Primary

‘This feeling is a message from my brain!’ Talking about feelings in primary.

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How do you feel today?

Easily, the emotions (and adjectives) have always been a great passion of my professional life. One reason is that they are a little bit unappreciated in the early years EFL world (a personal opinion) and they can make a huge difference in communication, even for the little speakers. The other reason is that they help the kids describe how they feel and, apart from that making them want to talk because they are sharing something personal, that is a precious something for the teacher to know. Having 9 happy preschoolers and 1 angry preschooler in the classroom or having 5 happy, 3 sleepy and 2 sad preschoolers makes a huge different and, whether you want it or not, it will have an impact on your lesson. Basically, it is better to know than not to know, in order to prepar and to adapt, if needs be.

And then we found the song…

It was only last week that, together with my students, we were trying to remember what was our first Hopscotch song. It was, probably, The Fractions Song. What a hit! Itt really (really) helped us get the concept and to memorise the fraction vocabulary. Not to mention the catchy music and the hilarious plot. And when, after about three weeks of listening the song, we found out that each (more recent) song includes bloopers…we were collectively in love.

I had never heard about that channel before so I got down to researching and I found piles and piles of treasures. Some went into the category ‘subjects’ and some, the really delicious bits, into the category ‘oh, my, the langauge we are going to pick up here!’. One of the latter, was the Feelings Song with as many as 56 beautiful adjectives.

Quite a few words, actually, and some of them from the higher CEFR shelves so I decided that we will just sing the song and aim for picking up a few words, such as hangry, disappointed, overwhelmed or inspired.

It was only much later that I decided that the song will fit perfectly in our end-of-year concert as it has a plot, all the emotions have been neatly divided into groups, like almost 5 acts of the play, there is an introduction and a funny ending, too. And a beautiful message. So, having sung and listened to the song for about two months, we took to staging it and really looking into the other words.

A conversation

At this point in the game, we had been starting every single day with a conversation about our emotions. ‘How do you feel today?’ ‘I am…because…’ and to help us with it, we use about twenty different emotions such as angry, sad, sleepy and confused which we have on posters on the walls of our classroom.

I made into two additional lessons in which we learnt and revised the feelings from the song (or most of them, I still decided to skip a few) using the wordwall cards. We went through all of them, clarified the meaning, practised pronunciation and devoted time to talking about our own examples when people might feel disappointed, overwhelmed, angry or inspired.

A self-reflection

I admit, initially, I only wanted something to write. My kids, now in their year 2, when putting letters in the Latin alphabet is no longer scary or tiresome, take pleasure in writing (insert: a little joyful dance that I can actually say this!) and we are now working on writing neatly, without mistakes, remembering about the punctuation marks and spacing. We write the date and the topic and we sometimes take little notes. This is exactly what I wanted to do last Tuesday, just write something neatly. I figured out that it will be a feasible and open-ended task if we all finish the sentences: I always feel…I never feel…I sometimes feel…I rarely feel…

It was amazing how the kids took time to think and to decide how exactly they feel in certain situations.

Showtime!

Somewhere in April, when we started to discuss our plans for the end of the year concert, I realised that this is the song that I want us to do. Initially, I was even considering turning it into a theatre show, with a few acts (one act = one set of emotions) and some conversations in-between, a musical of sorts. But then, the end of the year itself, the tests, the whirlwind of May took over and I decided to scale down. The plan was as such: we are going to sing the entire song and we will present the emotions to the audience as there will be parents and younger kids.

In order to turn it into ‘a video’, we started to prepare illustrations for an emotion or for a pair of emotions. I prepared the cardboard (A4) and the drawing materials, I also wrote the emotions on them, in big letters and I prepared a few examples, to show the kids that the emotions can be illustrated either by the situation (i.e. our ice-cream drops onto the floor = we are disappointed) or the associations (i.e. the rainy day, colour blue, wilted flowers = we are sad). We got down to work.

I think, in the end, we prepared about 40 illustrations and all of them were absolutely brilliant, either because my kids can really draw well or just because it was a fascinating experience to be going through the creative process and the creative decisions with my students. Some emotions were more difficult to draw (I dealt with them), some were really popular and so we ended up having about four pictures illustrating ‘love’.

I put them into groups, as they are in the song, and put them into a chain with coloured paper that had the text of the relevant verse on the back. Two of my more responsible students were assigned as the holders and as the verse would come up, they would pick up the big and beautiful streamer from the floor to present to the audience. And to peek at the lyrics.

The video finishes with the bloopers in which the emotions (represented by a cookie-like creature) are thrown out and up (Attention: don’t keep them in, don’t bottle them up, deal with them!) and we had a few ridiculously funny conversation how we could illustrate that without frightening the parents or the little kids with the year two kids suddenly making the ‘throwing up’ gestures…But we decided to go for the amazing streamers throws that one of my students suggested.

We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed and my kids actually sang the whole long song, almost entirely from memory and it was a really touching moment, for all of us. Not only because we loved the song and because it was the end of year 2 but also because, while we were singing, it was already obvious that our school was to close down, for ever, and, naturally, we had A LOT OF different emotions to deal with at the time, all of us, kids, teachers and parents.

It was beautiful, it was touching and everyone was amazing. We gave a good show and we created fantastic memories. That is what will matter in the long run.

Happy teaching!

My house! A project in primary once more!

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One of my student’s design. Created using deepai.org

I decided to share this idea here because I love how this whole idea happened, from just one little Maths exercise into a fully-blown, multi-media, multi-subject project. It is not a story of careless teacher who did not plan the lesson properly, rather a story of a lesson that, suddenly, blossomed and a teacher who saw the full potential.

Step 1 or I only wanted to make Maths a bit more exciting

The year 2 in Maths has been, so far, quite an adventure. Especially after we survived addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and decimals… After those first six heavy duty months of the academic year, the lighthearted Maths came up. I mean, it is still fun, measurements, statistics and geometry, all of that is amazing and we learn a lot but after everything we did before, it is just easy-peasy.

This project happened when we were in the unit of Area and Perimeter and while working on a task from the coursebook ( ) which was pretty easy and straightfoward: ‘to design a garden of the area of 80 m2 and calculate its perimeter’, I realised that my students were really enjoying the task. Truly, madly, deeply. They started to add flowers, trees, huts, colours and some random animals. Maybe it was because while explaining area and perimeter, I drew my own farm and a pig and a chicken…All in all, they got a lot more into it than I expected. There was definitely a lot more potentatial.

That is precisely why for the following lesson I decided to give them a summer hut to design and to draw and to calculate. The main aim here was to follow very specific directions and information and to put together a house in which all the rooms have specific size but they can be of any shape the little architects wanted. It was amazing to see how, again, they got into it but how, at the same time, they already wanted to do more and get more freedom and to add their rooms. Obviously I had to promise that we would design our proper houses when we will have the freedom to do almost whatever we want.

Our project has properly took off in the third lesson. The task my students got was to design a house they wanted: decide which rooms they want to have apart from the main set (the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom and the veranda), make a decision about the area of each of them, to calculate the total area of the house and not have it exceed the allowed area of 200 m2 and use the remaining part of the lot on the garden, the swimming pool or the garage. The main focus here was the Maths and calculations. The follow up task would have to be calculating the perimeter, too.

In order to make the task easier I looked up 200m2 houses with real designs, to understand how big this house can be, how many bedrooms and rooms can be fit in and how it could be organised. The first thing that came up was a lovely website from New Zealand and that is exactly what we used. I printed one of the plans and colour-coded it for the kids to better understand it and we had a look at it during the preparation for the house.

The description and the photo, already in the notebook.

Step 2 Visualisation or ‘Let’s draw it!’

The design could not be done without the floor plan because that is where the real fun starts. I realised it when I was preparing my house plan. Guess what: design is not easy! Putting together all the rooms in some kind of a reasonable shape, the walls adjacent and location of all the rooms…Because I designed my own house, I could prepare the kids better for the task. The following things had to be taken into consideration:

  • the area of each room and the total maximum area of the house, the calcuations we had to make on the way
  • the colour-coding of the rooms to make the design clear and easy to understand
  • the scrap paper to calculate and to draw on not to destroy the actual design
  • the pencils, the rules and the erasers for all the kids and to tell the students that it might be necessary to fix their desing as you go along because your ideas can change
  • to allow and encourage the kids to check and to compare their projects and to exchange ideas to inspire each other
  • to model and to share ideas about the non-standard rooms like the cinema room, the library, the secret room…

This would have already been great because they really got involved in the task and the houses already became precious. And, of course, we met our Maths aims: calculating and measuring. Somehow, during the lesson, we had a student who had already finished and, automatically almost, it turned into a conversation about the house and the student really enjoyed talking about it. I decided on the spot that there must be more lessons and a proper presentation.

The floor plan.

Step 3 or ‘Tell me about it…’

Truth be told, I am kind of lucky because I have four lessons of Maths a week and four lessons of English so that gives me quite a lot of flexibility and freedom. I have the time that I can devote to the projects. On Thursday, our final day of the week, we usually have English and Maths and I decided to use both lessons on finishing the project.

In the first lesson, we were finishing our designs and preparing for the presentation. I told the children that we are going to rehearse in the classroom and then, in a separate classroom, my amazing T.A. will make making short videos of the presentations.

I prepared a template for the kids to use and it was both on the board and on the handout that they took into the recording room (‘Hello! My name is…and I am an architect. This is my house. The area of my house is…The perimeter of my house is… In my house I’ve got…My biggest room is…and my favourite room is… The task was easy / difficult and it was interesting / boring because…Thank you).

My more independent students rehearsed together and I helped out some of my less independent students. Then, my T.A. was taking the students into a quiet room and recording the little videos.

While I was preparing this stage of the lesson, I realised that I needed some grand finale and a reward for all this hard work.

Step 4 or ‘We need a real illustration’

As you can see from the photos, the drawing of the outside of the house was a part of this project as, initially, I wanted the kids to simply create it themselves. However, they got so involved in the design and creating of the floor plan that asking them to draw another picture would be too repetitive. What is more, it is not so easy to draw the house in the time we had left for this lesson and ‘just drawing’ does not lead to any language production. And using the A.I. certainly does!

Now, I know that there are many disadvantages of using A.I. and there has been a lot of talk in the recent weeks of how it abuses the copyright and how environment-unfriendly it is but it is a perfect solution for the young writers and so I decided to use it again in my lessons*).

I explained for the kids that an A.I. engine would create the images of the outside of the house if we prepare detailed descriptions for it. Everyone got a small handout and they had to make more decisions about their design: the location of the house (country, city, etc), the colour of the house, the surroundings, the garden, the fence etc. I took their notes home and typed them up and then brought the pictures to class. We had a lot of fun looking at all the photos and trying to guess which house was whose. Indeed, this worked very, very well.

The serious details.

Instead of a coda

We had a great time with the project and I am very happy with how it turned out

  • My students drew, calculated, read, wrote and spoke a lot.
  • We managed to include almost all language skills and at least three different subjects.
  • The kids had a chance to express themselves creatively and to make independent decisions but also to be the real scientists, to follow instructions and the rules, to be accurate.
  • It was important to add the last bit, the outside of the house because this was where my students really let themselves be creative. As can be seen in the photographs, the gardens filled with flowers, trees, dugongs, peacocks and dogs and the kids were really specific about the location of their houses, too.
  • I could not watch the videos being made, I only watched the final product and it was a real pleasure to see the kids speak freely and independently, adding some details and getting into a real conversation. I was really proud of them and, in a way, this project was their end-of-year project and I can say they all learned a lot.
  • We shared the videos with the parents so I hope it will also help everyone remember this year and the progress we made.
  • For me, as a teacher, this project will be a memory of how a real, fully-fledged project developed in the making and that the most important thing is to keep my teaching eyes open for new options and for all of the potential that it may hold. Knowing everything from the beginning is not always an advantage. There might always be more that is possible.
  • The basis for the project were very simple handouts that you can see in the photographs. We kept them all in our portfolios (aka the notebooks). The videos were shared with the parents digitally.
  • All of the activities described here took a total of 5 lessons. I am not sure if this is everything that a teacher can set aside for a project but I decided to keep everything in and, as always, we adapt to everything that is possible in a specific context and with a specific timetable and a number of hours a week available.

Happy teaching!

*) Do I feel guilty? No, not really. My A.I. footprint is minimal – all my words come right from my brain, I only use the visual creations and very, very rarely. The total of times I have used A.I. for my projects is still under ten. I think I am fine, for now.

**) Deepai.org can be used for commercial purposes.

Spring in year 2 classroom management. Setting up the routine. A series.

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First a few words of introduction…

It has been quite a while since I wrote in the series (the first episode is here, the most recent here). I was travelling in the beginning of March and I couldn’t write and later I just didn’t feel like putting together a piece, just because the schedule said so. I didn’t, I decided to be nice to myself. However, it also made me think that maybe the time has come to change things here a tiny little bit. Even in January and December, half of the post went along the lines of ‘no changes’ and I realised that we (the class) have changed so much that new solutions have to be put into use.

I will still keep notes here, because some of the things we use might be useful for other teachers and I still need this series as a way of reflecting on my teaching and their learning and progress but I will not be on monthly basis.

The routine et al.

All the new tricks I have added and how they work for us:

  • the nicknames we still use although the question I ask now is ‘Am I writing your name or your nickname?’, just to give the students some freedom and flexibility. Those that feel creative on the day can express themselves (and some do a lot of that, our current record is 8 lines of a nickname) and some just use their names, sometimes written in a different colour or with a heart. The other kids are always curious to see who is choosing what each day and sometimes they add detail, help with translation or correct me when I, accidentally, use the wrong nickname or when I use the name instead of the nickname. Which, really, just shows that they are listening and paying attention. And that’s all I want. Plus, it is definitely something that we do together, a feature of our community. When someone comes late to class or when we exchange groups and Class A comes after Class B, they try to guess who chose what as their name.
  • the improvisation song is still with us (and it has been now a year and three months). Sometimes we sing once, sometimes more than once and I love the kids continue to use it to express themselves in English, to talk about emotions, to experiment with different ways of singing certain words and how we started to use it as call – response song whenever there is a question or whenever they just feel like reacting in their own ways (instead of just repeating the verse). More creativity? Yes, please!
  • give your teacher a grade: admittedly, it is not something I do every week but I try to included it once in a while, more or less twice a month. I am trying to use different techniques like leaving notes and grades on the board or preparing cards with specific questions (Was it difficult? Was it interesting? etc).
  • the grades for the week: I still write notes to summarise the performance of the students over the week only now we have a few more categories, although these vary depending on the week. This week, for example, we had: English, Maths, Behaviour, Notebook (we are working on handwriting and neat notes) and Accuracy (a specific task we did in Maths). The kids usually get to see them on Monday and they are still really curious about them. And they care. Sometimes they want to tell everyone what they got, sometimes they check with me or ask additional questions, they always read.
  • new rules were added, too, based on what we have been going through, emotions and lessons, basically the things that seemed like something that we might use in the future. These include ‘Get it together’ (a nice call to action from a song), ‘My feelings are the message from my brain’ (also from a song) and ‘Wait’ (just because we need it, still and desperately, too!).

Story, Socialising and Creativity

All our English classes have been about stories as the whole unit in our book has been devoted to adventures, superheroes, stories, adjectives to describe heroes and we used that opportunity!

We have already finished but we managed to: introduce and properly practise Past Simple, lots of regular and irregular verbs and questions, talk about our yesterdays, we watched and talked about some clips from ‘How to Tame Your Dragon?, we talked about types of stories and why we have narrative and dialogue, we wrote and talked about our favourite stories, we wrote a short story and we read ‘Splat the Cat. The Name of the Game’ because it seems to be a perfect story for us and all the problems we still deal with while playing.

Our story lesson was particularly memorable because we created a few beautiful pieces, we had a reading session in two language, we praised everyone and I want to type up all the stories and turn them into another issue of our school magazine. I will only have to ask the kids to describe what kind of an illustration they would like to have with their story. We will only have to write some description for the kind A.I. to create them. Next week.

We haven’t done any other creative tasks, not properly, but I noticed that kids expressed a lot of interest in the creations that always dry on the window sill after my Art Explorers and I think it might be a sign that I need to think of something like that.

The teacher

I have been a tired teacher in February. I was busy with all the other project (term break camp, conference and the real life errands) but I have had quite a few good moments like realizing that we have really made progress regarding reading and writing and that we have actually learnt how to understand and use fractions and decimals.

The classroom management and bringing up the kids never stops (never never never) but we have made a lot of progress and I know we are going to be fine. It is great to know that while some of my kids keep repeating ‘I don’t like school’ or ‘I want to go home’, they also add, to each other, mostly, ‘I like English, though’ and ‘I really like Maths in English’ so there is some comfort in it, too.

Things to do in March / April

  • another story
  • going back to the more advanced phonics
  • preparation for the YLE Cambridge
  • more pairwork and speaking
  • our garden

Happy teaching!

Soft skills in the YL classroom. Communication

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Why bother?

For us, it was a very simple story of cause and effect. We have a crash situation in my class (yes, I know, I know, they are only seven and eight and I was really hoping that this situationship could wait until year 4 or at least year 3, alas) and I noticed that, among all the other issues that was causing, the two were just fighting with each other. Obviously, it looked like fighting only to the untrained eye. What they were doing, in fact, was just an exchange, communication, only in the clumsiest and in the most unwanted of ways that one could possibly think of. They were obviously drawn to each other but instead of talking, they were just punching, pushing and what not.

On top of that, I noticed that the whole class, both groups, being still children, lack the social skills in general, although, after a year and a half in my classroom, they are, admittedly better now at playing in pairs and in teams. Hooray.

That is how I decided to take the game up to a new level and to start, slowly, developing their soft skills. I haven’t really done much of that in the classroom but everything needs to start somewhere and since we have a good team in our school, I can plan my lessons and consult them and reflect on them with our school psychologist.

In the long run, I would like to spend two or three hours a month (45 min times 3), doing ‘something else’ in class, developing certain social skills and soft skills and helping my students become better group memebers.

Our lessons are run in English but I speak my kids L1 so it is understood and accepted that at times, my students might reply in Russian, although, the aim is to use English as much as possible. I am including all the materials here.

In order to mark these lessons as special ones, we completely changed the set up of the room. The tables were moved to the walls and we were able to sit all together in a circle.

All the aims

  • talk about effective and not very effective communication and reasons for it (we used ‘good’ and ‘bad’ initially, then switched into ‘effective’ and ‘not very effective’
  • talk about different ways of communicating with examples
  • try communicating in different ways (controlled and freer)
  • talk about the different problems in communication and solutions
  • create our own code of conduct

Lesson 1: The ways in which we communicate

Step 1: We play hangman or monster game to guess the word ‘communication‘, talk about what it it is

Step 2: What is good or bad communication (effective and not very effective)? What happened here? We talk about the pictures in the presentation (slides: 2 – 7, description included in the notes). I based those on the real events and issues that we have to deal with on daily basis that are somehow connected to communication.

Step 3: We introduced and revised the vocabulary related to how people communicate. I chose these ten different ways in order to cover the basic ones (body language, words etc) and to include a few alternative ones, too, such as dance or music. I have included all of them here, in the wordwall cards. We went through all the words and illustrated them all with our ideas, mine and kids, to demonstrate that we already use a lot of them on daily basis.

Step 4: The practical part: We took turns to pick a communication method at random (cards I prepared) and an animal (the leader’s choice) for everyone to try their best to show the animal. At this point, I wanted it to be very controlled and not a game, to take the pressure off and to experience how different communication methods work. After each round, we were discussing the experience, a certain animal and a certain method using the language we know (it’s easy, it’s very easy, it’s difficult, it’s very diifficult, it’s impossible). It worked very well and we had a lot of creative fun.

Step 5: The quiz. In order to summarise the lesson and to do something together and to get back to the case studies from the beginning of the lesson, we did a quiz to discuss the better solution in each situation. There is an obvious answer in each situation but I was also accepting all the ‘But, Miss Anka, what if…’ ideas.

Lesson 2: Effective communication

Step 1: Revise all the communication methods using the cards and our examples

Step 2: The practical part #2: I prepared some simple sentences that the kids are familiar with for the task that was a bit more challenging and at the same time involved more decision-making from each child. The students, taking turns, came to the centre, picked one message to convey and then had a moment to choose the most effective way of communicating it. The class were to guess the exact message. The students were demonstrating, the class were guessing and the most interesting part of it was the experience itself. Sometimes the chosen method was not the most effective (for example, communicating with gestures is not always easy if the message is more complex) and more methods had to be added.

Again, at the end of each round, we talked about things that were easy and difficult, for the communicator and for the listeners.

Step 3: Problems with communication: We looked at the second part of the presentation to answer two questions: What is happening? Why is that a problem? In order to outline some of the potential problems with communication.

Step 4: Solutions: What can we help to communicate better? (based on the slides): listen, speak not too loud and not to quietly, take turns, use the right language.

Lesson 3: How we feel about it

Step 1: Revise all the communication methods and play the game from lesson 2 again, with a diffferent set of sentences. You can find my set here.

Step 2: ‘Why is communication sometimes a little difficult?’ is the question that I wanted the kids to answer. They came with quite a few good ideas, some based on what we talked about in class before so it was kind of a revision for us, too. But it was also a way for us to get to the topic of the day, namely the connection between the communication and the emotions. This is when we started to use our presentation (slide 3).

Step 3: This step was intended as a speaking activity and language practice for us but also, as regards the soft skills, there was also another aim: for the kids to realise that different situations may generate different emotions for different people. That is why we were looking at the photographs (slides 4 – 14). I have prepared quite a few pictures but we didn’t use a lot of them in both groups. Some generated more reaction from the kids, some not so much but we did produce some English and very very quickly in the game there were different reactions and different points of view. For example, even the very first picture, a very positive one did. Generally it made us happy (because we like presents, because we got great presents for Christmas) but also a bit sad (because we cannot see what the presents us, because these are not our presents and because we don’t know if the children like their presents or not). It was a lovely lesson because we got to see how differently we look at different situations and I cannot really tell you how many times I get to say ‘Great. This is your opinion’ or ‘Well, this is how you feel’, validating pretty much everything that was said.

Step 4: Summary with slide 14. I decided to keep it here and make it stand out although a lot of discussion was done so far anyway and it was a very simple summary: we have different emotions in exactly the same situation.

Step 5: Different emotions in communication. The linguistic aim of this part of the lesson was reading practice. For that reason, I chose a very simple conversation, with the language that we are familiar with and that we have been doing recently. There was nothing very challenging here and the kids could focus on the accuracy, intonation, pronunciation and enjoying reading a text that is all accessible to them. As regards the soft skills and communication aims, I wanted the children to notice the connection with how easy or difficult it is to communicate in different situations when the emotions of the people involved play such an important part.

To achieve all that we used an activity that I have been using for years in our regular English classes, the emotional reading. What you need is a dialogue (you can find mine in slide 16), a die and two sets of emotions (you can find our ideas in slide 17). We start with reading the dialogue with our regular, natural voices (one of the kids helped me), then we roll the die to assign the emotion for each player and then we read our dialogue in pairs, trying to portray the particular emotion. Depending on the time available, this stage can be repeated a few times. If appropriate, in the final round, all the kids can choose their emotions.

In our ‘regular’ EFL lessons, this is a lovely way of encouraging the kids to read, again and again, in preparation for a role-play, here I wanted them to focus on their emotions and the difficulties.

Step 6: Feedback. This was probably the most important step, as regards the soft skills aims for this lesson, because we had a very simple discussion about how these different emotions in our little dialogues made us feel. Our question, the same for all of the conversations, ‘Was it easy to communicate with X when he /she was happy / sad / angry? Why?’ A lot of these were done in English but, of course, my students are only children and A1 – A2, so they sometimes did resort to their L1. And that’s OK.

I have to say I absolutely loved these debates. Not only did my students put their hearts into re-enacting the emotions assigned and it was obvious that they loved this kind of an activity (mental note: we need to do more of them) but we got a lot of ideas for why emotions might make our communication a bit complicated. It turned out that when we are sad it might be difficult to talk because people speak very quietly and it is difficult to understand them but, surprisingly, when they are happy and excited, they might be speaking too fast or too loudly and that does not make things easy. Not to mention that when we are tired or sleepy or ill, things get even more complicated especially that it might not always be obvious to everyone.

Lesson 4: Things to do, things not to do aka RULES

Step 1: Modal verbs for talking about the rules: We revised the grammar points that we covered in the regular English lessons. We used two activities that were a success. One of them was a set of pictures on wordwall and the activity ‘What’s the rule?’ when the kids had to guess the rule symbolised by a sign. The other one was a simple bamboozle with places (we know these already). The kids had to name the place and give an example of one rule related to this place, things we can, must or mustn’t do there.

Step 2: What’s wrong with this conversation? We looked at seven photographs illustrating different problems with communication (powerpoint here) in order to outline what can go wrong and as a lead-in to formulating what we need to do in order to communicate successfully. I encouraged the kids to use Present Continuous here but that is not the only option, of course. You can see that I have outlined my own ideas (see the notes for the powerpoint) but the kids came up with a lot more ideas. For example, in slide 1, my main idea was that we cannot speak too quietly because it will be difficult to hear us. To my kids, however, this picture looked like a pair of friends trying to have a private conversation, sharing secrets while someone is eavesdropping on them…Same with the slide number 2. For me it was someone not listening and paying attention (teacher’s trauma, ahah) whereas my kids saw in it a man who is busy working and who cannot take part in any conversation at the moment…Fair enough, all valid points, these answers were accepted. The main aim here was to generate a few ideas for the following creative stage.

Step 3: Our communication, our rules. This was a writing task that can be done in pairs, teams or individually and its main objective is to generate ideas for Our Rules Poster. The hope is that after we have gone through the whole cycle of lessons, considered all the aspects of effective communication, we will be able to draft our own ideas that later will help us all communicate better.

The task was to do some thinking and write down five ideas later to be collected and edited and typed up by the teacher and displayed on the wall of the classroom. Which will help communicate effectively, without offending anyone and without any communication breakdowns ever again. Basically, they lived happily ever after.

Teacher says

Overall, I am very happy with the series and I am planning to continue including a series of lessons devoted to developing social skills in my amazing monsters. Simply because we need that.

As I mentioned before, I was able to use the help of our school psychologist (miss Katya<3) who helped with generating ideas for lesson 1 and who found time to come and observe our lesson 4 and to talk to me about it later and the outcomes, things we have achieved so far and things that we can expect in the future. These can be summarised as: ‘it went well’ and ‘we are taking baby steps and eventually we are going to get there’.

As a teacher of English, I am really happy because we managed to revise and practise a lot of language: Present Continuous, emotions and modals for rules. I was preparing these lessons being aware that we would not be able to carry them out entirely in the target language simply because we are not native speakers or advanced learners. I assumed that there will be ideas and concepts that we will only be able to express in our L1 and that was not a problem. However, having said that, I was really (really) happy with the language that my kids produced. They spoke in English and they spoke A LOT for their level. I’d say, about 80% of these lessons were carried out in the target language.

As a teacher of YL, I was really happy that we have sowed some seeds here. We looked at different ideas, talked about emotions, interacted, experimented and expanded our Zone of Proximal Development in the area of soft skills and, hopefully, we will be reaping what we sowed.

As regards my students, I am still to ask them what they taught of these lessons but, just from my observations, I can say that the reaction was positive. The children were involved, they were not scared to share ideas and to try new things, such as new emotions or ways of communicating. They also enjoyed the different format of the lesson and a different seating arrangement, too.

Now we will just keep looking at Our Rules Poster, remind ourselves that what we all want is effective communication and that we can do it. Fingers crossed!

And, by accident almost, this series turned into a mini-series on Splat the Cat and the Cat in the Moon which also deals with communication and looking at the world from different perspectives.

Happy teaching!

‘Competitive games in the YL classroom’

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This article, just as the earlier post here, has come to be as a result of the many (many!) conversations with my trainees and what I observed in my own classroom. It is fair to say that it has become my latest professional passion / obsession / interest. The post that I have written here (‘A balancing act. Non-competitive EFL games for kids‘) is one of my proudest moments on the blog but was just the beginning of the whole story. And one of the top 10 articles on the blog!

The article that I wrote for the Modern English Teacher (Issue 33.6 Nov-Dec) is a continuation of this research anad the search for solutions. It is, unfortunately, only available to the MET subscribed members but I am really proud of it and I can definitely say that the solutions that I came up with and the ideas that I suggest really do work. After a year and a half pretty much all of my YL are now ready to play competitive games. I do recommend!

Happy teaching!

All the experimenting fun aka CLIL in the classroom

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The summer is not over yet and there will definitely be more experiments but I wanted to collect in one post all of the experiments that we did this summer during our summer camp. Our students were all between 5 and 9 years old and they were a mix bunch not only as regards the age but also in terms of the language, from beginners to a strong B1. Everyone participated, the language was graded but, of course, the older / more advanced could be more involved cognitively and linguistically.

However, these have a lot of potential, not only because they are very engaging and have a strong WOW effect but also they can be adapted to different contexts and levels. I will include their connection in the curriculum for us, at the summer camp and some potential links to a more traditional EFL curriculum.

‘Refraction’

Last year’s fun

First the experiments that have already been described here, in separate posts:

Refraction, the original post is here. Our connection: black and white things. Potential connection: I can see, optical illusions.

Design 101, you can find the original post here. Our connection: things that are blue and water. Potential connection: colours, emotions, toys, pets.

Skittles, the activity has already been described here. Our connection: colours, prism, sugar in our food, hot and cold water. Potential connection: colours.

Volcanoes, the post is here. Our connection: things that are red and fire. Potential connection: colours, natural world.

The cabbage ‘juice’

This summer’s fun

Some of those experiments I ran myself, some of them were run by my colleagues, as a part of the programme which I designed and which we taught together at our school.

A floating orange, a perfect experiment for the Orange lesson and a great element of the lesson on objects that float or sink. We watch an episode of Blippi (or this one here) and do exactly the same, collect bits and pieces around the school, predict and then test if they sink or float. The orange, with and without the skin, was the cherry on the cake, so to speak. If you need any inspiration, here is the video to help. Our connection: things that are orange. Potential connection: materials, things around us, passive vice.

What colour is the colour black? This was an absolutely fascinating experiment that I found and ran following the example of The Dad Lab. The only thing you need is a range of black markers, from different sets and different brands, a few jars or glasses with cold water and strips of kitchen towels. The results are almost immediate and it is very obvious to see the great variety that can be combined to create the black ink for the markers, not only the browns, greys and blues but also greens and even yellows and reds, depending on the manufacturer. Our connection: things that are black and white. Potential connection: colours, I can see,

What colour is the colour white? This was the other half of the lesson described above and we also looked at how the colour white is created. We produced our Newton’s disc to see how different colours can mix to become white. There is this video here, in which you can see how a proper spinner is made although we used a simpler version, on a pencil. Our connection: things that are black and white. Potential connection: colours.

Cabbage juice or the ph indicator. This was probably one of the coolest experiments ever. On the one hand, we had a real staging and a real topic (ph indicator of different substances in our life) and a real Chemistry lesson. On the other hand, this was an experiment that most resembled proper magic. There are quite a few things that are necessary, all the substances (see the video here that I used as inspiration), a few jars or bottles and, of course, the cabbage jar. Many videos and manuals suggest using a blender but I didn’t have one so I just chopped the cabbage and threw it into a jug of warm water. This was also an interesting bit as the water started to change the colour within the first minute. Even though my students were quite young and with not a very high level of English, we talked about acids and alkaloids and tried to predict how the cabbage juice will behave. Our connection: things that are purple and pink. Potential connection: food and drink, introduction to Chemistry, future with ‘will’ for prediction.

Travelling colours, another very simple craft and very good for the young kids and beginners who have only little langauge but can learn a lot about mixing the primary and secondary colours. Our connection: experiments with water. Potential connection: colours, primary and secondary. The video that I watched to learn about this experiment is here. At first, I used regular paints to colour the water but the dye is not strong enough and although the water wets the strips of paper towel, it does not carry the dye. We repeated the experiment with proper food dyes and that was a lot more successful.

One of the paper towel magic pictures

Why we liked it?

I have to admit, I had so much fun with these lessons! We had a whole day at the camp and we didn’t need to rush anyway. There was time for English vocabulary and grammar, another lesson for the creative activity and then, after the lunch break, one more slot, just for CLIL and Science. It actually helped a lot to put it at the end of the day. The Science lessons were more hands-on and I had a longer break which I could devote to preparations. That came in very handy indeed.

All that meant that preparations were required and, admittedly, not all of the resources necessary are the things that you would just find lying at the school, but, they are definitely materials that can be easily found around the house. That, of course, meant, going to school with a bag packed with the most random selection of things but, hey, it was definitely worth it.

The summer is not over yet and there are still a few lessons to come and a few more experiments. I will be adding to this list but I am already ready to say it out loud: Science is cool!

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #80 A clever drawing dictation

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‘Students draw…’ is one of the YL-related lines that is my personal pet peeve…You can see it in coursebooks, teachers’ books, in lesson plans and on the social media. The idea is that a bunch of seven-year-olds (or younger) will have their teacher give out the pencils and they will hear their teacher say ‘draw (insert your word)’ and they will just sit down, get an idea and complete the job in five minutes without any issues and (AND) afterwards they will be ready to talk about their pictures, to present their work or do whatever goes under the productive part of the project.

What a joke! It looks good on paper and in theory and in a real classroom it is going to translate into a neverending, unproductive, very often full of blood, sweat and tears task because the little people simply do not have the drawing skills, the time management, the imagination and the self-control necessary to complete the task that the adults imagine them to do and, more often than not, they will really want to do it well because they care, they love a project and they love drawing and those zoo animals, monsters and princesses that they were told to create. Or, quite possibly, they don’t like drawing, they are into other creative areas and they will devote precisely a total of sixty seconds to that task having then announced ‘I have finished’ and already on the lookout for other things to do. While their more involved peers are still busy and far from finishing, leaving the teacher with a room full of self-induced mixed ability group.

Is there a solution to that? Yes, there is. There must be. This ‘students draw’ has been on my mind for a very long time and there are some ways of handling it, the first of them – taking the coursebook and the ideas with a pinch of salt. Or two. The second of them, working on the staging and the clever way of keeping the activity in shape and everyone on the ball.

This is one of my solutions. It has worked very well with both groups and I am already thinking how to adapt it to other topics. As soon as I do come up with something and as soon as I trial and test, I will be adding to this post. For now, only one topic: the dinosaur.

Ingredients

  • Paper and pencils or markers for the children
  • A set of cards that help to shape up the drawing process, like the one that I used in a lesson in which we created our dinosaurs.

Procedures

  • It is noteworthy that the lesson in which we actually draw the dinosaur was only one of the series of lessons taught over a period of three weeks and was proceeded by a few lessons in which we introduced and practised new vocabulary, did a mini-research and described the appearance of different dinosaurs. After our dinosaurs were ready, we added a fact file, did lots of quizes on dinosaurs and, eventually, had a role-play aka an interview about a dinosaur. The drawing lesson was just a part of a long chain of activities.
  • The teacher asks the kids to open their notebooks and get the markers or pencils ready or give out the paper for the drawing, depending on the set-up in your context.
  • The teacher tells the students that they are going to create a dinosaur, their own dinosaur and that they will listen to the teacher and make decisions. It might be a good idea to show the children the cut-up cards and to tell them that each card is a decision about a dinosaur.
  • The teacher is supposed to draw their own dinsoaur, either on a piece of paper or on the board.
  • The activity starts with everyone drawing a circle or an oval for the dinosaur’s body in the middle of the page.
  • The teacher picks up the first card (i.e. ‘draw a long neck’ OR ‘draw a short neck’), the teacher reads it out loud and makes their own decision, announces it out loud and draws the neck for the dinosaur. The teacher then checks with all the students, in turns, what choice they have made, making sure they say out loud what they have decided to do. The kids draw, the teacher monitors.
  • The activity goes on, with the teacher doing one more round and then the students taking over and reading and dictating for the class and the teacher.
  • In the end, the student come up with the name for their dinosaur with the suffix -saurus (although it is, of course, not the only suffix used to created dinosaurs names).
  • The lesson finishes with all the students introducing their dinosaurs briefly and only in the following lessons do the students proceed with working on their dinosaurs (facts, role-playes etc).

Why we like it?

  • I loved how this format worked in the classroom. It was well staged and it helped me manage the children and their creativity, without losing control and without anybody finishing ahead of time or going on for too long. It was also a perfect combination of teacher-centred and of individual creative choices for every student.
  • I had quite a few cards to use but I was prepared to use all or not all of them, depending on how focused or interested my students would have been. In the two lessons / groups I did it with, we managed to go through all the cards (aka decisions).
  • The kids were prepared for the task, vocabulary-wise and we also could use it to practise it further, through reading, confirming, checking etc. The words were out there, in the air, throughout the entire lesson.
  • The kids absolutely loved their dinosaurs. Some of them even managed to finish their first dinoasaur, and draw another one.
  • It worked very well also as the preparation for the more productive part of the project, our interviews – role-plays in the following lessons.
  • Kids also enjoyed the fact of being responsible for making the decisions, step by step, while creating their dinosaurs.
  • I will definitely be applying this particular approach to our projects in the future.

Happy teaching!

The unsung heroes of the YL/ VYL classroom. Volume 2

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I was there first, dear Balenciaga!

This is the second post in the series and the link between them is the painter’s scotch that already futured in the first post but that is still one of my top 5 things in my bag. And here are some more…

The alphabet

We started the academic year with ‘Aa is for apple’ in our handwriting booklets and we spent the first three months on meticulous handwriting exercises. When we got to Zz and we were more or less familiar with the whole set of letters, I would write all of them on the top of the board for the kids to copy. I know that there are a lot of posters available on the market (and my school prints their own, too), but I just didn’t like them as they did not match my set of requirements: big letters, handwriting, font matching what we have been using and some visual representation, too, to help make them a little bit less abstract. With the visuals that we already know instead of some randomness such as ‘N – nest’, ‘Q – quilt’, ‘S – sparrow’, ‘Y – yak’ or even ‘X – xylopohone’ that are either very rare, well beyond the A1 level, not child-friendly or just vile (yes, I am talking about the xylophone that has the randomest pronunciaction of ‘x’ ever).

I made my own. I made two, one for 1A and one for 1B. The only thing necessary was an A1 piece of cardboard, a marker and a set of stickers.

It has spent the second half of the year on the walls of our classrooms and we used it as a reference point in all our writing exercises. The kids used it on their own and I used it, too, to direct them towards the correct letter. ‘Dd is for dog! Look!’. All in all, it helped us made huge progress with our literacy skills. No more than that but so much!

The chalk markers

When I found the Treasure of the Year, I was looking for something else entirely. I was getting ready for the Art classes, White on Black, googling for black drawing paper and white pencils. I found them and the lesson was great (you can read about it here) but what I also found the Solution of the Year and the Teacher’s Love of the Year: the chalk markers.

The thing is for the previous six months I had been forced to use the traditional blackboard and the traditional chalk and I hated every single moment of it, after all my educational like in the Polish state schools, fourteens years as a student and five as a teacher; hatred from the very bottom of my heart, because of the dry hands, because of the chalk dust on your clothes and because of the cloth. And then I found the chalk markers that I had not even known existed!

They are beyond amazing. They last a few weeks, they are just markers and they are quite thin so it is a dream to be writing with them and you can be very accurate and produce intricate letters and drawings. And they erase easily!

The trolley

I spent about three weeks of the academic year being miserable. I had two groups and two classrooms and the whole day was about moving from one to the other, together with everything that I needed in my teaching life: markers, toys, flashcards, cards, stamps, schoolbag, thermos, notebook, my magic wand, glue, craft paper, pencils…Most of the time wasting on it the entire length of the break. Every single time, every single day. The classrooms are door to door but, still, it meant making a few rounds, a few times a day. It’s not that I did not have a place to keep my things in either of these classrooms, I did, but it was still impossible to have two separate sets of cards, two separate sets of puppets, two separate sets of markers for the whole class.

The misery lasted almost a month until I had enough and I looked for solutions. I used to use boxes and baskets in the past, with my preschoolers but these would not work in these new circumstances. This is how I got my trolley, four metal shelves of happiness on wheels. Each shelf has its own theme and I keep there, going from the top: markers, flashcards and storybooks and puppets, cards, packets small scrap paper cards and handmade cards.

It is super easy to move from one classroom to the other or to roll it around the classroom while handing out boxes with markers. It is light so my students can help with it and they love doing it. They actually love to pretend play being flight attendants and giving out things. It made my life much easier.

One more thing! That trolley is getting me one step closer to becoming a Real Babushka!

The cupboards

One thing that I definitely had a chance to find out about myself is that I am thoroughly obsessed with order. It might have something to do with some form of OCD because mess and disorder makes me very unhappy. In the past, I must have lived in some kind of an ignorance but that’s because I was not obliged to share the classroom with another teacher on permanent basis. Until September 2023.

This was when I realised that I am deeply unhappy with the disorder on the table, on the cupbards, on the window sills and on the shelves. This was when I understood that I like my classroom near to empty, without all of these toys, games, books and (omg) candy that children have a full and unrestricted access to, which, of course, has a detrimental impact on the general classroom management. Alas, when you have to share, you just share and try to live to tell the story.

The cupboards made it possible and because there are two that I have got, I can be easy-going with how I organise the shelves and what I put things. In one word, I have room for everything. One full cupboard is filled with books, workbooks and notebooks and the other is my beloved Art cupboard, with all my resources, treasures, aprons and jars. They are all located at the back of the classroom and sometimes, when I teach, I like to glance at one or the other and smile. Peace and quiet, law and order in my resources.

The markers

There are many stationary items in the primary classroom, pencils, pens, crayons, coloured pencils but ‘Nothing compares to you’ is what I would sing to my boxes of markers. I think, perhaps, it might be because of the hours spent in the young learners’ and very young learners’ classroom or, in other words, because of the hours spent with people who are learning to hold a writing tool and people who are learning to use it to write their first words.

On behalf of my students, I prefer them to everything else, because, first of all, they are much easier to handle for an inexperienced hand, much easier to hold, requiring less muscle power to hold and to produce a line, very often much thicker and much lighter than anything else. Not to mention that because of the colours and the excitement of using them, they make the difficult and tiresome task of writing a tiny little bit more appealing and motivating.

We use them throughout the year to colour and, also, in the beginning of the year to write. I cannot really say exactly when we stop and switch to pencils and pens as it varies, from year to year but that is our general procedure.

Happy teaching!

Upside down and inside out. How to dismantle a traditional EFL curriculum and how to spend a year disregarding the CEFR

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(Or an English teacher reflects on the academic year that has just finished.)

This is the third of the posts in the series of the Reflective Teacher that I promised myself to celebrate the end of the school year. Here you can find me reminiscing on the life of an Art teacher. Here you will find the unexpected memoirs of a Maths teacher and here (because they also secretly belong in the series) – a whole set of notes of a teacher trying to introduce law and order in Year 1.

But, first and foremost, I am a teacher of English, working hard to give the students in my classroom the tools, the imagination and the courage to speak a language. And from that point of view, this year has been a very interesting experience for an English teacher, too.

Something old…

Well, there is a lot of that!

I have been teaching English to primary for many, many years now. I know how to do it and I love doing it, really. Vocabulary, grammar, communication skills, functional language, reading, writing, a is for apple (a a apple), learning how to be a student, learning how to be a member of a community, routine, pairwork, all of that, all at once. It makes your head spin, a little bit, of coure, but then, all of a sudden, it all starts coming together and it feels great.

Introducing all the letters of the alphabet, staring our handwriting booklet, phonics stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, the first song, the first test, the first spontaneous production case, the first storybook. I have jumped through all these hoops with many generations of my students and successfully so and this year we have done it together once more.

The only thing that was different was the fact that I had a lot more time in a week and we could set aside a lot more time for practice. And that, apart from English and the ESL classes, my kids were getting a lot more exposure and practice from the History lessons, from Maths, Science, PE, Art and the break times, too. Every little helps!

Something new…

Do you still remember the title of this post? If not, please scroll up to refresh. Why? Because this is the image that I have in my head when I think of English in this academic year, here goes:

a beautifully constructed framework of the CEFR, with all the levels and their detailed descriptions, skills, grammar and vocabulary, in a sequence, neat and tidy, like a set of puzzles forming one beautiful picture, now scattered on the floor, all over the place and it is not even possible to understand what it was that they showed in the first place…

That is exactly what happened this year and that is all due to the context in which I was teaching, namely my bilingual primary school, with a group of students who were in their year 1 of education but according to the curriculum and age, in their year 3 of the BNC. And who, naturally, were a very mixed bunch as regards their L2 language skills. A very mixed bunch indeed.

Because of that we made a decision to adapt the programme and the plan and divide the children into level-appropriate ESL groups so that they all could learn and take their English to another level and, alongside that, we would teach the English and develop the skills according to the BNC. All in all, it has worked well. The kids were tested throughout the year, both as regards the reading and writing skills (milestone tests) and speaking (Cambridge YLE) and they all made progress. Hooray.

However, all of that meant that I had to forget about what the basics, the CEFR. First of all, because, from the very beginning I had pre-A1, A1, A2 and A2+ and everyone in-between sitting in my classroom. Outcomes: forget about using one single set of materials.

Second of all, we were to follow the curriculum of the year 3 of the BNC and even if we made amendments (as we did), this was nothing in any way related to the CEFR, as regards the structures or the vocabulary and we had to at least make an attempt at combining the English curriculum with our ESL curriculum. Outcomes: adapt, adjust and do your job, feeling just a little bit anxious, with the safety blanket gone.

Last but not least, I had my bunch in the classroom and in the school, for many hours a day and it was my task to make the most of it and to give them a chance and the tools to communicate in English as much as possible and that means (or it might mean) not going nicely from one level of CEFR to the other. I have already written about it earlier, in my storytelling campaign posts here, and this year I definitely had a chance to research it more and to gain even more experience.

Some of the things that meant for us:

  • introducing lots and lots of verbs, the everyday verbs (to talk about what we do in the classroom), the story verbs (in order to read and to tell stories), the hobby verbs (to talk about what we like to do)
  • introducing lots and lots of adjectives, to describe emotions and feelings (to talk about ourselves and to talk about the emotions in stories), to describe objects (all the Maths, History, Science lessons because of the comparatives and superlatives used in all of the subjects)
  • introducing structures when we needed them: Present Continuous (to describe what we are doing in the classroom, to manage the kids, to tell stories and to describe pictures), comparatives and superlatives (the BNC)
  • introducing some elements of the word formation (some negative prefixes, gerund, er for jobs) because of the requirements of the BNC
  • introducing the elements of the three basic tenses (the Present Simple, the Past Simple and will) to give the kids a chance to express themselves, to talk about the weekend on Monday and to talk about the things to do on holiday
  • learn a huge pile of words from way beyond our A2 level and not in some topical sets but because we either needed them in our phonics practice and it was ok to learn them because they were all 7-year-old-friendly words (with such treasures as: feather, together, trophy, sloth, gate, cube, arrow, pillow among them) or because we needed them for our English, History or Science lessons.
  • introduce a pile of useful phrases, way beyond our A2 level, through stories, just because we needed them in the everyday. ‘It’s impossible!’, ‘Let’s try!’, ‘You’re too loud!’, ‘Just a little bit more!’, ‘I’ve got an idea!’…

Something borrowed, something blue!

Two things that it led to is that we have actually learnt and we have made huge progress over the year, despite this being the first year of learning English for some of my kids and it meant learning some complicated vocabulary and grammar at the age of seven. The other thing it meant for me only was staying somewhat shell-shocked and puzzled at the fact that I have turned the CEFR upside down and inside out and I lived to tell the story…

I am not sure if, with this post, I really want to promote getting rid of the CEFR. Quite the contrary, I appreciate it being a part of our life, as a teacher and an assessor or an examiner. But it is not the only thing that matters and, sometimes, experimenting and playing with it or just blatantly going around it, that is the best idea EVER! Especially that the CEFR itself is one thing and the way the structures or vocabulary items are included and organised in our coursebooks, that is a completely diferent thing.

It’s been years now since I started to introduce lots of verbs, lots of adjectives and the Present Continuous in my VYL classes. This year was the first one in which I brought some elements of the Past Simple and the future will to my young beginners, just so we could talk about the everyday in a meaningful and natural way. And I am very happy with the results. Hooray to that!

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.

Hence the survey.

Miss Anka, the Maths teacher?!

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The picture from our lesson on emotions and my example for ‘proud’.

I am looking at the title of the post and it still looks weird. Out of place. Oxymoronic. Laughter-inducing. Still, after all those nine months in the classroom, I say it out loud (‘I teach Maths’) and I am experiencing another cognitive dissonance. And yet it is all true. I am miss Anka who teaches Maths. Or rather, to be more specific, I am miss Anka who has also taught Maths in this academic year, together with English, ESL, EFL and Art.

But that’s exactly what happened. At the end of August, I got my lesson plan and there it was: year 1 (or year 3 of the British National Curriculum): English and Maths. I decided to just go for it, partially, because it was too late to change things, partially because I was curious and up for a challenge.

Our lesson plan on the board. Upgraded by the kids.

Something old

On the one hand, Maths is something that I had done before as somewhere along the way I got to design and teach a programme based on the BNC, Science and Maths, for KS1 and KS2, for two years and yes, I loved it. That I had started from the absolute zero but reading, research and a tiny bit of enthusiasm and creativity helped me find my feet in the area and learn the ropes.

On the other hand, I was not sure. I have not got any formal qualifications in that area and I have never done any courses on Maths methodology. Yes, I do know Maths and year 1 (or KS3) Maths is within my brain’s competence BUT. In a way it reminds me of a situation in which a native speaker of any language says ‘Hey! I am going to become a teacher of this language just because I speak it!’ Well, no. Whether we like it or not, methodology matters. Not all the proficient langauge speakers, not all the talented bakers, dancers, farmers and drivers are great teachers of the subject.

And yet I decided to accept the challenge and dive in at the deep end. I ever have to present an alibi, I will use: my experience with the BNC, all my years in the primary classroom and my general creativity. Plus, the overall results, because I did ‘make my kids know Math‘.

When we were practising division

Something new

There were two things that I absolutely loved about teaching Maths this year.

First of all, my kids, all 21 of them were absolute Maths fanatics. I don’t know if kids are like that, in general at the age or whether I was just lucky enough to land two classes full of them but that’s what it was. There were numerous conversations throughout the year along these lines: ‘Miss Anka, what lesson is next? Maths? Hooray!‘ There were often asking about the units that we would cover throughout the year and, quite often, I had no idea regarding the terms they were using because I don’t know them in Russian. When I introduced the topic of multiplication I got a standing ovation in both groups. A standing ovation! That has never happened when I was announcing verb patterns or the Present Perfect…NOT ONCE!

Of course, I am only joking. My kids’ enthusiasm and curiosity and passion for Maths made it all possible and worth it. We went together through numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, fractions and measuring everything. In English.

Our first fraction lessons

The other thing that I absolutely loved in this academic year was the constant challenge for my methodological brain: looking at the coursebook and the material that I was about to teach and forcing my grey cells to find a path and the best way of presenting, explaining, finding the context, finding the words and the steps.

Naturally, there are plenty of resources available (more of that below) but I found out that I am a creative teacher of Maths, too. I did a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and it paid off.

One of my favourite additions to my toolbox were two invisible students, Petya and Alisa, who helped us help them with their issues with Maths and English, respectively, and my students absolutely loved these lessons.

This whole chapter was also very interesting from the point of view of all of the differences with my ‘core’ subjects, English and Art. These two are all about breaking the mould, getting creative, allowing yourself to go over the top. It is a place in which the pigs can be bigger than humans and they can fly, a place in which you are allowed to think of broccoli ice-cream and a place in which any idea IS a good idea. All of these rules do not apply in Mathematics. 2+2 is 4, forever and ever and forever and always and there no debates are going to change it. This is something that we had to learn, too. That it matters not only that you know the final result but that you know how to get there and that you keep the written record of this journey. That all your symbols are matching the international standards and that they are exactly where they should be. I caught myself talking a lot about ‘what real mathematicians do’ or ‘what real scientists do’ to encourage them to follow suit, too. In one of the lessons, I also started to bring up Albert Einstein, first as a joke, but it did stick and it helped to remind the kids of all the little things that matter. ‘Listen, if Albert Einstein came here and saw THAT (the written record of the mathematical operation), he’d cry. Let’s not make him cry. Please!‘ It worked and they were often joking about it themselves!

The introduction of the bus stop method.

Something borrowed, something blue

Everyone knows twikl.co.uk so I don’t really need to advertise it. Suffice it to say, Twinkl is the teacher’s best friend and I am nothing but grateful for their handouts and presentations.

Jack Hartman’s channel has been very useful, too. Together, we did a lot of Maths gymnastics and we sang all of the song to practise multiplication tables as ‘You don’t need any tricks. You can multiply by 6!’ We have also loved Maths videos from the Secret Garden channel (such as the one about fractions) and Mr R’s Songs for teaching because ‘My favourite thing is measurement’.

Wordwall also has the maths generator template and we have used it a lot in class and at home and I created lots of games with all the other templates, depending on the topic. Here are some examples: a numbers spinner (‘What do you want?’ ‘How many?’ ‘Is it enough?’), a quiz (‘Which one is heavier?’), ordering (From the biggest to the smallest).

We tried to make Maths a hands-on subject. We ran around the room with a measuring tape, we learnt to understand division while working with pasta pieces, we did the litres lesson in the bathroom and we got to understand addition and subtraction with carry-over thanks to Oreo Cookies. Although the audience did object to the fact that there were no REAL cookies in the classroom.

I think I might actually like being a Maths teacher.

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.

Hence the survey.