Material design

Is it bigger? Is it smaller? Teaching comparatives to young learners

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A new series!

Welcome to the new series on the blog! Teaching grammar to young learners is one of my passions, especially that the students are getting younger and younger and / or the context is changing and you find yourself faced with a challenge of coming up with ideas to engage, to present and to practise with people who are still not really ready to deal with abstract terms and the target language goes beyond the easy-peasy bits of ‘is’ is for one cat and ‘are’ is for many (naturally accompanied by gestures and flashcards).

I have been interested in that area for some time already and I have written about before (please check the other emails in that category) but in the recent months, this has been especially present in my life. This year I am teaching in a school with a bilingual programme, and I am a teacher both of the BNC and of the ESL to a mixed ability group and on a random given Monday I may need to teach past simple or comparatives who students who are not the A1 level yet.

Hence this series. I will simply be sharing ideas that I have created or adapted for my students and, naturally, the activities that have worked well. Let’s get started. Comparatives first!

The context at hand

This year I am teaching two classes of year 1 (and of year 3 of the British National Curriculum) and I am responsible for their BNC year 3 curriculum as well as their ESL classes. Consequently, we have about one million different aims and the two most important among them are the following: developing the kids’ language skills and realising the aims of the BNC. My students are 6 and 7, they are in their year 1 of the state education. They language levels vary from pre-A1 to early A2. In case you are wondering regarding the aims, bilingual education to non-quite-so-bilingual kids is a different planet and I am only at the start of my journey but the main objective is that we are going to be closer to bilingual when we get to our year 4. It is all a process.

The most practical implication for me as a teacher is that we do not follow a linear curriculum, typical of foreign language learning and, that, for example comparatives and, subsequently, superlatives, is our target language in the fifth month of our year 1. As one of the examples. That, in turn, means that I am teaching my very young kids some advanced grammar points and I am trying to do it the best I can. I am hoping that some of these ideas will be useful to my fellow teachers out there.

Ideas for teaching and practising comparative forms

Presentation

  • My students already know a range of adjectives, because we have learnt lots of emotions, adjectives to describe characters and also adjectives to describe objects. My main aim of it was to give the kids a range of vocabulary which we can use in telling stories, retelling stories and describing pictures, all a part of my storytelling campaign. However, it was absolutely necessary to choose a very narrow range for the grammar presentation stage of the lesson and for me it was ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’, leaving behind, for now, the other short adjectives, the long adjectives, superlatives or the irregular adjectives. For now. As soon as we become familiar with one, we will move onto the other. For example, in one of the exercises, I decided to ‘smuggle’ longer and shorter, just to see how the kids react.
  • We revised all the adjectives and we had a short slot in which we described animals. I was showing some images and asking students ‘Is it big or small?’. All this time these two words were written on the board.
  • Afterwards, I stood right in front of the board and added, in a different colour, -er, to our words, changing them into ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ and then I uncovered it, faked surprise and asked ‘What happened here? What’s this?’ and I elicited the letters, asking the kids to read the new words. Afterwards, I demonstrated with these flashcards aiming at showing the difference between ‘big’ and ‘bigger’ and, naturally, ‘small’ and ‘smaller’ using a set of flashcards. It could go along the following lines: ‘Is the tiger big or small?’ ‘It’s big’. ‘Yes, it is. But, look, the elephant is BIGGER’. The same was done for small, with a mouse and a butterfly. I also used gestures to highlight the meaning. With these two adjectives, I tend to move my hand up, gradually for ‘bigger’ and move it closer to the floor or the table, gradually, for ‘smaller’. We repeated the same conversation about some other animals, trying to elicit the structure from the kids.
  • The next step was putting the key sentence on the board by adding flashcards to our words on the floor, creating a sentence made of visuals and words. The great advantage of this activity is the fact that you can adapt and create the sentences by replacing the flashcards and reading the sentences together. That, actually, will be the first controlled practice activity.

Practice

  • Bigger or smaller?, a guessing game: the teacher holds a pile of flashcards with animals, all the cards face de teacher takes out one card and shows it to the kids. Then the teacher asks ‘Bigger or smaller?’ and the kids make their decision, saying out loud ‘Bigger!’, ‘Smaller!’. Afterwards, the teacher takes out a card at random and the class check. Afterwards, the game continues with another card. The main aim of the game is to drill the key words in a simple way and to reinforce the idea. It can also be done with number flashcards or with school objects flashcards.
  • Who is bigger?, a simple movement activity in which the students compare themselves, in pairs, and the class decide who out of the two is bigger. The aim is to produce simple sentences, to personalise the target langauge and to involve the whole group, because, of course, only the students in the classroom are able to tell who, in fact, is different. It might be a good idea to think about the careful pairing of the students, choosing those who get on with each other or are friends to minimise the negative impact of ‘being smaller’. I also like to pair myself up with the kids and to highlight that they are going to grow bigger and bigger and bigger (one more chance to use the target language!). I have also ducked or sat on the floor, as a joke, so that the child could be bigger than me, at least for a moment.
  • Magic Bag, an object description game that we have already used in our classes. This time, however, the kids put their hands into the bag to describe the object they are holding but this time they do it twice. In the end, they have to objects they have to compare using ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ or any other adjectives at the later stages of this unit.
  • Who is bigger? Who is smaller?, a simple flashcard games whose main aim was to get the students to produce full sentences with bigger and smaller in a more active way. The game starts with the teacher taking out a card with an animal and letting each student take one, too and to keep it secret for now. The teacher reveals the card and says ‘I am a dog. I am small. Who is bigger? Who is smaller?’. The kids take turns, to reveal their animals and to produce the sentence. At the same time, they get up and take their place on the left of the teacher (if they are smaller) or on the right (if they are a bigger animal). In the end of the round, all the kids stand in line, at the board, lined up, from the smallest to the biggest animal. Since they take turns they can produce all the relevant sentences, i.e. ‘I am bigger than a dog. I am smaller than a tiger’ and so on. We play this game a few rounds. It might be necessary to give out one card per pair of students if the group is big.
  • Draw it!, a reading and drawing activity that I created to give the students a chance to reinforce the idea of the concept behind comparatives and to check understanding. The only thing that is necessary for this game is a piece of paper (or a notebook) and markers and crayons and a handout which you can find here. The paper is printed (only one copy) and cut up, all the cards end up in a bag or in a box. The kids take turns to take one of the cards, they read the sentence, a few times and everyone is drawing a relevant picture. The teacher monitors. The game can be later develop into a more SS-centred activity, as soon as the kids ready. In this adaptation, the key structure is written on the board: _____is bigger than_____ and _______is smaller than ______ and the kids themselves take turn to dicatate a sentence to draw.
  • What is bigger?, a reading and writing activity, also on a higher level in which I wanted to encourage a more creative and a more productive approach to the target language. You can find the handout here. This was the first more advanced activity which we did together, with a whole set of different adjectives at the same time. And the kids were ready! Everyone got their copy of the handout and they were supposed to trace the comparatives and then to create their own sentences with their own choices.
  • Wordwall activities were included in these lessons, too, to give us a chance to practice the target language. Here are some of those that I used: missing words (only bigger and smaller, I had to help read the sentences), let’s compare (either using only the basic bigger and smaller but also to give the kids a chance to use more complex structures, if they are ready, this btw is an activity that I found in the community resources on wordwall and adapted), and a simple set of cards to play ‘Bigger or smaller’ but on the screen.

All of that, on top of whatever you have in your coursebooks. The next steps will be: adding more of the short adjectives and then, eventually, the long adjectives, too. But, as they say, that is a story for another day…

Happy teaching!

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How to make your own songs for the YL classroom

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The amazing staircase in the tenement house by Max Berg in Wroclaw

Looking for songs

We have lots and lots of sources of amazing songs that can be used in the YL and VYL classroom. The first and the easiest one of them is your coursebook and the main advantage of it is the availability and the close connection to the curriculum. The songs often combine the vocabulary and the structure of the unit and both the teacher and the students have an easy access to it. The songs’ lyrics are in the kids’ coursebooks, they are often built around the characters from the coursebook or the stories in the coursebook. As a teacher, I have been using the songs from Superminds and Playway to English by CUP and Discover with Dex by Macmillan and I am a huge fan to the extent that I would recommend them as a supplementary material to accompany another coursebook, too.

Another amazing resource is youtube and the brilliant channels such as Super Simple Songs, Dream English Kids, Fun Kids English or Mother Goose Club, full of amazing, kids-friendly, visually beautiful productions that can be used in our EFL classes even if the content does not match the curriculum 100% accurately. After all, this can be an opportunity to learn some more vocabulary or structures.

Sometimes, however, it happens that, no matter how hard you try and how long you look here and there, the song or the chant that you really need is nowhere to be found. There is a way out, too, because you can create your own songs! From scratch!

Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw

Creating your own songs: Starting from the rhythm.

This is more of a jazz chant than a song and I took the general idea from Carolyn Graham. The thing you need is a set of words to practise, divided into groups based on the number of syllables: 1-syllable words (cat, dog, frog, duck), 2-syllable words (hamster, snake, lizard), 3-syllable words (elephant, guinea pig, ladybird) and 4-syllable words (chameleon). You arrange them, in any way you want, following the pattern, for example: 2, 2, 2 – 2, 2, 2 – 2, 2, 2 – 4, 1 OR 3, 3, 1 – 3, 3, 1 – 3, 1 – 3, 1 – 3, 3, 1.

Hamster, lizard, snake

Hamster, lizard, snake

Hamster, lizard, snake

Chameleon, cat!

OR

Elephant, ladybird, cat

Elephant, ladybird, cat

Elephant, cat

Ladybird, cat

Elephant, ladybird, cat.

Practically any rhythm will do, especially if you start clapping your hands and stomping your find and chanting.

A similar technique can also be applied to any repeated sentences. I really like mixing affirmative and negative sentences connected with ‘but’ and ‘and’, for example

I like cats but I don’t like dogs.

I like ducks but I don’t like frogs

I like lizards but I don’t like snakes

What about you? What about you?

Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw

If you are looking for more ideas of this kind, please check out the book by Carolyn Graham (see below).

Creating your own songs: Starting from the melody

This, by far, is my favourite way of creating the songs I want and the songs I really really need. The only thing that it takes is a melody that the teacher is familiar with and filling it up with the lyrics that match the lesson’s theme and aim.

During the YL course sessions, I was visiting one of the breakout rooms while the trainees were discussing the ways of adapting a certain material and, together, within a couple of minutes, we came up with a simple song that could be sung in the lesson on pets, with to the melody of The London Bridge is falling down. It went more or less like that:

Little dolphins cannot dance, cannot dance, cannot dance.

Little dolphins cannot dance but they can swim!

Naturally, this little verse can be replicated with all the other animals and verbs, according to the vocabulary content of the lesson.

Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw

Creating your own song: Starting from the language

This one is probably the most challenging one because there is no basis here, like in the previous two. However, at the same time, since you are not bound by the rhythm or the melody, you can put together any text you need. I have used this approach while creating a chant for one of the groups with whom I had a double lesson, with a break in-between. This is the song that I put together to signal the beginning and the end of the break. The melody for this song was completely made up.

Let’s take a break.

Let’s run and play.

Five minutes. Five minutes

Let’s take a break.

Let’s drink some water.

Five minutes. Five minutes.

Let’s take a break.

Let’s go to the toilet.

Five minutes. Five minutes.

In one of the Science lessons for my pre-schoolers we were doing the food chains and I really wanted to make it more interactive and fun and this is how we ended up with a play with an alge, a fish, a squid, a dolphin and a shark. The story was built around all the creatures noticing their predator in the ocean and hiding. While taking turns to sing the song

I am a little, little alge

And I am happy

At the bottom of the ocean

Where I live

Oh, no! Look! What’s that? It’s a fish!

Let’s hide.

In this particular lesson we made the finger puppets for all the characters, practised the song a few times and then we all participated in the game aka the performance. It was definitely a success.

The only trick with writing a song like that would be coming up with the message to convey, verbalising it and sticking to the appropriate number of syllables in each line. As can be seen in the examples above, the verses don’t rhyme and they don’t need to. As for the melody, it can be anything and, once you’ve got it, it is a good idea to record it, for memory, even if only on the smartphone recorder.

Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw

Here you can find my other posts about using songs in the VYL and YL classroom

  • Where to start if you have never sung before (here)
  • How to un-sing a song (here)
  • All the reasons to use a song in the classroom (here)
  • Five songs that have become games (here)

Here you can find some more interesting resources to read

J is for Jazz Chants by Carol Read

How to creat a jazz chant by Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto

Creating chants and songs by Carolyn Graham (Oxford University Press)

How to survive a coursebook. Part #2 Grammar

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This is the second post in the series that is a diary of a teacher trying to teach not the most exciting unit from the coursebook and sighing all the way. The first post can be found here. Today another one, this time devoted to two lessons on the passive voice. The post includes references to Gateway to English, B2 by David Spencer published by Macmillan. This is the coursebook that I am using with my group and the page numbers refer to the second edition of the coursebook.

Vocabulary practice and revision

This unit has a rather challenging content as regards vocabulary. There are the names of the natural disasters as well as a big set of nouns, adjectives and verbs used to talk about disasters, not a small thing. Hence more practice.

  • A quick test – Here I had a good time pretend play a school teacher and calling out my teens to answer a series of random questions. The teens took turns to give us a definition and an example for all of the key words from the previous lesson.
  • Visuals: I shared with my students a set of six visuals related to disasters (here) that I found on google, illustrating different aspects of a variety of natural disasters, including the damage and the beauty, too. Students were asked to work in pairs and to choose a pair of pictures for their partner to talk about and to compare them (‘Are they similar or different?’), partially inspired by the visuals tasks from the higher levels of the Cambridge exams. There was also a round-up question, ‘Which photograph was the most interesting for you?’ which is also the question that we used for the whole class feedback.

Grammar presentation and practice

From the very first moment I knew that I would try to minimise the presence of the main topic of the unit, in order to give us all a break and to be able to include some more exciting and some less dramatic topics. Because, really, how much can you take. Overall, I decided to keep all the practise exercises from the book (all of them but one using the context of the natural disasters) and to supplement them with something more fun.

  • The context I chose was My International Life. The first part was the presentation about the products that I use, the clothes I wear, the books I read and the devices I use and where they were made. I presented a series of visuals and the group were trying to guess where they were made, my computer, my socks, my coffee and my trinkets. The model sentence we were using at this point was: It was made in…They were made in…
  • Later on we dealt with the form, pronunciation and use, including the difference between the active and the passive voice.
  • The first practice activity was the students talking about themselves. The students were sent out into the breakout rooms to talk about their international life. They were instructed to talk about ten things (minimum).
  • The other practice activities in that lesson focused on the exercises in the coursebook (page 98 in the coursebook).
  • We finished the lesson with an online game, found on bamboozle.com.

Grammar presentation and practice. Part 2

I decided to divide the grammar input into two lessons because I teach a mixed ability group and, although, theoretically, the passive voice structures, in all the tenses, should be only a revision for them, it is not quite true in case of some of my students. For that reason, in lesson 1 we worked on the form in all the tenses and in lesson 2 we focused on the passive voice with two objects.

  • Practice and production: Photographs in our book: I decided to start with a freer practice activity based on the materials from the coursebook. I found different illustrations in the coursebook, namely: set 1: pages 98 and 99 depicting the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina and the typhoon damage in the Phillipines and set 2: pages 87 (a Foo Fighters concert) and page 70 (health). The students were asked to choose one of the sets and to describe the photographs using only the passive voice. We did this activity in the breakout rooms.
  • Grammar presentation #2: we used the coursebook materials to present the passive voice sentences with two objects (page 98).
  • Controlled practice was built around the exercises in the coursebook (page 98 and 99).
  • Freer practice #1 was the activity from the coursebook, too, Find someone who. I had to change the format of the activity as moving students in-between the breakout rooms would be too much hassle and I wanted them to produce a lot of language, rather than talk to different partners which they do anyway. For that reason there were asked to use the prompts from the coursebook and to find out as much as possible from the same partner.
  • Freer practice #2 and the final activity of this lesson was inspired by something that I read on Sandy Millin’s blog once. I decided to call it ‘A story of an object’. In the orignal version of the activity it was the object itself that would be retelling the story of its life and, I suppose, other structures would be the format. We changed it to the 3rd singular as it was the format more consistent with the passive voice that I was hoping that my students would be using. We started with a model and I used my (amazing) Malevich tote bag, probably The Present of the Year 2022. I presented the structure (A story of an object, 3 questions from the audience) and a set of verbs to use (created, bought, brought, seen, loved, kept, washed, worn etc). Afterwards, the students went into the breakout rooms and worked in pairs. Back in the common room, each student gave us a summary of what they found out about from their friends.
  • We finished with another bamboozle game.

Reflection

  • Well, in one line: I was a happy teacher last week.
  • The context of the international life worked very well. We managed to get away for a moment from the gloom of the natural disasters and immediately after the presentation the students got to use the structure to talk about themselves. It was very beneficial even though in the beginning the students were mostly using ‘was / were made’. This gave us a very good basis for the more extensive use and it was a great opportunity to personalise it straight away.
  • The lessons included a good ratio of the individual practice, disaster-focused and the pair-work, disaster-less and more productive. The bamboozle games were another way of balancing the weight of the lesson.
  • I love working with visuals and I was really very happy with how they worked in this lesson. The students were discussing the disasters and using the vocabulary but they were also able to interact with the beautiful photographs and notice the discrepancy between the beauty of the natural disasters in the photographs and the danger and suffering that this beauty is synonymous with in some cases.
  • In the same vein, I was very happy with the way we recycled the photograhps in the coursebooks. It was also interesting for the students to notice when it is and it is not natural to use the passive voice in different situations.
  • A story of an object was probably my favourite activity of these two lessons. I could share with the students the story of my Malevich tote bag but I also loved listening to the stories that my students chose to tell. Some of them decided to share their treasures with the class, such as the favourite book, the phone or the parrot (a bit of far-fetched but she managed!). Some went for the sarcastic approach as they talked about their favourite cookies, the hoover or a bottle of water, sparkling. It’s been a while since the last time I laughed so much in class.

Happy teaching!

How to survive a coursebook. B2 Case study

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Part 1 (skippable) A teacher complaining

This story started last Wednesday evening. I was getting ready for my Thursday classes, including my teens’ group. I knew that we were about to start a new unit but I hadn’t bothered to look at it, I had no idea what it was supposed to be. It was only on Wednesday that I opened the coursebook and I sighed but this feeling quickly turned to anger. Because what we have in store for the next three weeks, the next twelve academic hours and the next fourteen pages are natural disasters, casualties, destruction and damage. Even if we had lived in some more peaceful and optimistic times, that would be a lot to take. For my students and for me, the teacher, too. Especially that the whole unit is some weird collection of depressive topics and debates. Literally, asteroids, tsunamis and epidemics are destroying the planet’s population on every single page of the unit, in the vocabulary lesson, in the grammar lesson and in the every skills lesson. In one word: I hate it and I personally think that this is a rubbish unit. I don’t like it. It needs to be highlighted here that despite the fact that I do believe that the perfect coursebooks don’t exist, I like our coursebook, Gateway B2 from Macmillan and we have had a good year so far. But this unit is simply a disaster.

There are two things that I could do. Naturally, I could just skip the entire unit because I do not really feel like using my and my students’ time doing something we are all going to hate and suffer through. 12 academic hours is 540 minutes or one full working day. I was really considering that and I am sure that if I explained it all to my parents, I could just get away with it.

However, that would mean that I would have to find, create and put together enough material to fill in those 6 lessons and at this point in my life I simply do not have time for that. Then, there is of course the fact that the environment and the natural disasters are a part of the B2 curriculum (why they are there is another question) and I wouldn’t want to deprive my kids of the material that they should be covering. With a heavy heart I decided to go for the option two: try to surive the Survive unit by heavy adaptation.

Welcome to a new short series of posts. My main aim is to record the adaptation process in detail and on the go as well as to motivate myself to reflect on each of the lessons taught, hoping that someone might find it useful.

Lesson 1: Main aim: Vocabulary

  • We started the lesson with the weather vocabulary revision and upgrade. The students were divided into pairs, each student in a pair was given a link to the weather wordwall cards (set 1 and set 2), with the visuals and the key words and definitions. The students were working in pairs in the breakout rooms, calling out one of the words and discussing if they are similar or different, for example: ‘Scorching and boiling? Are they similar or different?’ or ‘Fog and rainbow? Are they similar or different?’ They were both sharing their ideas and discussing.
  • A small set of questions for the students to talk about their favourite and least favourite weather and the extreme weather conditions that they have experienced or read about.
  • The key vocabulary from the coursebook on page 96. We used exercise 1 and exercise 4 but I have also prepared an additional quiz for the kids to practise the words related to natural disasters. It can be found here.
  • As a follow-up I decided to include a debate, modelled on the B2 speaking exam task. For that used the list of the key words (ex 1a page 96) and a question that was added, namely: How damaging are these disasters? Talk about the impact on the people, the environment and the economy. Choose the most damagine one.
  • I decided to skip the text on page 97. I didn’t like it and I decided to replace it with the text on page 108 and change the direction of the lesson towards people for whom natural disasters can be an adventure.
  • We started with a discussion on whether students would like to go to a location of a natural disaster (inspired by ex 1 on page 108). Before we started the discussion, the students were shown two videos of people who research volcanic eruptions and people who like to visit the sites. I used the short clips from the following ones: Cooking pizza on a volcano, Cooking sausages on a volcano, Drone above the volcano. We talked about the reasons that make the people go there and our views.
  • As the final task we read the text to find out more about the expedition to a volcano, as featured in the coursebook, together with the comprehension task (page 108). The final summarising question was: Has this text helped you make your mind about such adventures? Has it made you change your mind?

Reflection

  • Overall, I am quite happy with how the lesson went.
  • I like to start a new unit / topic with a visual-based task but this time I decided to leave it for later. I already have an idea for a task for lesson 2 or 3 of the unit. This time round we started with the weather vocabulary speaking task and it was a good decision. First of all, the topic is related and most of the natural disasters are somehow connected to the weather conditions. Second of all, we could revise and extend our weather vocabulary – some of the words were familiar, some were new but the cards include enough information for the kids to be able to handle it and to participate. Last but definitely not least, the game we played was a great balance to the rest of the lesson, a lighter beginning, not so dramatic and / or desctructive as the rest of the input. And even though it started slowly (‘Anka, but these words are completely different’ aka ‘We can produce one sentence’), it quickly took off and the students were getting more and more creative as regards the potential similarities between pairs of words chosen randomly.
  • We will definitely need to revision and opportunities for practice not for the key vocabulary (the natural disasters) but for all the accompanying words. There were just too many verbs and nouns.
  • Quite unexpectedly, the debate on the impact of different natural disasters was a success. The students are familiar with the format (FCE speaking part 3) and I knew that this would not be a problem. I was worried, however, that they might have enough ideas or inspiration to compare the impact of a pandemic with that of an avalanche. I was wrong. All of the natural disaters are destructive but because of the angle (impact on the people, the environment and the economy), the students got involved and they were almost amused arriving at a conclusion that avalanches, in fact, are not so damaging for the economy and they are not often dangerous for people or the nature because they just happen whereas, in many ways, an epidemic such as coronovirus was even beneficial for the environment as people stayed at home and were not using their cars or flying as much…
  • Using the videos was also a good idea because it help the students understand the eruptions a bit better and it gave them some food for thought and it activated the schemata for the reading task. I have already started looking for a follow-up video, an interview with the volcano tourists that I could use in a listening task.

See you soon in part two of this series!

Happy teaching!

I am a lazy teacher and why you should be, too!

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Two weeks ago I was invited to present at the monthly meeting of the Teacher – Mentor Learning Community which was founded by Anna Kashcheeva who, over the years, has been my fellow teacher, ADOS, trainer, my trainee and my trainer and supervisor. Oh, what a lovely list))

I prepared a session on laziness, one of my professional passions. The session went well, the audience were amazing and I got a lot of positive feedback. We were not recording but the presentation was followed up by a post on the community’s blog and you can find it here. Once you get there, don’t forget to have a look at all the other posts and materials.

Happy teaching!

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

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The Polish shade of ‘November orange’

This is how we arrive at the last stop of this series. If you haven’t done it yet, please make sure that you check out the other three: the introduction, the materials that were created because of a certain resource and the materials that were created with an activity as a starting point.

The Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

The aim (a most random definition)

First a brief explanation of the idea behind that heading and that concept and it is rooted in the most selfish question that teachers can ask themselves upon entering the classroom and that is: ‘What do you want, teacher?‘ and it can be further extended into: Why have you come to school today? Why are you entering the classroom?

The answer to this question will largely depend on the particular Pasha, Sasha, Ania, Javier, Rita and Julia sitting at the tables in your classroom (or in front of the computers in your online classroom) and it is with them in mind that we often start to change, to abandon, to supplement or to design activities and materials. Regardless of what the curriculum says, what the pacing schedule wants, what the authors of the coursebooks intended or, sometimes, what the DOS (or the parents) would want you to do.

For that reason, this post is dedicated to some of the coolest people that I have had a chance to meet, my students and some of the materials that were created because of them. Are you ready? Let’s go!

The Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

Storytelling project

‘Project’ was what I saw in the pacing schedule for my pre-teen online class last week. And I sighed. My kids are already a lovely A2 but they are quite young and, since many of them are new in the group and have been online for only eight weeks now, they are still a bit wobbly and cannot be ‘trusted’ with a task that is all about sending the students a set of questions and asking them to prepare a presentation, with photos and all. Online.

Instead, we did a storytelling project. Here are the main stages

  • telling a typical A2 KET story, using the materials for KET A2 Writing part 2, first time together, as a group, second time, with a different set of materials, in pairs
  • vocabulary revision part 1, with the special focus on the adjectives used to describe houses and rooms. Here we used a simple Wordwall game. Recently, we have been doing these twice, first with the whole group, then, individually as a competition, during the lesson time.
  • vocabulary revision part 2, one of our favourite games: Tell me about it. We play it in teams, with teams taking turns to open the boxes and to describe the rooms and houses in the pictures and winning the points which are also hidden in each box.
  • grammar revision, with the special focus on Past Simple and Past Continous and a quiz
  • grammar revision game which was also our favourite in this unit. We called it ‘When suddenly’ and we play it in pairs. Students use the props (aka the key words, nouns and verbs) on the cards. Student A starts a mini story, creating a sentence using the Past Continous and the key word (‘I was walking in the park’) and student B finishes the story in the Past Simple tense (‘when suddenly I saw a crocodile’)
  • story preparation: students work in pairs, they look at the set of the pictures (a house, a character and an object) and choose one of the set for themselves. They work together in the breakout rooms and prepare to tell their story. The set of visuals (taken from google) can be found here.
  • story presentation, for the group. As the feedback, each pair chooses the story they liked most, apart from their own.
The Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

Easy-peasy personalisation tricks

  • adding kids’ names to the homemade wordsearches, as a bonus prize, all of the names or some of the names (remembering that every child should be included at one point)
  • replacing the names in the grammar handouts with the kids’ names
  • using kids’ names in examples (when appropriate)
  • creating quizes and game to practise grammar based on the knowledge of the group, for instance Present Simple 3rd singular (‘Anka sometimes eats fish’. Yes or no?)
  • replacing the names in the grammar handouts and examples with the names of our class heroes such as Angelina, the Hen, the Flying Cow or Pasha, the invisible student.
The Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

Kids’ ideas for games creation and adaptation

  • Hangman (aka the Monster Game): one of the students suggested that since we lose points for not guessing the letter, we should be getting points for guessing the letters
  • Stickers Online aka Google Search Capacity Check which was fully shaped by students and the format of the lesson and which we are still using.
  • ‘Go Fish’ – deciding every time on the rules of the game ie the person with the biggest number of cards wins or the person with the smallest number of cards wins
  • Choosing half of the categories for the STOP game (aka ‘scategories), some (usually content-related) are chosen by the teacher is food, drink, verbs etc, the other half – by the students, usually we end up playing something random ie computer games or football clubs
The Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

Primary kids students and more advanced grammar

This was the phenomenon of the previous academic year when we were already at the A2 level with my kids and such serious topics as Past Continous, Present Perfect and Conditionals 0 and 1 and the kids were still only 8 and 9 (and 7, in one case, too). There is a post that I wrote about it, here and you will find there some generic games for grammar practice as well as the materials to our Science lesson that gave us an opportunity to practise and to use Zero Conditional in a very natural setting.

Messy choir is a more fun and a more creative version of a drilling task that we used while practising Present Perfect with already and yet.

Disaster TV was a lesson inspired by the materials from Superminds 5 coursebook by Cambridge University Press, only instead of ‘finding out about a disaster’ and ‘presenting it to your classmates’ (unit 1 page 20), I decided to go for a lighter take. The topic of Pompeii (although very interesting) was a bit too heavy for a group of young kids who had just gone out of a pandemic and a lockdown and I myself could not face reading about the destruction of New Orleans during the hurricane Katrina so we just didn’t. Instead we went for a project called ‘Disaster TV’ in which kids: chose their own disaster, real or made-up, discussed the details, wrote the questions and rehearsed them. Finally, we recorded a series of interviews with survivors of different disasters and we laughed a lot watching them later. It was absolutely necessary that we have some positive element in all the gloom surrounding the story of the Pompeii. If you are interested, you can find the handout for that project here. I wish I could share the videos, too because they are absolutely precious but we made them only for our personal use and this is what the parents agreed to.

If you still have some energy, please browse through this blog. This is what it is about: my kids and all I wanted to do in class.

Happy teaching!

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

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From the series: Try something new today!

Welcome back to this autumn’s series and, before you go on reading this post, I would like to invite to have a look at the introduction and to the first part, the materials that were designed and came to be only because I found a new resource that I really (really) wanted to use in class.

The episode here is going to focus on the well-known activities that were too good not to be smuggled into the EFL lessons, with kids but also with adults.

Noughts and crosses

This is one of my personal favourites. Admittedly, it is used more frequently in the offline or in my 1-1 or small groups with the online groups and that is due to the way it was adapted, with the option of the points each box, revealed only at the end of the round. We also use noughts and crosses to tell stories and there is a post, too.

MadLibs

MadLibs is a great party game and if you are lucky you can find some ready made ones, appropriate for young learners (or just kids) or related to one specific topic to match the theme of the lesson or the unit. However, pretty much any text can become a MadLib (or a MadLib in reverse) since what you need is a) a text and b) some missing words which we guess and then the world really is your oyster. We use the approach with my exam preparation classes, especially with the tasks such as FCE Listening part 3 in which the exam paper is a ready-made MadLib and which you play to predict the potential answers. We use it also with my Flyers kids as a preparation for the story reading in Reading and Writing part 5. The same idea can be used with any sample writing although here the teacher has to remove some words first and then think of a category for them.

Pelmanism

First and foremost, this is probably my favourite tool to develop the early literacy skills in my primary and pre-primary kids, both online and offline. The main idea: find the two pictures that constitute a pair. With the pre-primary kids, we play to find the two identical card and to call out the word or to produce a full sentence or, similarly, in the flashcard – word card pairs.

The range is much wider and the tool much easier to prepare for the literate students as the pairs may constitute, from the easiest to the most complex: a picture and a picture, a picture and the first letter of the word, a picture and a word, a word in a simple structure and a word in a simple structure, a word in an affirmative structure and a word in a negative structure, a set of questions with various structures and a set of answers and, finally, halves of sentences. See the sample here for ideas.

The activity can be used with the older and the more advanced students and it can be made a lot more generative by asking students, for example, to find the phrasal verb with the definition and the question in which it is used, which they later answer ie take up (start a hobby) and ‘Why do people take up different hobbies? Where do they find the inspiration to do that?’ or a phrasal verb and its definition with the question that they have to create themselves.

In the online classes, the cards on wordwall can be used (we add numbers using the zoom notes or we simply count the cards for the teacher to open) and recently this option has been added to the upgraded bamboozle. This game is also very easy to create on the Miro board or even in a simple powerpoint (in the design mode, without the presentation).

Go fish

This is the most ridiculous case because, up to this day, I really have no idea how to play it. I do remember reading about it, in one of the methodology books, but the instructions were a page long and I gave up after a few lines only. The only recollection that stayed was the following: you have a set of cards, you keep them secret and you have to ask for these cards. Today, we play it as ‘Can I have?’ or, with my younger kids as ‘The Sheep’.

Riddles

If we had a different set of categories, that would definitely be mine ‘something old’ that recently I have had a chance to rediscover with two amazing people and the most recent post on that topic is here.

And there are many, many more and I am going to include the links here, just in case if you are looking for ideas: General Kutuzov, a lazy role-play and our fruit salad.

Now, off to writing the final part of the series: things that started from the most important people in the process: the kids. Soon in cinemas near you!

Happy teaching!

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

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(From the series: Try something new today!)

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

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

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

Oldies but goodies

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

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

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

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

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

And some latest finds

Two videos

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

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

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

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

Speaking YLE

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

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

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

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

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

One-sentence phonics stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy teaching!

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

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

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

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

Why do teachers adapt, supplement and design?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example #1: the coursbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example #2: Own materials on Miro

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

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

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

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

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

Happy teaching!

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

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