animal.
S1: It is a bull. It is swimming.
T: Because he likes water.
T: Tell me about this man.
S2: He is sitting. He’s got a big fork.
T: Because he is very hungry.
Stage 2: Because
Since this is a new kind of an activity and it might quite challenging to find the rationale for all the actions, we will play it together, to ensure a good brainstorming session. Kids will be choosing what they want to talk about and the whole class will try to say what everyone is doing and why.
In the worst case scenario, we might resort to our ‘Because because’ answer which they sometimes use or we might just go for a simple ‘Because it’s fun’.
This ia brand new adventure for us. I will be back in a few weeks to let you know whether it was a story of success or yet another epic fail story to post on this blog, too.
If you are interested in our free speaking practice circle, have a look at this post and if you would like to know more about what EFL teachers can learn from speech therapists – here is another post to check out!
If you are looking for more ideas on using pictures in speaking activities, here are two posts from the series of ‘All you need is…a picture’ and, its Volume 2 (because activities are accumulating:-)
PS A word of confession: it was very difficult to resource these illustrations. They have been posted, reposted and shared a million times, sometimes losing the artist on the way. I did my best!
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
There are eight students in the group with whom I trialled this lesson. They are about 12 – 14 years old and we are now finishing the A2 level. The inspiration for this very lesson (apart from my own personal obsession with storybooks and storybook illustrations) was one of the reading tasks that we did cover, taken from Prepare 3 2nd edition by Cambridge University Press in which we discussed books and everything we read in general. The thing that really inspired me to put together this lesson was one of the follow-up questions asked on page 104 and it went: Do you think that books with illustrations in them are just for the little kids? and, which came as a surprise, this was the question that generated a real discussion.
Almost at the same time, I received a delivery from a bookshop with as many as eight new storybooks and that basically was it. I wanted a new lesson, a different lesson.
The teacher brings up (or brings up again, as in our case) the topic of illustrations and drawings in books in general. Students discuss in pairs or teams.
Are the illustrations and drawings only for the little kids?
Are the photographs only for adults?
What do the teenagers like then?
The teacher regroups the students, to make sure that each student has a new partner. The students, now in new pairs, report what they have discussed. Afterwards, the teacher asks each pair ‘Do you have the same opinion as your partner?’, this way summarising the entire discussion so far.
Where’s my baby? by Julie Ashworth and John Clarke
Setting the context
The teacher shows selected illustrations and the titles of the storybooks to be used in class. I have used the covers but these might not always be appropriate. It might be a better idea to choose one of the illustrations from the story. The students discuss the following questions:
What can you see in the picture (on the cover page)?
What can the story be about?
An open class discussion follows. At this point the teacher does not reveal anything about the plot of any of the stories. The students will be able to figure it out for themselves in one of the later stages of the lesson.
I’ve seen Santa! by David Bedford and Tim Warnes
The storybooks selection
When I taught this lesson for the first time I used the following coursebooks
I’ve seen Santa! by David Bedford and Tim Warners from Little Tiger: I have chosen this because they are cosy and warm, something that might be an example of typical, obviously beautiful storybook illustrations which are there only to accompany the text.
Where’s my baby? by Julie Ashworth and John Clark from Longman. This book is a good example of a basic framework chosen to tell the story. All the pages are basically the same scene: Mr Monster Officer and Mrs Monster looking at yet another monster baby. The baby is the only element that is changing from page to page, as the officer’s confusion and Mrs Monster’s desperation grow.
Mr Noisy and the Giant by Roger Hargreaves from Mr Men and Little Miss Magic. This might be a good example of simple and uncomplicated, illustrations that might have been drawn by little children.
Perfectly Norman by Tom Percival from Bloomsbury. This is a gem of a book where the story is told through the words and by the visuals, both of these being separate entities in their own rights, complementing each other.
A Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston from Walker Books Ltd. This title is unique, like all the books by Oliver Jeffers and here a story of the importance of books is told and illustrated by pictures made of words (which are also the quotes from the classic child literature, all titles acknowledged in the inside covers).
Perfectly Norman by Tom Percival
Vocabulary
We have looked at some of the vocabulary related to storybooks that the students might need in the following stage. In a way, for my students, it was the follow-up on the vocabulary presented in the coursebook, and for that reason I decided to include the following: cover, text, illustrations, writer, illustrator, reader, character, background, details, plot, dark, bright, easy, complex, drawn, printed, painted.
The students were working in pairs, matching the definitions with the terms, follwed by a whole class feedback and an exercise in which we talked together about one of the books, using these words. For this exercise it is best to choose the title that is the biggest in size so that it could be comfortably demonstrated by the teacher and seen by the students. By discussing the storybook together, the teacher can also guide the students and ask some follow-up questions, to model what the students will be requested to do in the following stage. One or two questions from the set below can also be used.
A Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston
Discussion
The students work in pairs or groups of three. Each team gets one of the storybooks and a set of questions to discuss, based on what they see in the storybook. The teacher sets the time limit and when the time is up, the students exchange the storybooks and the procedure is repeated until all the teams have had a chance to look at all the books.
We worked in four teams and we used about 5 minutes per book.
The questions the students were asked to answer were as follows:
Please describe the book using the key words.
Look at the illustrations only. What is the story about? Can you ‘read’ the story only by looking at the illustrations? Why? Why not?
Look at the text (some or parts). What is the story about? Do you like it?
Do you like the illustrations? Are they simple or complex? Beautiful or ugly? Dark or bright?
Do the illustrations make you feel happy / sad / angry / bored / ? Why?
After all the students have looked at and discussed all the storybooks, the teacher asks them to answer the following questions
Which book has got the best illustrations? Why do you like them?
Which book has got the worst illustrations? Why don’t you like them?
The teacher monitors and helps to keep the discussion going. A whole class discussion follows. The teacher may highlight the main points, as outlined above (the storybook selection) but, really, the main aim of this kind of a lesson and this kind of a discussion is the opportunity for the students to look and to draw their own conclusions and formulate their own opinions. There are no correct or incorrect answers and interpretations.
Mr Noisy and the Giant by Roger Hargreaves
Conclusions
This was the first lesson of this kind with this particular group. It was obvious that, at the very beginning, some of the students did not feel very comfortable with expressing their views and even with formulating them. However, even as we went through the task, it all got easier, with the second or third book and they were all involved in the discussion. It was great to see how they ventured out into evaluating the illustrations and uncovering their meaning for themselves.
Their answers in the final survey on the favourite set of illustrations were also unexpected because of them could not really make up their mind and they chose two, very different books: the more conventional ‘I’ve seen Santa!’ and the more unusual ‘Perfectly Norman‘.
All in all, I did decide to give myself a pat of on the shoulder for that lesson and I am already planning the next one. Maybe it will be devoted to storybooks, maybe not.
If you, dear reader, have any storybooks lying around and no idea for a lesson, here is your lesson plan!
Bonus: an easier start
I have written the post and only then did I realise that, perhaps, not all the teachers will feel perfectly comfortable and ready to enter the world of the storybook illustrations at a full throttle, especially if they have not dealt with this approach to language teaching.
Storybook illustrations can be used on their own, as visuals, only slightly different visuals, as an alternative to photographs or YL scene illustrations. In this case, the teacher can choose any storybook illustrations, in no connection to the story itself or the entire book.
The teacher gives them out and uses them as the basis for one of the following exercises
YLE Starters, Movers, Flyers speaking such as answering questions about pictures, talking about differences
PET speaking picture description
FCE or CAE speaking (compare the pictures and answer the questions)
some of the ideas I shared in my post on using illustrations to develop speaking skills ‘All you need is…a picture’
This way the students (and the teacher) will get introduced to the storybooks illustrations and using drawings will be a lovely and an interesting alternative to the visuals that we usually encounter in our lessons or coursebooks. I promise that it will make a difference! And, on top of everything else, you will be developing your students’ visual literacy!
I have committed a piece about Pasha, the invisible student only to realise that there are more unsung heroes in my classroom. Enter Mr Milk.
The beginnings
Mr Milk has been a frequent guest in my classes for a very long time now and, and unlike in Pasha’s case, I know that for sure because I remember the students (8 and 9-year-olds, A1 level boys plus Nastya) and I do remember the classroom itself: Moscow, Sokolniki, 2008. Since then, it’s been twelve years and a quite a few generations of students.
This time round, I also remember the sources of inspiration. One of them was the game I played with my cousin, Magda. When we were much younger, we used to come up with silly names for characters according to the formula: a very traditional first name and an everyday household object for the family name. Hence Peter Radiator and Archibald Loudspeaker. It must have left a mark because up to this day, I get weirdly excited when I come across such surnames in real life. Tetradkina, Karandashovna, Sobachkina*…Oh, what a dream!
The other sources of inspiration was definitely the amazing videoclip for the Blur’s song Coffee and TV. It’s just the ending of the main character dying and going to heaven has (so far) kept me from using it in class.
Mr Milk arrives when…
we start talking about other people, moving away from ‘I am’, ‘I have got’, ‘I can’ and ‘I like’
we introduce Present Simple 3rd singular. No day is too weird, too amazing or too everyday for Mr Milk.
we introduce Past Simple and start telling stories. Mr Milk is a superhero and literally anything can happen to him.
The best thing about Mr Milk is that he rarely stays on his own and as soon as he feels comfortable, all his pals, relatives and enemies so that we are never short of people to talk about. Mr Cheese, Mr Coffee, Mr Apple, Miss Umbrella, Mr Banana…And once he comes, he never leaves. And, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea why the kids like Mr Milk so much. But they really do.
The next step?
Well, that’s easy. It takes very little for the kids to start coming up with their own characters’ names. This week, for example, we spent a good portion of the lesson talking about the adventures of Mr Bike Strawberry. After they had decided whether ‘Bike’ was better as a name or a surname, that is. Oh, there was a caterpillar, too.
This particular story involved Mr Bike chasing the teacher, an absent teacher, happy students drinking lemonade in class and one sad football (sad because everyone was kicking it).
And, as a result of all that, one real life teacher, very very happy at the amount of the language produced. And eternally grateful to Mr Milk.
Here, in the other post, you can read about using noughts and crosses to tell stories in class.
Happy teaching!
*) Tetradkina from the words тетрадь (notebook), карандаш (pencil) and собачка (a little dog). Although, to be honest, I am not quite sure if all of them are real Russian surnames.
Here is my favourite character who would be a perfect amabassador for ‘We want more‘, my professional obsession (you might have noticed:-) and some of my favourite solutions for the classroom.
Trick number 1: The language
Regardless of what coursebook is used or what curriculum is followed, there are certain language items that can be included even in the pre-primary programme that will enable children to communicate and produce more language.
Some of these language items include:
descriptive adjectives, such as big – small, long – short, happy – sad, beautiful – ugly, serious – funny, old – new, etc. Introducing them in opposites will make it easier for the students to understand and to remember
simple linkers, introduced gradually, starting with ‘and’ (‘blue and green’, ‘cats and dogs’, ‘I like bananas and apples’), then moving on to ‘because’ ( starting with ‘I am happy because it is sunny’) and perhaps even ‘but’ (‘I like dancing but I don’t like dancing with a bear’, like in the song from Super Simple Songs).
introduce Present Continuous, because it will be easy to play with it in all the miming games and it will come in very handy while describing pictures and telling stories.
talking about other people. Personalisation is very important while learning language, not only with the little ones, but it is also a good idea to start introducing other people and the language we need to talk about them such as ‘she/he is / has got / can / likes’
Trick number 2: The freedom of speech
This freedom of speech has got very little with the civil rights. It is all about the degree of freedom that the students are given or, in other words, about the scaffolding and the support that are slowly removed in order not to limit the students and to enable them to choose what they want to talk about.
One way of doing it is shifting from closed yes/no questions towards more open-ended questions. ‘What do you like to eat?’ is more likely to generate more language that only ‘Do you like bananas?’ which will lead to one-word answers or maybe even only gestures. ‘Tell me about‘ will be a lot more generative.
Using this approach while working with illustrations, pictures or any kind of visuals will give students the opportunity to choose for themselves what to talk about. And it is quite likely that they will pick the topics (elements or aspects of the picture) that they are either more interested in, have more knowledge of or are better prepared to discuss. In any case, more language is likely to be generated.
Examples or real activities? Here you are:
Pairs is a speaking activity that uses a simple material of a set of pictures. The students put them in pairs, in any way they want. They also have to justify their choice. In case of the younger learners, this principle can be the colour (‘Panda and zebra. They are black and white’) but kids can also choose any other reason for that, like ‘Zebra and horse, they have 4 legs’ or ‘Bear and deer. They live in the forest’.
This activity can be also used with the older students who are given a list of words and have to put them in pairs, according the knowledge and the language they have.
Below you can see the end of the game with my pre-primary student. It started off slowly, with simple sentences about the colours that the animals have in common but as the activity progressed, the categories changed, too and we have here an example of animals that have a long tail (a lizard and a monkey), animals that live in the forest (a bear, a fox and a deer) or animals that like meat (a tiger and a lion).
This is the final product of our Pairs activity, using the visuals on Miro
Tell me about is another activity that uses a visual, for example a set of pictures with animals or a picture scene. Students choose an element for their peers to describe, for example Tell me about this boy’ and it is easy to imagine the variety of responses that these can generate. Students can choose to talk they boy’s clothes, feelings or actions.
Trick number 3: The appropriate activities and materials
Our students do what we want them to do. It is assumed so, precisely because we are teachers and they are students. The roles have been assigned once and for all. The question to ask yourself, though, is Would they really want to do it, if they had a choice?Is there anything in the task itself that would encourage them to? Or not.
Certainly, it does not meant that all those less-exciting-but-crucial activities will be renounced forever, because even though they are not always fun from the point of view of our students, they might still be necessary and useful, but it is an interesting aspect to start taking into consideration while lesson planning.
Here a few activities that use that principle
Yes or no? This is an activity that also uses visuals as the basis. In the first stages of the activity, the teacher describes the picture using very simple structure ‘I can see’ when some of the sentences are true and some are false. Students listen to the sentences and correct the sentences. In case of the pre-primary students, this is likely to be one-word production but with time, they are learning to respond in full sentences. Later on, when the students are familiar with the format of the activity, they are invited to take a leading role in the activity, also producing true or false sentences about the picture for the teacher and their peers to correct.
Kids love the game because they can correct the teacher’s mistake and they are allowed to create their own un-true sentences about the pictures and to try to trick the teacher. I have used it both with primary and pre-primary students. The younger kids, naturally, needed more time to adjust and to start producing full sentences, in the beginning they would only provide the key information, for example the colour or the number of objects but, eventually, they were comfortable enough with producing full sentences. At approximately the same time, they were ready to lead the game, too. The older, primary students could make this transition within a lesson.
This is how we were telling our own version of ‘Pete the Cat. I’m rocking in my school shoes’ using the visuals on Miro
Storytelling for pre-primary is based on picture description. Here, the easily available materials might involve the stories from the coursebooks for pre-primary, retelling together any other story used in class or even any of the materials in the YLE Starters materials. In this case storytelling is scaled down to simple picture description, in the appropriate sequence.
Storytelling for primary can also use the visuals but it can be more challenging with the use of storydice or a storytelling treasure hunt (see here)
The lion and the kitten is a simple boardgame that has been very helpful in encouraging the students to produce the language. It was created and used with the online 1-1 pre-primary students. The game does not use a dice. Instead the students can choose the box where they want to go next and in each round, they have to talk about one of the pictures hidden under the yellow, orange and blue diamonds. In the beginning the sentences are very simple and focus on simple vocabulary (‘It’s mommy‘), later on these can be exchanged for a more detailed description (‘Mommy is happy‘ or ‘Mommy is dancing‘) and even further extended with the use of ‘because’ (‘Mommy is dancing because she is happy’) or in any other way that is within the children’s linguistic ability.
This game gives children a lot of freedom and almost a guaranteed victory. The cards can be changed easily, especially in the online format, and even if not, new sentences can be made every time the game is played. With a group of children, a dice would probably have to be used.
This is the board for our boardgame, also created using the visuals available on Miro.
Are you in the park? is a simple guessing game turned into a role-play. Each student has a city plan (since this was the language that we were working at the time) and three stickers which they glue somewhere ‘in the city’. They keep their picture secret and they try to guess where their partner is at the time.
Student A: Are you at the bank / park / market?
Student B: Yes, I am / No, I am not.
After a while, they can ask for help.
Student A: Please help me.
Student B: I can see…I can hear…I can smell….
Student A: You are…
Initially, the stickers were introduce only to prevent the kids from ‘cheating’ but they absolutely loved having random leftover stickers all over the place. In the first lesson we play, it was pirates, in the second one, it was farm. They laughed a lot about having little pigs and chicks all over their cities. The other incentive was the opportunity to imagine and to describe the places from the angle of what they saw, heard and smelled in different places in the city. The kids had the full control over the game and they were making the decision themselves when to move to the second stage.
created using an image from classroomclipart.com and Miro
Before you even look: tell the students that it is a picture of a bedroom, have them predict what they might see…Then we look at the real one and check.
Tell me about this room: the students describe the room, using the language that they are familiar with, ‘there is’, ‘I can see’, perhaps only the nouns, perhaps nouns and colours and prepositions.
Riddles: the kids make up simple riddles for their partners to guess. ‘It is black and it is on the chair’.
Stickers dictation: this one is more appropriate for the lower levels and was inspired by the sticker activity in the Superminds coursebooks by CUP. It is also a perfect opportunity to use up all the leftover stickers that no one ever asks for. Students work in pairs and they upgrade the illustrations in their coursebooks (as in: any illustrations) with the stickers. Student A is telling student B where to put the five stickers in one of the coursebooks and then they swap roles.
Teacher = Cheater: the kids open their books and look at the picture. The teacher tells them about her non-existent picture which is, surprisingly, very different from the picture in the coursebook.
Students = Cheaters: the kids describe their made-up rooms, also, very different from the bedroom that they are looking at.
In my real room: particularly appropriate for the online classes since the children will be already sitting in their rooms and can easily compare the illustration with the reality but can be done in the offline lessons, too.
Because: students describe the picture but instead of just focusing on what exactly they can see they try to find the rationale for what they can see. ‘The books are on the floor because….’
The story behind the picture: even such an uninspiring picture in which nothing is happening (really) can be a starting point to writing a story or telling a story. The only thing that you need is a set of questions to get them started, for example: Who lives in this room, a boy or a girl? How old is he/she? What is his / her name? What does he / she like? He / she is not in his/her room. Where is he/she? What is he/she doing? What did he/she do before? What is he / she going to do next?
Dice games: the teacher has to assign the structures to each of the numbers on the dice and these can be easily adapted to the level of the students. The standard set might include: 1 = I can see, 2 = There is, 3 = There are, 4 = It’s on / under / in, 5 = It’s green / red, 6 = It’s big/ small / beautiful. You can also include: I like, I don’t like, …is doing what, is happy/ sad/angry, there aren’t any and so on, depending on the picture. Kids work in pairs, roll the dice and describe the picture using the assigned structures.
Noughts and crosses: It takes three lines to turn any picture into a noughts and crosses game. Students play the game in pairs but before they put their mark in one of the boxes, they have to describe what they can see there in one, two or even three sentences. To keep the kids interests up, a marking scheme can be introduced, a twin grid, with points which is of course kept secret until the end of the round (in Miro – under the noughts and crosses grid, on paper – on the corner that is folded under). This way we always have a winner, the person who collects more points for the boxes that they have described. Sometimes we have two winners, too, the logical one and the mathematical one.
Memory games: first, the students get to look at the picture for a minute or two. The teacher asks them to remember the details, all the colours, actions, number of children and so on. Afterwards, the students are divided into teams. The teacher can use either a set of pre-prepared sentences some of which are true and some of which are false. The teams pick out one of the cards, read the sentence and check how much they remember. This version is more T-centred but it has the advantage of additional reading practice. In another version, the students get to look at the picture again and make up a sentence about it, for the other team to guess. They can also write their own set of sentences which will be later used to test the other team.
There are two pictures…
I can make it different: the starting point is a picture and it can be copied and upgraded in any way the teacher sees fit, using all the beautiful tools that the Miro board has to offer (google image search and icons). It will take some time but it means that it can be adapted to the level, skills and interests of a particular group and then saved and recycled forever. Just like these two pictures here…
Predict the Differences: the children can only see one of the pictures and they try to figure out all the ways in which the two pictures can differ. It might be especially effective if they are already familiar with the task format and know that they have to be looking out for different patterns, activities, objects that the people are holding, throwing, the comparisons between two objects, the location on the right or left side of the picture and so on.
Predict the Differences Quiz: the idea is the same but we add the competitive element and another skill as the teams or pairs of students are asked to write ten potential differences between the picture they can see and the other one. The team that manages to better at predicting wins.
Find the difference: we can ask the students to work in pairs but to find all the differences without showing their picture to the partner. This is not going to be a strict Movers or Flyers preparation task but we are going to raise the level of challenge and they students will really have to listen carefully in order to establish how these two pictures are different.
One big and ten small pictures: it is not necessary to kill another tree to ensure that each child has two pictures right in front of their eye. One, enlarged copy of Picture A can be displayed on the board (or on the screen) and compared with the picture B in students’ coursebooks.
Accidental friends: illustrations that were created not as a ‘find the difference’ task but can easily serve the purpose. Examples? Any of the Movers and Starters reading and writing story tasks or any of the Movers or Flyers speaking story tasks…The theme is already there and looking for differences can be a nice warm-up to storytelling or story-writing activities…
Very, very different: the illustrations that can be used in this kind of a task do not even have to be specifically created with that purpose in mind. Any (and I mean it: any) two pictures depicting ‘a bedroom’ can be used to find the differences. The crazily pink exhibit A here and practically any page of the IKEA catalogue…And pronto!
YLE listening task recycled: these can be used as a listening task, to prepare for the format and to develop listening skills but they can be later used again as a colouring dictation activity. Students work in pairs, one is in charge of the coloured pencils and speaking (‘Colour the bird yellow’), the other one – in charge of the colouring page and listening. Half-way through the activity they swap roles.
This is already more productive but the best is yet to come. Since it is a freer practice activity and students make their own decisions regarding the choice of the colours, it is quite likely that all the pictures will be different. And then…Yes, we can compare them, in groups of four.
Actually, even a leftover listening copies can be used in the same way (Saving the planet, remember?). After all, regardless of which exam it is, the students only have to colour five elements of the picture and the rest of them can be used in a speaking task like that.
Colouring printables: can be used in exactly the same way. Not all the pages will do, for example a large drawing of a cat does not really offer too much as an object to be described and I try not to use colouring pictures which are too big as some students like to be precise and colouring those might take too much of the precious time of the lesson. Other than that, just open google and type in: a child’s bedroom colouring page…Ready! And if there are any words that the students don’t know yet, we can always learn them. Even if they are not on the YLE word list and just because ‘a dragonfly’ might be a cool word to know😊
Which one is different?
Which one is different? Why?
Vocabulary practice: we only need four pictures out of is one is different. It might be a set of four objects, three of which are blue and one of which is red and the students do not even need to know the name of all of the objects. They can still complete the task by using the structure ‘It’s blue’ or even ‘blue’. We can create such by using icons or google images on the Miro board or by arranging and re-arranging the flashcards that accompany our books.
Grammar practice: the focus here can be chosen depending on the topic of the lesson and it can be limited to only ‘it has got…legs’ with animal flashcards, ‘it’s big’ with school objects, ‘I like’ with food, prepositions, Present Continuous and what not.
Kids take over: the students can make up their own chains, either with the coursebooks flashcards or the mini-flashcards (always a good idea to have two or three sets of those for each topic, they can be reused throughout the course).
Chant it! This is the only variation here that I have not had a chance to use in the classroom but if you look at it from the right angle, all of a sudden, there is a lot of potential here: each chain has four pictures and each of them can become a separate verse. The kids can clap for the similar concepts and stomp for the odd one out…
It’s a good idea but it’s not my idea: the kids talk about the pictures and describe the odd one out but they have to go on until they guess the teacher’s original idea (probably better to write it down somewhere in order to be able to prove that we have not been cheating this time😊. If the appropriate topic has been chosen (such as, for instance, animals), this activity can go on for almost forever and the students will produce a terrifying amount of language. Once they learn to think outside of the box, this same activity can be used with all the seemingly less ‘appealing’ topics, too.
How many can you think of: a similar idea but realised slightly differently as students work with the exam materials but try to think of as many reasons to odd one of the pictures out…
Well, 27 activities…Not bad, not bad at all. I might be adding to this list in the future.
I hope you have found something useful here! And if you have used it in class, please let me know!
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
Have you got something that you could file under ‘professional interests‘ (or, more to the point in some cases, ‘professional obsessions’)? Mine is language production.
That is why I am always on the lookout for new ideas on how to trick my students into producing more and more. And more. Some of these ideas can be found on this blog, in the posts on the discourse clock, pairwork for pre-schoolers, using songs or cognitive skills-based activities to develop speaking. Today – a new post in the series.
It was probably one of those free-falling searches on Instagram, with no rhyme and reason, that got me to Saffira Mattfield’s (@onlinespeechie) Instagram post on Colourful Semantics. A very special moment, like when you stumble upon a proper toolbox with the screwdrivers and bolts and saws and monkey wrenches…Or, when in the supermarket, you wander into the baking aisle and, all of a sudden, all the professional decorations and ingredients right within your arm’s reach…This amazing and a very powerful feeling of: ‘I could do so much with it!’
Colourful Semantics
The approach was created in the 90s by a UK-based speech therapist Alison Bryan in order to help children develop their speaking skills especially as regards the use of full sentences, storytelling and so on.
The main idea behind colourful semantics is the colour-coding of parts of speech and the parts of the sentence and developing the habit of including all the necessary ‘ingredients’ in the simpler or more complex sentences. This is done with the use of the cards, like those in the photograph below. Subject (who?) is orange, verb (what doing) – yellow, object (what?) – green and, location (where?) – blue.
Colourful Semantics cards from @onlinespeechie Saffira Mattfield
Children start with building simple sentences by using only two cards, for example ‘The girl’ (an orange card) and ‘is painting’ (a yellow card) and putting them next to each other on the template. Later on they move to constructing sentences made of three elements, for example ‘The girl’ (an orange card), ‘is painting’ (a yellow card) and ‘a balloon’ (a green card) or even four, by adding the blue card with the location, for example ‘in the park’. They not only learn to remember to include all the elements but they can also manipulate them physically. The sentence itself becomes less abstract since it all its key elements are represented visually.
If you are interested in all the details, please have a look at the bibliography.
Colourful Semantics cards from @onlinespeechie Saffira Mattfield
Colourful Semantics in EFL? Yes, please!
Colourful semantics perfectly resonates with everything that I have been doing in my lessons. Grammar structures and the format of the sentence are an abstract concept, beyond the grasp of pre-schoolers especially those who live in their own country, surrounded mostly by their mother tongue and not exposed to a sufficient amount of the target language. By using some kind of a visual representation of the parts of speech or the parts of the sentence, we make it more accessible to them and we enable production.
This visual representation can be realised through:
using gestures such as ‘pointing at yourself and sliding the hand along your body to draw attention to your clothes’ for ‘I am wearing’
using symbols such as ‘a heart’ for ‘I like’ and ‘a crossed heart’ for ‘I don’t like’
using flashcards such as ‘big’ and ‘cat’ to elicit a chunk ‘a big cat’
And…colours!
While making the sentences, students will be required to use all the required colours, ‘to tick all the boxes’, this way building a full sentence or a phrase. Of course, they might require more support from the teacher who will have to ensure that they did not skip any of the elements, but, the hope is that with time, including all the elements will become a habit.
Colourful semantics in the EFL classroom: how to get started
Step one: very easy
Get in touch with Saffira (@onlinespeechie) in order to get your own set of the ready-made cards. It is a perfect way of familiarising yourself with the colourful semantics in practice and to understand how it can be adapted to our EFL context. Although, of course, these cards can be used in the EFL classroom as they are, depending on the level of your students.
Step two: adapting the idea to your groups’ needs
The materials presented below were used with a group of the second level of four- and five-year-olds. Since they were still learning online, they were not using any real cards but only the visuals created with the Miro board. The unit was built around the topic of the house and included some furniture vocabulary, the prepositional phrases ‘the cat is on the sofa’ and some of the Present Continuous based on a story as well as a song.
The boards were used to practise these phrases were used later in the unit, when the student had become familiar with all the basic components. The main structure ‘The mice are having fun’ was introduced through a song. The first time the cards were used, the teacher was a very active participant, taking turns with all the kids to make sentences. In the following lessons, the teacher only modelled the activity and was responsible for moving the pictures around in accordance with the sentences the kids were producing.
The first set was designed to support the production of the sentences with the preposition ‘on’ which were later practised in a freer practise activity (‘My room’) whereas the second one focused on Present Continuous which was later reinforced in a storybook activity.
For the time being, a decision was made not to adapt the original colour-coding system and instead, a set of colours was assigned freely to each structure, to help the children associate them with each particular components of different structures, rather than with the whole system.
Reflection time
I have just started experimenting with this approach in my classes but the first steps in the world of Colourful Semantics have been more than exciting. This is definitely not the end of that adventure. Right now I am working on a set of cards that I could share with the parents of my students so that they could be printed, cut up and used at home.
Want to find out more? Start here:
Bryan, A. (1997) Colourful Semantics: thematic role therapy. In Chiat, S., Law, J. and Marshall, J. (Eds) Language Disorders in Children and Adults: Psycholinguistic approaches to therapy. London
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
DIY is the answer, in most cases. Especially in the VYL world.
All those missing, lost or non-existent flashcards, magic wands, puppets, handouts, balls, hats, masks, storybooks that we just nevermind-gonna-make-my-own-then (it really should be a verb).
DIY was the answer, an obvious answer and, yet, an answer that, on this particular occasion, took quite ages to land on the table and to become obvious.
The equation? A group of very young learners, studying online, helpful parents (but no printers at home so no customized handouts), a coursebook (but with tasks that I could make work only in the classroom), no ready-made material (and two steps away from regretting the decision to use the book altogether).
The first fifteen minutes went by peacefully, filled with sighing and staring blankly at the page in the coursebook. The next fifteen minutes were similar, only the sighs became more desperate and angrier.
Not happy at all. Until…Nevermind, gonna make my own then.
This time: Listening homework tasks! It’s been only a month but I am absolutely loving it!
How to?
Minimal requirements, your phone recording app will do.
Usually two takes are enough to record (although, suspiciously enough, as soon as I start, there is always a police car or a fire engine whee-yoo-ing just outside my window)
After a first few exercises, I started to type up ‘the script’ and it made everything much smoother.
Why?
An opportunity to take English out of the classroom and a recording that the kids can listen to as many times as they want to
Extended exposure to English, especially in the area of the functional language that the teacher can create, shape and enlarge as the course progresses
A great support for the parents, to help them work at home with the child and to structure it properly
Any picture, any illustration or any photograph in the coursebook (or online) can be used as the basis for it.
Widens the range of homework activities (see the ideas below)
Amazingly, it is also a great tool to practise scaffolding for teachers because you have to dissect an activity and verbalize all the procedures in simple English and only then you start think of all the micro-stages and you can hear what your students might hear.
Some of the activities we have done so far
Identifying pictures (pre-primary): It is a simple riddles game, based on an illustration with the key vocabulary. Most coursebooks for pre-primary include a page which introduces all the new words. In the example that I am sharing with you, I also managed to incorporate a verse from song ‘Are you hungry?’ by Super Simple Songs.
Dictation (pre-primary) It is better to use a black and white picture, perhaps from the workbook
Any illustration can be used for this kind of an activity. A chapter usually starts with an illustration of all the key woIt’s a teddy. Brown (children circle the bear brown)
Identifying differences (primary). Additional listening and speaking practice in the format inspired by the YLE. You can use set of pictures from Movers or Flyers, a set of illustrations for Movers or Flyers story or your own set prepared using the miro board (my example uses a picture from classroomclipart.com and the miro icons). Students listen and describe how their picture is different. The same activity can be prepared using only one picture. In that case, the students are listen to the sentences about the picture and correct the mistakes, for example: In my picture, the white cat is sitting on the chair.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTBhq4TkE_M
Find a mistake (primary). The audio is a follow-up to the story / text done in class, record a summary of the story with some mistakes (and with pauses between sentences). Children listen and correct the mistakes. This is also an opportunity to expose them to a lot of past tense.The following task was prepared to follow-up a cartoon lesson from Superminds 1 by Cambridge University Press. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbwiidV_i7Y
Ask your mum! (pre-primary) Here, the audio is only used to set up a conversation between the child and the mum. A set of pictures (for example a picture dictionary at the back of the book) can be used as the worksheet for the kids to mark the answers they get from the parents, for example: ask ‘Mummy, do you like carrot?’ (and circle / cross the fruit that mum likes and doesn’t like, these symbols have been used in class before, the kids are familiar with them). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onlENphATDQ
Of course! You can hear kids blabbing in the hallway. To their mums, dads, nannies, friends, school’s security guards, all these never-ending stories of kindergarten adventures, scraps with siblings, birthday parties, visits from gran, new toys, rain in the playground, teeth lost, dead grasshoppers found…
They do it in Russian, of course, but that just proves that they are capable of discourse and that we, teachers, cannot really use the excuse of their age to justify all the one- word exchanges in the classroom.
Of course, they are already fluent users of Russian so they will be able to produce lots more, naturally but this post is not about catching up with the L1 but about what is feasible for the pre-primary students, pre-A1 level with the total of 90 or 120 minutes of exposure to the English language. More than just single word utterances.
I present to you… (drum roll): A discourse clock.
The tool itself is neither very complex or especially revolutionary. It is a just a neater and a more VYL-friendly toy which was created to support the kids in producing the language.
How to?
We play a game of riddles
Teacher demonstrates: moving the hands around the clock and producing sentences about a secret animal, from 12 o’clock to 12 o’clock. Kids guess the animal.
Kids take turns to make sentences about their secret animal for the group to guess.
Why we like it?
Moving the hands around makes this taks a little bit more kinaesthetic and it helps to structure the whole discourse by sequencing it and by highlighting all the topics to mention. The clock hands never stop half-way through. They have to make a full circle and they can only make a full circle when the language is produced.
The icons offer the visual support for the students and they represent all the language that they should know. But, apart from working as ‘visual reminders’, they can also be used by kids to ask for teacher’s help, by pointing at the word they need to use, without having to resort to their L1.
It is ridiculously easy to adapt to different topics and levels of challenge. The most basic animal clock can only include ‘big/small’ and ‘colours’ and more areas can be added to it as the kids progress through the unit or the course.
It works in the classroom and online.
Eventually, the clock becomes unnecessary and the kids are ready to produce longer stretches of discourse without it.
If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on pairwork in pre-school, using songs, activities based on developing cognitive skills and Colourful Semantics in EFL.
