Setting up the routine. A year in the classroom

Welcome to my classroom diary! This is where I reflect on our classroom management, our challenges and achievements. It started in September 2023 with two brand new groups. During the first month I added entries weekly, at the moment, after a year in the classroom, I add new posts monthly. Follow our journey with us!

Step by step! Year 2, one month in.

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I decided to contiue with my reflection journal.

One thing is that someone else may find it useful, reading about the adventures of another teacher and realising that even for an experienced one, it is not (always) a bed of roses and that, regardless of the mileage, we work with what (or whom!) we have in the classroom, adapting methods, approaches and always being on the lookout for new solutions.

The other thing, however, is that I find it really (really) useful as a teacher. Even the very fact that I created a new post here and typed in the headings, that alone helped me see this whole month of teaching from a completely different angle. An instand reflection and understanding. It does not mean that I regret doing something or that I would introduce any major changes in the month of September. We did what we had to do but now I understand better why we did it this way.

September, back to school after three long months of no routine and no learning, that had to take its toll! I am beyond happy that my students could enjoy the summer freedom from their duties but it is true that you forget, at least some of the things that you have leant. And, mind you, not so much regarding the actual language or Maths, but, absolutely – definitely – thoroughly, when it comes to habits and routines.

Outcomes? You spent the whole month of September rebuilding it. Step by step.

Starting the lesson

As regards this stage of the lesson, we went for the principle of ‘something old, something new’. We start with our traditional ‘5..4…3…2…1…Hello everyone’ and talking about how we are plus talking about the weekend on Monday but now this part is now led by our ‘Hello Master‘. One of the students is chosen to perform this task in the beginning of the task. They sit on the chair in front of the class and ask the question ‘How do you feel today?’, not forgetting to follow up with ‘Because?’. Because? Because We Want More Language Production!

At this point, we are not using our handmade flashcards with feelings. Instead, I prepared the real ones, printed and laminated and they are displayed on the walls of the classroom. I did notice that some students look around to find something to really express how they feel. Thanks to that one of my students stopped answering ‘I don’t know’ (an answer which I used to accept, it is, after all, a valid way to feel for a human). Now he looks around and finds something to say. Usually, a few things, actually, which I am not surprised with as he is the one that seems to be able to feel a whole multitude of feelings per second. At least now, he can talk about it!

We have two other students chosen in every lesson, two Helpers, who hand out pencils, books, handouts and who help with cleaning up. Kids love helping and they treat it as a privilege. Naturally, I have to keep track of the names and roles, or else, I am in trouble.

Afterwards, we sing our Month Song, I start and then, whoever has an idea, they sing, too. I love this part of the lesson and I see that they really use it to express how they feel on the day or to joke about me or themselves. And it is all improvised!

Rules and classroom language

Aside from the feelings, we are now in our own classroom and we can display whatever we want on the walls, just the way I like it! So, aside from the days of the week, the months, the sight words and the feelings cards, I also added all the rules, so that we always have them in front of our eyes.

One of the Helpers always reads them in the beginning of the day and we refer to them during the lesson. The next step will be adding the real classroom language, all the verbs and phrases we need during the lesson. After all, we still have some room on the walls and they pay attention to what’s there!

Rewards chart

A rewards chart has become an important part of our lessons in September, as a visualisation of what they do AND as an instant reflection faciliation tool.

I did experiment with it a little bit, over the month of September, using what I have learnt so far (a post is here) and, let me put it like that, because of my students, I managed to learn even more about the effective use of a rewards chart.

In the end, after experimenting and finding quite a few things that don’t work with my current audience, I decided to keep it simple. We have a list of names, all of them with attendance (either a plus or a little comment ‘Where is Sasha?’ or ‘Sasha is ill’), some of them with the badges (Helper or Hello Master) and, as we go along through the lesson, I add stars for the completion of the tasks and, sometimes, special stars for some additional achievements, for the extra work that is optional. This week I also started to add some verbs that describe the kids behaviour, the unwanted behaviour. It is not a minus or a sad face, it is just a neutral description i.e. talks or disturbs a friend etc, and, of course, they are there only to signal that there is something that they should not be doing and, naturally, if they cease, I erase. It has worked so far and the language is as neutral and bland as possible. ‘Only facts’.

Last week I also used it in the end of the lesson, to thank those few of my students who were great players during our competitive game. However, for that, I used a different symbol, a big smiley. More of that a bit later.

We also keep a lesson plan, or actually 2. I have my own, on the board at the back and I write a short, funny version of it on the main board, for the students. We keep erasing bits of it as we go through the lesson. I normally wrote it as bullet points and changed it only this week, to a snake (a theme of the day) but one of my kids asked to go back to the bullet points list as it is, apparently, easier to read. OK, point taken, thank you.

Since we are still getting used to the life in the classroom, I had to go back to another item: ‘time left’ on the board as it really helps my students manage their attention and focus during the lesson. As I have written before, it is also an interesting resource of feedback for me, because, naturally, they ask more in some lessons and less in the others so, this is one more signal of how we are going on.

Songs and story

I decided to put these two categories together because this month, to some extent, we have abandoned songs and stories. Not fully, oh no, these are the two things that I love doing in the classroom and I would never give up on them. But the month of September saw fewere of them, in comparison of what we did last year.

We do have our Month Improvisation Song in the beginning of the lesson and the other song, taken from Superminds 3, ‘School is cool’ which we love, we love to change (‘School is not cool’) and which helped us practise school subjects. We also did listen to some of our favourites from last year but, overall, there were fewer songs.

The same applies to stories. We did Dr Seuss, ‘I’ll teach my dog 100 words’, to revise and to practise verbs and one long story, ‘Johnny’s Story’ from Superminds 3 which we read, listen to, talked about and created our own versions, too. I really wanted to use this one because it is quite long and I have a few Johnnys in my groups. We definitely can relate! But, again, only two stories in four or five weeks.

I have my reasons! Hear me out! It seems that, subconsciously, I wanted to cut down on the number of stimuli and new things in the lesson, based on how much we struggled with remaining seated. Literally. It helped a bit and we will definitely add more stories and songs in October!

Socialising

This was one aspect of our classroom life that we had to work a lot on. What the kids forgot, apart from the routine and rules, were the social norms and the bond and friendships, or, in some cases, the kind tolerance we had developed towards each other in year 1. Sigh.

As a result, we had to work on that A LOT in September and this is how we did it:

  • I experimented a lot with different seating arrangements. Throughout September, kids would sit with different partners every day. I wanted to experiment in order to find out the best and the worst combinations. In the beginning, we used the September words and it was random but after two weeks I started to assign seats (using the chalk marker) to write the names on the tables for everyone and reflecting after the lesson. At this point, after a month, we are pretty much aware of what works best and, aside from little changes, everyone has their own seat. Some kids sit in a trio, some in pairs, some in a pair but with tables apart and I have some outsiders who sit at the front but at their own separate island. That said, we also regroup, too, for some of the activities.
  • We have done a crazy amount of pairwork. Only last week, over three lessons, we did comparing pictures (Flyers), playing a dice game, playing a guessing game, comparing how often we do things based on our notes, played a team game various times, with different teams. They did well!
  • We did lots of competitive games because NOW WE CAN! I am so proud of my students that another article will have to come out of it! Because of all the work we did last year, over the summer with some kids and over those four weeks of September, the kids are now simply amazing at managing their emotions and taking the defeat without tears. It was not easy, not at all, but we made it. I am just so proud! We now have a habit of getting together in a team, thinking of a name and negotiating a lot while in-game, in order to achieve the best results. In that sense, that is also a thing that works towards being a part of a group.
  • I believe that also all the other things that we do, as one big group, that also helps to remind us that we are a team: our rules, our classroom, our cards, names, all of the rituals and traditions, our notebooks and books.

Creativity

We didn’t do any real projects apart from the first one, on day 1, but we were very creative in September. Starting this year, my school introduced a new lesson, the homework time, that is obligatory for everyone and serves as an opportunity to catch up on things that haven’t been finished during the regular lessons or completing some additional tasks. And, so far, that has been so much fun!

First of all, these are the tasks that my kids do with our T.A., so there is a different vibe to them. Sometimes, we do English and on some days Maths, depending on the day. Sometimes these are just ‘some more exercises’, the repetition and revision of what we did in class and how we did things in class but, often, these tasks are more creative, for example creating stories, sentences and Maths tasks for me. I am able to check them only the following day but when I do, I usually laugh a lot because my students are having fun, with Maths and with the language.

Having said that, the time for a real project is coming up!

Teacher

Over these few weeks of September, I have generally calmed down and got my feet back on the ground because we have been more under control of everything taking place. There are still a few issues to resolve but we are getting there, step by step.

I am really happy because I can see, on daily basis, how much progress my students have made. They are so much better at reading and they do remember quite a lot from Maths, too. Hooray to that! And onto the next one!

Happy teaching!

‘It’s tricky! It’s tricky!’ Back to school classroom management

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About some ridiculous expectations

Well, it is not my first rodeo and, actually, it might be actually a good point in life to count properly how many rodeos aka Septembers there have been so far (I really don’t know) but, it turned out that I had been a bit naive about what to expect in the classroom on the 3rd of September. Or, in other words, my students managed to suprise me once more! Hooray to that. I suppose)

I knew that my students would come back having forgotten a lot and that we would not be able to pick it up where we left off, not after three months of no-school life. However, naively, I was hoping that they will remember something and that our September life will not involve starting off a brand new blank page. I was wrong!

The funny thing about it is that a few minutes into a lesson that was not necessarily bad but also not my dream come true, I kind of split my attention. There was a part of my brain that was solely responsible for the lesson taking place and the other one stepped back and started to look at the events the way a trainer would, connecting the dots and making mental notes about ‘the things to improve’. That was an interesting experience, I have to say.

This post today will have a format different to every other post in this series. I will try to analyse the things that did not go to plan and the solutions I already decided to put in place.

Things that I liked on the first real day

  • We talked about the things we did on holiday and it was great
  • We kept our Months Improvisation Song and now we are singing about ‘September’, I did my verse and the kids did theirs.
  • We did an introductory reading task and I was really happy with how it went. The kids really wanted to read (already a reason to celebrate) and to find the mistakes in the song.
  • We played our numbers spinner Maths game (‘I want…’) and it was very productive.
  • We made a mural about our favourite things that we will put up on the wall, Our Solar System. We sat together on the floor around a sheet of paper and we went on creating.
  • Even in the first lesson we had a good variety of interaction patterns: whole class, individual work, activities led by kids, collaboration on the project.
  • We have a special board where we keep the plan for the lesson.

Things that I didn’t like on the first real day

  • In one line, the kids were over-stimulated and out of control.
  • It was the first lesson in our new classroom, out of the previous set-up, associated with good habits and routines and there were too many new elements.
  • I allowed the kids to sit the way they wanted, with the friends they wanted to be around.
  • I decided to include the rules revision during the second lesson (for a reason) but I had to pay for that
  • I decided to include one of our favourite Maths games, to balance ‘the new’ with ‘the familiar’ but, I have to admit, there were better solutions, something else than a game would work better.
  • We used some of the favourite songs but I also included a new song, ‘Back to school’ but, in hindsight, I think it was not really necessary. It could have been left for a bit later.

What has changed since the first day aka Solutions

  • Nobody is sitting where they want anymore. This was my plan and I announced it in the first lesson that during the month of September we are going to have a different seating arrangement every single day. I prepared some September vocabulary cards and glued them onto the desks and a set of cards with the same words. Everyone coming into the room picks up one card and then looks for their place to sit. I want to experiment with different seating arrangements (especially that I am still working on the arrangements of the desks, too) and I want to check which combination works the best. There are some dangers involved, some tricky combinations to be avoided at all cost, but I am willing to take that risk, in order to learn. It was only yesterday that I saw a meme or a video on the social media in which teachers were saying that they let everyone to sit the way they want on day 1 specifically in order to find out who shouldn’t sit with whom. Plus we are also going to learn some cool September words)
  • Our rules have not been printed, laminated and displayed on the wall above the board. We have been reading and revising them at the start of every lesson. There are only few, my basic set: I sit nicely, I listen to the teacher, I speak quietly, I raise my friend, we are friends and Russian is beautiful but I speak English here. If we need, we will add to the list.
  • I have also decided to add another poster ‘How are we working today?‘ to help kids understand the different interaction patterns and modes of work. You can see all of them in the poster underneath and these are the terms that I am using to describe what the lesson is going to be about. They also help a lot with giving instructions to particular tasks. The most important differentiation at the moment is the one between ‘follow the teacher step by step’ and ‘you can make your own decisions’.
  • I reinstated the tool that we already abandoned, namely, the final stage of the lesson with the official announcements of the grades for the lesson, for work and for behaviour. We did not quite abandon them because I still needed my notes to add comments to the electronic journal for all my students but making formal announcements of praise and of not-so-good feedback was not necessary at the end of the previous academic year. This is back and it helps to summarise the lesson, to highlight once more the superstar behaviour and to explain why some grades are not very good.
  • We have a new call – response and last we used ;Autum leaves’ (teacher) – ‘falling down’ (students). They have already customised it and some of them respond ‘falling up’, just because it is funny. I need one more of those.
  • We sang a lot of our favourite songs during the other two days and I am planning to keep that trend for another week, without repeating, until we go through everything in our Songbook.
  • With one of my groups, I have put the games on hold for now, we are not ready yet. With the other one, the games are at the end of the lesson plan, in the ‘if time’ section. We need to get back into the school mode, back into the focus, before we start doing something more entertaining.

What’s next?

Not much, just the everyday and helping my adorable monster get back to the proper working mode. We will sing our songs, we will definitely do a story next week. We are still working without our books, rationing resources. We already have the beautiful notebooks, though, so there is a place to keep all the notes. Step by step!

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. Nine months into the course aka The end of Year 1!

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Starting the lesson

We have had the same routine for a few months now and it’s been going pretty well. The kids just loved sharing everything about their new toys and things related (lipsticks, brushes, water bottles, notebooks, candy and what not). Some of them also started to tell me about all the presents the parents would buy them. The more language, the better!

Songs

In May we did a lot of singing of our Seasons Song because this was the song we chose for our presentation for the end of the year show. The kids really liked and they loved singing it, without any help from me. We also continued to sing our ‘May May’ improvisation song. Which was mostly about how tired we are, how much we are looking forward to the summer, holidays and birthdays. We also did a few summer songs, What do you like to do in the summer? and the song from the last unit of Superminds 1 (Let’s go to the sea).

Rules and classroom language

After a very rough April, the kids calmed down and everything fell into place, more or less. We worked hard, we were focused (most of the time), we wrote all the tests but we also had a lot of fun because the really difficult and challenging topics finished and the fun units started, for example measurement in Maths and our body in English and ESL. These are the topics that lend themselves to hands-on learning and I think that also had an impact on the way the kids reacted. In a way, having survived multiplication and division, we could finally relax a bit and have some more educational fun.

Teacher in May: emotional support

Story

In May we did a great story from our coursebook, a traditional story from Turkey, ‘A fair solution’ and we really enjoyed it. We also watched a short story as part of our lessons ‘At the doctor’s’. The one I really like is the one from New Tiger 2.

Now I am looking at the story summary of the month and it looks just very disappointing, only two stories, barely 2. I think I am going to comfort myself with the fact that we have made up for it with our project activities…

Socialising

We have been doing our best as regards social skills. There were times when we had to deal with different issues, still, but we are trying.

  • We did lots and lots of pairwork in the role-plays (At the doctor’s)
  • We took part in quite a few whole class projects and I was really happy to see that the kids were working together and thinking of the whole team, like, for instance, in our ‘I can smell’ project in which we were testing our noses and recognising the smell of mint, lavender, some fruit etc and in which the success of the activity depended on the individual team members’ efforts (‘Please smell but don’t say it out loud yet!’). It worked!
  • Both of my groups tried to play a competitive game (‘But you know that one team is going to lose, yes?’) and one of the groups even asked for the more competitive version. They won, in the end, but I was so proud of them because they were willing to take a risk. It was a good first time and they really were a proper team)
  • One of the acid tests of the strength of the group was a day and a week with some trial students. I was really curious how the class would react and after the initial five minutes of rolling the eyes, they just got over it and welcomed the new kids and we all worked together.
  • It also helped that we all worked together to prepare the end-of-year show. The kids did their whole performance in Russian, a dance routine and we also prepared our song. That was a nice opportunity for bonding.
22 presents

Creativity

May was definitely an Above Standard as regards creativity and I am very happy with it. Just as well we had something to balance the heavy duty test and test preparation lessons!

  • We experimented with different codes in history and we tried to write our names and silly messages in the Julius Cesar’s code, the Morse code and the number code.
  • We worked a lot with our bodies and experimented with different senses. We played the game of I can see (guessing what might be in the pictures), we tested our noses with a variety of smells. We made a fruit salad and guessed the fruit while eating the salad with our eyes closes. We also learned how to measure a pulse and we tested how our heart behaves when we sit, walk and jump. And this last bit was my excuse to play Song 2 by Blur in class.
  • We made the X-ray photos of different organs. I mean, not the real photos but a cool craft that I designed. I really need to write about it, eventually!
  • We learned about healt problems and illnesses and we had LOTS of fun role-playing it! The secret? A set of basic structures on the board AND a pile of post-it notes for the kids to write notes and prescriptions. Nothing like the notes scribbled on the small pieces of paper, followed by a signature and the card peeled off in a quick movement to give to the ‘patient’…
  • In Maths we did all types of measurement, size, weight, volume…That meant a series of lessons that involved estimate and measurement and checking and us walking around the room with a meter, looking for the information about the volume on the packaging of different things, trying to guess how heavy our possessions are and measuring random volumes of water in the bathroom.

Teacher

I have been a tired teacher in May, a very tired teacher, in fact. All the testing, preparation, end-of-year festivities, reports, presents, good-bye letters, that was A LOT. Especially that, as an Art teacher, I also took it upon myself to have the craziest month in a year with a wide range of materials for my mandalas, salt dough creations, dreamcatchers and stone painting…Rarely was there a day in May when I would walk to school with just a schoolbag…No. There always had to be bag, too, with all the precious junk.

I managed to test everyone again according to the YLE Cambridge standards and everyone (everyone!!!) made progress. Hooray to that!

And then the kids wrote the tests, I did tear up now and again while checking them (because yes, they did great), I prepared 22 goodbye letters and small presents, I clapped a lot during both shows and then they just left. Some of them are still at school, taking part in our summer programme but many left and I know that some of them are moving, changing schools and what not and not coming back. And I had to say good-bye.

  • ‘I am not coming back, miss Anka’.
  • ‘I know. You are fantastic. Don’t forget that!’
  • ‘Я постараюсь. (I’ll try)’

Did I tear up on the spot? No, I am 100. I can, most of the time, control the emotions. Did it ruin my mood for about a week? Yes, it did. It most certainly did.

But we have had a great year, autumn, winter, spring and summer. We started the year with ‘Aa is for apple’ and ‘I can count to 20!’ and now my kids read and write and do multiplication and fractions and they ALL speak much better English than they did in September. I am proud and I will be keeping my fingers crossed for all of them. And, of course, I hope to see them again, in my classroom or just somewhere, in the city.

Happy teaching!

P.S. Please make sure you have a look at our development since September!

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.

Setting up the routine. Eight months into the course

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Starting the lesson

This is the part of the lesson that is still the same: hello, how do you feel today, have we got any new students. It is great to see that they are more in charge of it right now and they are able to answer more fully, without my consecutive questions. If I forget (and that happens), they remind me to bring it back. Right now, it is more common for the kids to ask if we are going to include some other of their favourite elements or games and my stronger writers ask for the permission to put the lesson plan on the board. That is just sweet and it makes my heart melt to see that I can just dictate a very simple plan and they are able to write it down.

Songs

In April we started the lesson with one of two songs.

It was either the absolutel hit from Super Simple Song, The Seasons Song. The kids still really like it and, right now, they are really good at singing. We can properly sing for the pleasure of it.

We still continue singing our month song but in April it has completely turned into ‘I am going to sing about how I feel today’ and we had a few amazing days when it turned into proper comments on the weather (‘What is this? Where is the sun?’ on the rainy days) or an expression of our wishes and hopes (‘Tomorrow I am sleeping, All day’ one day before the May holidays or ‘Where is the summer?’ since we are a few weeks before the end of the academic year). This has been the absolute hit of this academic year!

Rules and classroom language

It is obvious that, on the one hand, the rules are in place and, finally, we almost sit through the lesson, without wandering aimlessly (that was one of our objective in January!) but it is also obvious that the kids are already very tired with the pace and the length and April has not been very easy. The overall attention span has shortened and we have dealt with more issues and outbursts of my kinds.

While planning the lesson, I am more careful with putting the activities in order and with ensuring that the serious tasks that require more of their attention are in the first half of the lesson. It is also more common now to put all the games at the end of the plan and with a question mark. We only play them if we manage to go through everything else. I also caught myself announcing that ‘we are going to do a task’, referring from calling it a game, to signal that we are not doing it ‘just for fun’. Danny Go, our hero from the previous few months had to go, too, because he stirred the kids too much and it was very difficult to bring them back to do some real exercises.

At the same time, I also introduced a new tool for the fast finishers, the ‘I have done everything’ book, with additional tasks from different areas (Maths, logic, drawing, English). The students who have finished their obligatory task can take their booklet and continue working on their tasks. We have had only one week of that so it is too early to evaluate it at this point. We’ll see how it all goes.

Story

April was a bit shorted, due to the term break and my trip, but we still managed to squeeze in a few stories. We read the second part of Marvin, ‘Marvin Wanted More’ by Joseph Theobald and it was cool to read it as it is, with only one or two verbs changed. We also learnt the phrase ‘Just a little bit more!’ and the kids recited it during the reading, when Marvin was getting hungry, which is, basically, every other page.

We also had a fantastic lesson with ‘Wacky Wednesday‘ by Dr Seuss and, last week, with ‘I can read with my eyes shut‘, which we used in a shared reading activity.

Socialising

If anyone dared to think that our eight months in the classroom might potentially mean that everyone is now everyone’s friends, they would be seriously mistaken.

Yes, we get on better with each other than we used to and it is much easier to sort out the issues that come up, admittedly. However, we still have a few issues that bother me a lot. In one of the groups I had to announce that we stop playing games because they are not ready to play. I have one student who is accutely allergic to any competitive activities and recently it turned out that even when we play together, to collect points for the group, the kids start judging each other based on how many points they bring to the kitty. And if someone brings fewer, here you are, the group is ready to troll…

I decided to put the games on hold and I annouced it, officially, but I have a cunning plan. In the time that we have left until the end of the year, we are going to work hard on building a team. Basically you can address me as ‘coach’ for now…I have a few ideas ready and I will look for more. The post will be written, eventually.

Creativity

April would get a strong ‘To Standard’ for the creative element in our lessons:

  • our patchwork project, a part of the lesson devoted to patterns and shapes, not very generative in terms of langauge but, I will be honest, I really wanted to include something like that in our regular ESL classes
  • our amazing dinosaur project that was divided into three lessons and consisted of drawing a dinosaur, filling in a fact file for it and interviewing a friend about it
  • a mini-project in our Wacky Wednesday lesson. The kids had to write only three sentences of their choice about their Wacky Wednesday and draw pictures to accompany them, so simple and so precious. We had a lot of fun.
  • April was also the month of our story (based on Flyers visuals) that we turned into a real book. I loved the fact that they enjoyed writing it and then reading it, too. We are definitely going to do it again.
An excerpt from the story
‘I ate pasta upside down’ (Wacky Wednesday)
Pure brilliance, from the point of view of illustration

Teacher

It has been a very tiring month, although it was a shorter one. I was tired (and busy with the non-school tasks) and the kids were also very tired (and already looking forward to the summer, the last bit of the marathon, before you see the finishing line and find the last scraps to speed up and cross the line in style).

But the good things happened, too. We have done huge progress in Maths and in reading. The kids are really creative and now, I can say, we read. We have had a few amazing Art classes. But I am like my students, I am looking forward to the end of the academic year.

Please make sure you have a look at our development since September!

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.

Setting up the routine. Seven months into the course

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Starting the lesson

This is the part of the lesson that is always the same: we say hello, we talk about how we are and we introduce the new students aka all the new toys that the kids have brought to school that day. It is a lot of fun to see how they are getting better at it and how much smoother it is now, compared to what it used to be a few months ago.

Songs

Our song writing at the beginning of the lesson is getting better and better. We started with the official versions of the song, ‘March, March’, but it went on for only a week or two and then it took a new direction. Nowadays, we sing two versions of it. The first one could be labelled as ‘my favourite month’ and some kids sing a verse about Christmas and Santa coming (presents, presents!) or about their favourite month. The second one is just a long and musical answer to a question ‘How do you feel today?’ and everyone is becoming more and more creative. This is definitely one of my favourite parts of the lesson these days and we usually have six or seven variations. And the language that is coming out of it! I am over the moon!

Another song that we started to sing in March is another hit from Super Simple Song, The Seasons Song. It is not a very new song, it was published a year ago but I have just found it while I was looking for something about spring. I love it. The lyrics are great and not so easy and the music is uplifting, a perfect song for the morning. We have been singing it for about a week now but soon I would like us to write our own versions of the song. I am hoping there will be different things that we can sing and love about the spring, not only the flowers…

Rules and classroom language

I have come up across an interesting problem related to rules and classroom management and I am now in the middle of considering all the implications and the steps I will have to take to sort it out.

I have realised that for some of my students our interactive lessons, so different to their ‘typical’ national curriculum classes and the approach of their national curriculum teachers have given an idea that the English lessons are not serious and that, for example, they don’t need to think about the rules that much or that they can simply op out of the activities as they would opt out of a game…I am not sure what it means yet but I know that I need to do something and introduce some changes. More on that later.

Story

We did a lot of storytelling in March. We were practising jobs and that is why we watched an episode of Steve and Maggie and turned it into a role-play. We also read and listened to our first story in verse from our coursebook, Lenny, Jenny and the Jumperoo. The story was quite long but the kids were really involved and with all the illustrations and proper staging, we made it into a good lesson.

And, after the success of the Wocket in the Pocket (which we also read again in a shared reading session), I decided that we are ready for the Green Eggs and Ham. We read it together, properly and it was a lot of fun. Our copy is a collection of five or six Dr Seuss’ stories and once my kids saw the other ones, they immediately made a plan for the next few weeks and the order in which we will read them all. I think we can say that Dr Seuss will be a frequent guest in our lessons!

Socialising

We kept working on our class friendships. We have done a lot of pairwork (surveys with different partners), we have played bamboozle, ‘Tell me’ and Wordwall Quiz, as one big team, collecting the points for our class. We have done a few ball games and we have even tried some Maths multiplication boardgames. The kids also had a chance to cooperate with each other during the treasure hunt activities as they could choose to work in pairs or small teams.

Creativity

Since our February was not the most creative on months, I tried to make up for it in March:

  • we wrote a lot of songs and this way we produced a lot of langauge
  • we read a poem and we wrote our first poem in English
  • one of the topics in March was ‘Inventions’ and we created our own inventions
  • we had a great lesson about Alfonso Pomodoro, a ghost and we used his interview with Miss Viola as a model for our own interviews with characters and we role-played these later.
  • we acted out our versions of the Steve and Maggie conversation from the video

Teacher

It has been a good month. We did our third milestones test in Maths and English and it was just great to see that so many of my students got excellent results. Although, all of them worked hard and I am proud of every single one of them! It is really a pleasure to look at how they work and get better and I even had to write a whole post about it!

A few months ago we started our dear diary project and some of the kids still continue writing and I get so much pleasure from reading them and replying. Especially when they give the notebook to me, then pester me to read it straight away and keep asking whether I have already replied or not and then they get their answer, read it as soon as possible and try to reply within the same day. We ARE communicating!

We have just started division in Maths and we are about to start unit 6 on Dinosaurs in English! Exciting!

Also, I bumped into Santa and managed to get out of him a pile of handwriting erasable notebooks and this is why I could give my kids the most amazing present that, within minutes, they started to use to write, in English and in Russian, to draw, to create stories, to take notes, to calculate Maths…

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. Six months into the course

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It has already happened! A few days ago, in the middle of a lesson, I suddenly realised that we are closer to the end of the game called the academic year and that one is now allowed to rejoice (‘Hurray! Almost there!’) and to panic a tiny little bit (‘Oh, my, do we even have enough time to finish everything?’), too.

The month of February has finished and it is the time to reflect on everything that is going on in the classroom. Please don’t forget to check the previous episodes in the series here.

Starting the lesson

This is the part of the lesson that is always the same: we say hello, we talk about how we are and we introduce the new students aka all the new toys that the kids have brought to school that day. The toys are usually well-behaved and they also want to share how they feel (= more production). After the longer weekends or the term-break we have also added another extension to share what we did. For that we use a few of the past verb forms that we know (I went, I ate, I saw, I liked, I didn’t) and we share our ideas.

The interesting thing is that on some days the kids also asked to repeat this stage of the lesson after the lunch break and it happened twice on rather difficult and emotional days. Somehow, everyone wanted to share how miserable and sad and tired they were. We did and I would like to think that calling out those emotions and validating them helped everyone a tiny little bit.

Songs

We still continue to sing As quiet as a mouse and What do you like to do? but our favourite thing about them is not the songs themselves but our variations and ideas. I absolutely love that they take so much pleasure in being creative and some verses are simply precious (‘I am as hungry as a dragon. Miss Anka, you’d better run away’) and even my not-so-strong and not-so-brave students take part.

I wanted to have a replacement for the January song but because I simply did not find anything interesting and fitting, we just wrote out own songs, with both my groups. We used the melody of Frere Jacques and with the help of the kids, we put the four verses together (‘February (x2). Make snowmen (x2). Spring is coming soon (x2) And holidays! (x2)’) and it quickly turned out that we have more ideas than we could fit in one verse so after singing the first part, we started to come up with more and more. This was easy, especially that the song follows the pattern of call and answer so it was very easy for the kids to lead it, too. We have even recorded a video for the parents.

Oh, I almost forgot, there is also Mr Jack Hartman who helps us practice multiplication tables (and here you can find a recent post on the songs that I use to get the kids to move)

Rules and classroom language

No major changes here and, guess what, walking around the room, is still the biggest vice and challenge and, surprise, surprise, we are still working on getting our 10th star. Two months in and we are still trying.

Story

February was a great month for storytelling. First of all, we had a story in our coursebook, about the Fox, the Mouse and the Rattlesnake. a traditional story. The kids really liked it and we had a great lesson.

We also did Dr Seuss ‘There is wocket in my pocket’ which my kids helped to read. I caught them red-handed a few times later on, as they took my copy off the trolley and went on to read themselves during the break. We also did a great story ‘Impossible‘ by Tracey Corderoy and Tony Neal.I did adapt the story a bit but I loved the message and the fact that the story gave us a chance to practise reacting to different ideas with ‘It’s impossible!’ and ‘Let’s try!’. It is also a great story to practise the words related to the natural world.

Then, there was also Norman, the Slug with no shell by Sue Hendra! I have almost forgotten about him!

February was also the month of the term break and that, for some of our students, meant a week of emotions which we did through storytelling. Here I am sharing some of the ideas from this week.

Socialising

February was a bumpy month. On the one hand, we had a few birthday parties and it was lovely for the kids to celebrate together, to eat together and to socialise. On the other hand, somehow, there have been different issues related to being friends, respecting or not respecting classmates, getting upset about little things, liking and not liking people.

Because of that we had a few ‘conversations’ which I led in the L1 in which everyone took part, shared ideas and we tried to arrive at some conclusions. We have also been doing a lot of pairwork with different partners. Pairing up did not always go smoothly (see the issues above) so that is why I announced that partners in round 1 and 2 are asigned by the teacher and in the final round everyone would be able to work with their best friend. That seemed to help a little bit. We have also done a few activities in which the whole class was cooperating such as a drawing running dictation and even a round of bamboozle which we played with points in a less competitive way, with the whole class collecting the points (and with some of the power-ups switched off). That worked, even with my Sasha who has zero immunity to anything mildly resembling a competition. I was really proud of them.

The other group also managed to play a few rounds of noughts and crosses and it went very well, apart from one minor meltdown which was not quite due to the game itself but due to a mistake that occurred in one of the teams). I was really happy because we managed to practise reading the key vocabulary and I will be able to use the game in the future, too. At least with one of the groups.

Creativity

Looking back, it seems that our February was not very creating, on the whole but we did some things:

  • we wrote a lot of songs and this way we produced a lot of langauge,
  • every camp lesson and our Art Explorers was pure creation
  • we made St Valentine’s Day cards
  • in February we had another lesson of running drawing dictation and we created beautiful pictures in our notebooks based on the notes-directions that we found around the school
  • our Norman lesson was followed up by a creative activity, making a poster with more ideas for shells for Norman

All in all, however, I am not happy with how little we did to express ourselves. A mental note taken, I (and we!) will be catching up on that in March!

Teacher

My favourite teaching memories from the month of February will definitely include everything related to storytelling. All of these were memorable lessons and I was happy that my students were so involved. A series of the most precious moments, no doubt! I also really liked (and still do) our song creations and that’s because my little students are producing the target language, they are having fun and, they are snowballing while doing that, reaching into their vocabulary like into pockets full of treasures, to pick out some gems. And the songs they make up are funny so we laugh a lot!

Apart from that, although February / March is still too early for such grandiose comments, I can see the progress my kids have made since September. Last week, I prepared an activity, a simple reading and writing task of four pieces and I was planning to do it step-by-step, led and guided by the teacher. That turned out to be completely unnecessary. The kids started and just went on, each at their own pace and order. I was walking around the room, monitoring and trying not to show how touched and proud I was. They were just reading and writing, something that was not possible a month ago. Another beautiful moment in a teacher’s life.

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. Five months into the course

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Welcome to the second leg of the academic year! We can already start dreaming of spring and of the end of the year and, more importantly, January is over and we have returned, more or less successfully.

Please, don’t forget to check our September adventures in the following posts here, here, here and here and our progress in October, here.

Starting the lesson and How do you feel today?

As regards the start of the lesson, very little has changed since December. We still say hello, talk about how we are, about all the toys we have brought and how they feel. Then we sing a song and look at the plan for the lesson.

Songs

The hello song is gone, gone, gone. We have replaced it with a months song and last month it was January, January, to give us additional practice with the names of the months (especially that sometimes we have sung it together with our ‘old’ months song. We sang it every day, at the start of the first lesson and only sometimes did we replace it with our ‘old’ hello song but that is only because my kids loved (as in: LOVED) singing it in the ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ style singing ‘bye bye’ instead of every single ‘hello’.

Danny Go is still one of our heroes, mine, too and that is because apart from providing exciting brain breaks, Danny also sings about farms, pyramids, jungles and what not and that means we can always find a relevant Danny, to match our topic in Maths or English. All you need is Danny!

In January we did a lot as regards animals, adjectives, comparatives and superlatives and because of that our playlist included also the following: the Opposites Song which can be turned into a game, with the kids singing the other adjective in a pair of antonyms (especially that there is a little pause in the song, even if you decide not to pause the recording yourself which I only did the first two times), As quiet as a mouse which we have already started to personalise with out own verses and What do you like to do?. This last one, my personal favourite, was only introduced, to give the kids an idea of the concept and the structure of the song. We are going to work on it more in the weeks to come. There is a lot of potential there, for games, for personalisation and for fun.

Rules and classroom language

No major changes here. We still have the same rules, although they needed reinforcement and revision, we still get grades for behaviour and for work in every lesson and we still struggle with not wandering around the room for no reason. However, right now, more frequently than before, kids are getting involved in policing each other and reminding each other that ‘I don’t walk around’. I do that, too, although I am using a simple question: ‘Sasha, are you walking around?’ It works, every other time, basically.

Story

January was not a very long month but we managed to squeeze in a lovely book ‘Who’s for dinner?’ by Claire Freedman and Nick East about very clever farm animals and a (not very clever) fox, with a funny storyline and some bits of the text that my kids could actually read themselves. We also did Eric Carle’s ‘From Head To Toe’ which we read through and through, in a shared reading session and a story that we have in our book about a rattlesnake, a mouse and a clever coyote.

We have been also working on the Past Simple Tense (or the tiny elements of it) and this is how Mr Milk came back to be a part of the everyday life for me and how I introduced him to yet another bunch of kids. Now, at least once a week, sometimes more frequently, we tell stories of everything that Mr Milk does in his life. Or what his friends do, among them Miss Juice and Mr Banana.

Socialising

In terms of socialasing, we have done the following:

  • I am trying to use a range of the interaction patters in class: kids nominate each other, I nominate, too, for the balance, we have done some pairwork, some S vs the class activities (interviews, miming and guessing, shared reading), a lot of whole class (one of my groups especially needs to work on ‘when people speak, I listen’) and some 1-1, too.
  • keep a variety of alternative seating arrangements does wanders to the atmosphere and to the focus. In January we did the following: sitting on the carpet, sitting around the TV on the chairs, regrouping, standing or singing for the songs, sitting or standing in front of the group, leading the game. By the way, I started writing this January post with reading the previous month’s entry only to find out that I was very clever to take notes. Not only because of the blog but because of the everyday classroom life and my poor memory. It turns out that I have already forgotten about ‘sitting in two rows’ for pairwork and how much fun we had with it! I did not use it once in January and I so should have!
  • kids still take turns to help in the classroom although they have the official roles assigned by their Russian programme teacher and because of that, they did fight back a little bit. ‘Miss Anka, but why is Sasha handing out the markers? I am on duty today! I should be doing that!’ I decided not to take that into consideration at all. Mostly because I want to keep my classes independent and because that gives me more flexibility as I do not need to think of the rules introduced by another teacher in my lessons when it is not that relevant. Our class, our rules, routines and traditions.
  • our Christmas garlands and fairy lights are down and the classroom became bare and sad. We will be thinking of new ideas for February. Some kind of a hearts + boys’ things (the holiday coming up) + term break fun garland. I am thinking.
  • Maths for Life lessons with us cooperating and interacting with each other’s work.

Creativity

Our creative projects in January involved:

  • Personalising the songs. We started very slowly with simple ‘Hello song’ that my kids love to sing as a ‘Bye-bye song’ and we have already started coming up with new verses to add to ‘As quiet as a mouse’. There is more to come!
  • Mr Milk and his adventures which we make with a set of past tense verb cards, as a whole group. In the end of the story we decide if it was a good or a bad day for Mr Milk
  • We had another lesson with our invisible student, Petya with us helping him with his English homework. It is our tradition now to follow-up the error correction with a series of mini-role-plays when Petya’s mum (me!) calls the teacher (the kids) to find out how her son is doing. He is not doing great but thanks to him we are practising very simple phone conversations. And it is a lot of fun.
  • We started our Maths for Life series in which we are going to design our shops (posters), then go shopping and do some addition and subtraction to find out how much we have spent and how much change we’ve got back. We had only one round but there is a lot of potential so we are definitely going to repeat it.

Teacher

The biggest challenge for the month of January was the long break we were on, almost two weeks with the bell, the rules and the everyday routine. I was worried what kind of kids will be coming back to school and what to do in order to make sure that we can actually study and focus.

I saw the rules reminder poster on the social media and I decided to adapt it to our context. There are ten rules aka ten challenges and the areas to focus on. As soon as I decide that one of them is already back in life, we mark the challenge as complete. As soon as all ten are done, we are going to be celebrating. I am going to write about it in a separate post.

One of my favourite activies in January involved my Magic Bag full of the most random objects that I brought from home such as: a selection of fruit and veg, a bag of raw pasta, a bag of flour, a tube of toothpaste, a small jar, a stone, a shell, a squishy, you name it. We used it in many lessons: in Maths, to estimate quantity and to check the actual numbers and in English – to describe different objects and their qualities and to practise comparatives. It was a success not only because of its novelty value but because we could touch, shake and sometimes smell the objects and to describe them.

We also wrote our second Milestone tests, with a proper revision / mock test lesson and I am very happy with the results. The kids worked well, they took it seriously and with two exceptions, they did a great job. They were really sitting with their papers and going through the tasks.

I also tested all my kids according to the Cambridge speaking YLE exams in order to have a better idea of the group profile and in order to better track everyone’s progress as these are going to be repeated in March and in May. It was an interesting experience and, again, something that I should / will write about in more detail, one day.

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. Four months into the course

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Here we are again, at the next important benchmark / stage / stepping stone in our primary course – the end of the four-month period (enough time to have built up some routine) and before the start of the new calendar year with the kids coming back from the winter break having forgotten everything they have learnt. Maybe to immortalise everything before I have to rebuild the world next week or maybe to help myself remember what it was that we did a week ago, here is the post. There was nothing at the end of November (I was on holiday) and December was unusual with many kids ill, many leaving for the holiday early and with our routine slightly interrupted with the rehersals for the Christmas show, here are my kids.

Please, don’t forget to check our September adventures in the following posts here, here, here and here and our progress in October, here.

Starting the lesson and How do you feel today?

Right now, we have developed a tradition of starting with a little chit-chat before moving on to everything else. In a way, it was kind of unavoidable – the kids wanted to share or to catch up with those who were ill and returned, they had questions ‘about everything’ because our school life was quite busy and adventurous (winter photo shoot, Christmas show rehearsals, the general news). I also noticed that it is also the time that the use to clean up the tables, to organise themselves and to switch from the break into a lesson and that is especially important if our classes are the first lesson of the day. Whenever possible, I try to start this stage even before the bell rings but I gave myself the permission to stop being stressed about it and to just take it in strides. This stage does not last more than five minutes, sometimes even less.

Afterwards we move on to asking ‘How do you feel today?’. We don’t have any new emotions but I am so happy that more and more kids started to answer with ‘because’. In December the kids would also bring their toys (and there were more toys because maybe the presents started to be given out early) and they really really wanted to include them in the hello circle. That is why we started to ask ‘How many new students today?’ and this is when they introduce their toys, they count them and they reply how they feel. Usually we manage to get away with one collective question – answer per student but even so this means twice as much production. And everyone wants to share, even those who did not bring any toys on the day so we had the following items introduced as toys and getting involved in the conversation: a pencil, a Christmas decoration, a cushion and a packet of Oreos.

The roll call is a part of this stage, sometimes I lead, sometimes the kids take turns to ask the questions and only after we are done with that, we move on to our hello song. Counting from 10 to 0 stopped being necessary at this point and I don’t use it, on most days. We go back to it only occassionally, when the kids are a bit more excited and louder. This helps them to calm down.

Songs

A lot of December was hijacked by everything Christmas-related and we listend to everything that Super Simple Songs have to offer as regards the festive season. We really liked S-A-N-T-A and C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S which are great because of the spelling and because the later is a perfect illustration of all the Christmas traditions. I loved it and so did my kids. However, the Absolute Hit for everyone (including our non-English staff) was the Snowflake. We used it as a song, as a calming device and as a track to dance to. Even of my ‘Super Cool’ and ‘Oh, I am much more serious that the rest of you’ kids adored it and to see them twirl to it and just enjoy it was beyond precious. Not to mention that thanks to What do you want for Christmas, now we have our ‘I want to’ and ‘I don’t want to’ clocked in forever in our set of functional language structures.

Dance and freeze got, temporarily perhaps, put on hold but there were two great replacements. First of all, we were counting and working out a lot with Jack Hartman and, while I was on holiday, the cover teacher introduced my kids do Danny Go. It is a great brain-break and it helps kids work on the gross motor skills and focus and we get a few random verbs as a bonus. I have to admit I am not a huge fan, especially when the floor is lava, but the kids just loved it. Of course.

It has to be noted that we no longer have a hello song, not as such. Right now, we just choose one of our favourite song and sing it, at the beginning of the lesson or at any point throughout. The kids are given the responsibility of making that decision. We take turns and I take notes who has already been involved.

Rules and classroom language

We haven’t really changed anything regarding the rules. We still need to revise them but at this point it is only once a week that we do it. I have also noticed that the kids became much better with their own time management, a combination of a better adaptation to the school routine and being more familiar with the digital clock. I don’t need to put the end of the lesson time on the board and I do it only occassionally. It is very rarely now that I get a question from the room ‘How much time left until the end?’ and when I do, I just answer it. Or someone else from the group does.

But there are two new additions to the everyday routine. The first one is a detailed lesson plan for each of the lessons. I put it on the board, on the top, usually a set of 6 or 7 points, outlining the main stages of the lesson. Some of them are the code names that everyone is familiar with (‘read’ = phonics exercises, ‘notebook’ = we write, or ‘suprise’ = there is something good coming our way), some of them are bascially there for me, to remind me the order of activities. The kids read them all, that’s for sure and sometimes they ask questions or suggest more stages, such as another surprise or their favourite song. They have also started to ask for the permission to help me write that and that is another precious thing because it means more writing! They are also very eager to help me erase the bits once we are done with them. You can read more about this kind of a lesson plan here.

The other element, grades for each lesson, was introduced because of the serious issues of behaviour that I encountered after my holiday break. I was away for only seven working days and l left detailed instructions for the cover teacher to ensure that the gap between her lessons and mine were as small as possible, but, still, it did not work and after I came back I found my kids very much in their September mode aka ‘all over the place’. For that reason, I make a list in my notebook and I give everyone a grade at the end of every lesson, or, to be precise, two grades: one for behaviour and one for hard work and at the end of the lesson, or during the break, I announce who got what. It also works as a reminder during the lesson and so far, it has had a positive impact on the group. Their behaviour and hard work is clearly reflected in numbers and it helps them as a reference point. I found it to be more effective than my regular rewards charts because it does not take a whole board (13 kids!) and it is contained within a lesson. I am also hoping that, sooner or later, I will be able to phase it out but for now and, especially, right after the break, it is coming in very handy.

Story

Stories continue to be very much present in our classroom lives. There is a lot that we have in our books and I especially liked the series of stories on memories (Global English 3) because it gave us a chance to talk about feelings, to personalise these stories and to introduce very small bits of the past tense.

Apart from that we also did our first story writing (you can read about it here) and we read Zog (and this post here, is partly dedicated to what happened in that lesson and also to the story follow-up activities).

Socialising

In terms of socialasing, we have done the following:

  • kids have been nominating themselves ‘Who’s next?’ although, because of the behaviour issues I mentioned before, I had to mix it with a more T-centred approach.
  • we have been doing a lot of alternative seating arrangements such as: sitting on the carpet (for the phonics games and pelmanism), sitting around the carpet on the chairs (for all the city + prepositions games), sitting in two rows facing each other for pairwork, working in pairs with changing partners
  • kids have been taking turns to give out and to collect materials and to make decisions about the lesson (songs and games)
  • working together as a class to win snoflakes in the whole school advent calendar winter activities
  • we have done a few projects in which the kids were working individually but sharing the resources such as the cards (on the board) or the stickers, learning how to take turns, how to share, how to wait. I was really proud of the children because it all went well.
  • we have had a lot of activities in which one student was leading the game, especially our riddles
  • as a whole class we created Christmas gardlands to decorate our classrooms and it was a perfect bonding project

Creativity

Our creative projects in December were all Christmas-related

  • used the theme in our Serious Maths Classes, with Christmas Maths Stories, Christmas Puzzles and colouring pictures, Help the Reindeer
  • we created our posters about our favourite characters, the day when we were proud. We also created our Reindeer Hats in the final lessons of the year.
  • we played a lot with songs, creating our own versions and we had a blast for a few lessons playing pelmanism and creating wrong sentences (‘Paul washes the dragon’ instead of ‘Paul washes the car’) which finished with a mini-project of our TV programme ‘Crazy Sentences’ in which we made a video of kids reading their creations. That was fun and I am planning to do it again after the break.
  • and the garlands mentioned above

Teacher

Well, these were busy two months and sometimes very tiring because of the behaviour issues but we are working on everything, we are improving and we are learning.

It is good to know that I am sowing a lot but I can reap a lot, too. We have crossed one super important bridge in Maths with all the regrouping activities, as regards addition and subtraction. It was not the smoothest of rides and I think even my strongest Maths kids are not entirely excited about subtraction but we are making progress and I have to admit, I love it when I hear ‘I get it now!’ and they just move on with it.

Our English classes are more and more English now and I can see how they are making progress and become more and more communicative. We decided to test everyone regarding their English level, using the Cambridge exams framework and we are half-way through with it and it will be great to track the kids’ progress over the year. This, in itself, has been a very interesting exercise for me and I will definitely write about it after I have reflected on everything properly.

We prepared a great dance for the Christmas show and this was an interesting experience for me, too.

And, last but not least, we have completed our first big notebook as in: we filled it up with handouts, notes and drawings up to the last page and we could finally take it home. I loved it watching kids look through the pages, reminisicing on everything we had done already and how much we had learnt. Afterwards, we closed them, said ‘Thank you, Notebook’ for helping us learn and we took them home. Naturally, we have already started the new ones, too.

Another thing that did happen over those last two months, also in the category of ‘last but not least’, after two months of studying only with notebooks and handouts, at the begining of November, we introduced the coursebook for English, Maths, Science and History and now they are a part of our everyday school life. We are much more serious students now. Hooray.

Kids after the break aka what happens next

January will be messy. Some students have missed a week of school, many have missed two weeks, some even more. I bet you everyone has forgotten what the classroom is about. Preparing for the first day and the first week will be quite something, as regards the subject and as regards the classroom management. Good luck to me and see you in a while. I will be back with an update.

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. Two months into the course

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Starting the lesson

This stage of the lesson is almost exactly the same as it was in September. The only real difference is the fact that we take the roll call, we talk about how we feel and we share what we have got today, on our tables and in our bags and only later we sing the hello song to make sure that the song is really this unifying element after which a proper lesson starts.

How do you feel today?

We haven’t added any new emotions as such but our beautiful cards are on display in our classroom, in both of them, and children refer to them when they reply to the question at the strat of the lesson. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have anything new at all. We have been working with the phrases that we have but the kids became very creative with them and these have been my favourite replies: ‘I miss my phone’, ‘I want to sleep’, ‘I miss my bed’, ‘I miss my puppy (at some point confused with ‘papi’ aka dad) and I miss my daddy’.

Songs

In the recent weeks the greatest hit was everything related to Broccoli Ice-cream. We have been doing food and ‘do you like?’ and the song quickly became a hit, especially that it has four different versions and we could beautifully extend it over a month. It has become a part of the routine itself with looking at all the foods in the beginning of the video, attempts at predicting the combinations and then singing, of course, followed by our own game played with paper flashcards or a wordwall spinner. Naturally, we have already played this game in the dinining room, in the playground and in the hallway, during the break, with our own made-up versions.

The other great songs have been all the songs from the Dance Freeze series that we started in September. They work amazingly well for our brain breaks and I am hoping that all of the verbs will stay with us, too.

The other new songs are also our two new hello songs, Every day I go to school and Hello, nice to see you, and we use one or the other, in different lessons, depending on what we feel like.

After I have found a song about what plants need to grow, I believe that there is a song for absolutely everything!

Rules and classroom language

The system is go. This is how I could describe the rules in our life at this point. We didn’t need to add any more rules, since the end of September, which, of course, doesn’t mean that there will be no new rules in the future. These rules that we have, we have been using to remind the kids how to behave and how to survive the lesson.

That is not to say that all days, every day are smooth and that everyone is a little angel. It is not the case. We have had a few situations in which I had to put the lesson on hold and spend some lesson time on a serious conversation about how we should behave and why. And how we should not behave, too. It is still only the second month of their school life in year 1 and they are still at the stage of figuring out how to be.

Rewards chart and Time

This element of our routine has not changed at all. I am keeping track of kids’ behaviour and we still put up the lesson time (and the number for the clock) on the board, too.

Story

We have had such a good run with all the stories! My storybook library is basically just round the corner so I can just just pick up our next adventure just walking to the teacher’s room or the office.

Over this last month, I have been experimenting with different stories, some of them my real favourites, and I have been also experimenting with different follow-up activities, too.

‘Marvin Gets Mad‘ was a nice follow-up to our lessons on body parts, emotions and Present Continous. The follow-up task was devoted to reading and Present Continous about all the sheep and what they are doing.

‘The Crocodile Who Didn’t Like Water‘ was a blast. This was the story that not only read and listened to but that we also managed to retell, with very simple phrases.

‘Barry and the Fish With Fingers’ was an opportunity to practise ‘I can’ and it was also the first time we took notes about reading, such as a set of simple sentences about the character and the story as well as our opinion about it.

Socialising

In terms of socialasing, we have done the following:

  • kids have been nominating themselves ‘Who’s next?’
  • I have been a little bit more flexible regarding the seating arrangements for some of the activities, allowing friends to sit together and to work together
  • we have done a few projects in which the kids were working individually but sharing the resources such as the cards (on the board) or the stickers, learning how to take turns, how to share, how to wait. I was really proud of the children because it all went well.
  • we have had a lot of activities in which one student was leading the game, especially our riddles
  • we have also played lots of phonics games, as a whole group, individually and in teams
  • kids are also taking turns to give out and to collect materials and resources
  • it is also our everyday feature that when I am writing the lesson plan on the board, there are always some suggestions from the room, most of the time regarding the favourite games or songs, sometimes also regarding the surprises (which, most of the time is synonymous with ‘Can we have some stickers, please?’)

Creativity

Our creative projects in October were related to Halloween as my school decided to celebrate. Apart from decorating countless pumpkin, bringing spiders and coming to school in fancy dress (a few days before the actual Halloween), we have

  • used the Halloween theme in our Serious Maths Classes, with Halloween Maths Stories, Halloween Puzzles and colouring pictures
  • we created our monsters posters to practise body parts
  • we had a great Stickers in the Park project
  • we had a drawing dictation mini-project in our ESL classes, too
  • we had a lot of fun in the miming-drama activities in the ESL classes

Teacher

As a teacher I have been working on including the electronic journal in my daily school routine, especially as regards finding the time to fill it in effectively and as regards taking notes in real time to remember what to put in later on.

I had to step down as the Science teacher because my workload was just impossible to handle. I am sorry because I liked teaching Science but the kids have a great teacher now and I have a few hours to deal with the admin tasks so hooray to that.

I am very proud of all the kids because they are making progress in English and Maths and they are better and better at being students. I hope they are ready for all the new developments. The light term has come to an end and beginning November we are going to start using the coursebooks and notebooks, getting homework and we will start dealing with slightly more serious material. We’ll see how it goes. I am keeping my fingers crossed for all of them!

I will be back with more notes at the end of November!

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. A diary, week 4

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This is my September and New Groups Diary. Here you can find the previous episodes: week 1, week 2, week 3.

Starting the lesson…

…stays as before, no changes.

How do you feel today?

We continue to do our little chain reaction of the question – answer, from student to student and, on top of all the phrases, a few new lines appeared, too. First of all, someone suggested ‘I am everything’, which is an interesting albeit unconventional approach, and some kids picked up on it. I will have to come up with a flashard for that.

The other thing that happened, in one of the group, was a flurry of ideas to add to our set. One of the students asked for a piece of paper before the lesson, to create a card, some others got inspired and they ended up producing four or even five during the breaks. Apparently, what we needed (and I did not know!) is:

  • I am feeling sick.
  • I was sick.
  • I want to stay home.
  • I want to go to school.
  • I am bad.
  • I don’t know how I feel.

These cards are already ready, pretty and colourful. I just need to laminate them on Monday.

Songs

This week we have only added one song to our playlist, Let’s go to the zoo! and that is because, imagine that, on Wednesday we were going to the zoo, on a school trip. Accidental though it was, it made me realise that, actually, we are in a desperate need of some ‘we want to move’ songs, for some brain breaks for the lessons themselves or the in-between the lesson time. I am planning to introduce either Move or The Dance Freeze Song next week. They are going to love these and it is about time we learnt a few new verbs.

Actually, there is a lot of verb-related material this week as we also did Milo’s I like you in our English classes and our story was also verb-related as it was ‘Don’t eat the teacher‘ (see below for details).

Rules and Classroom Language…

…has stayed the same as before. We haven’t been in need of any new rules. The kids have improved overall and they know all the rules and they help me revise them in a more efficient way right now. So far I have been giving them the first half of the sentence, together with the gesture (‘I have…’) for the kids to add the key word (‘a question’). Right now, they know all of them and can recreate them when I demonstrate the gesture. On Thursday, I also happened to forget one of the rules and one kind soul reminded me (and us) about it, too.

Rewards chart and Time..

…have seen no changes whatsoever. We are just using what we have introduced.

Story

This week is a week of verbs (see above) and since we have reached the end of the first full week of classes, I have decided to introduce a school story, one of my favourites is ‘Don’t eat the teacher’ by Nick Ward.

We have:

  • done the vocabulary
  • introduced the main character, Sammy, the shark, talked about the cover picture and the little problem that Sammy, the shark has (biting things when he gets too excited (although we used the word ‘energetic and happy’ because these are the words we know)
  • watched the story
  • done an activity with matching the sentences with symbols, ‘don’t’ with different verbs
  • and a similar activity on a handount

I really wanted to add the structure to our set of verbs, on top of ‘I like to do’ that we had from the song. I am also planning to reinforce the ‘let’s’ from the song and to practise both, as they will be very useful in the classroom. Overall, I am happy with the story but I don’t think I will use the video again. We have the paper storybook somewhere in the school library and this will be a much better choice as with the paper, the teacher can control the language, the pace and the audio, the emotions and the understanding.

Socialising

These are the things we did in the previous week to faciliate the community building:

  • We continued doing everything we have done so far: making decisions, choosing songs and activities, helping with the resources, student – student interaction.
  • The biggest event of this week was the trip to the zoo and, for one of the groups, a trip to the park during the science lesson to look for different types of plants. First of all, it helped us create some memories, as a group and we definitely had a chance to be a group, to listen to the rules, to remember about behaving well. Everything went well and I was very happy and proud of everyone.
  • This week was the first week in which we were working with our big notebooks. We have one for all the subjects and we use them to glue in all the handouts, to take notes (yes, we have started) and to work on all the tasks. I have already noticed that the kids enjoy looking back and checking what has been done so far. One or two have already decided to add some bits and pieces to the previously completed handouts and drawings. The kids who were absent were also curious to look at the work that we have done during the days they missed, in order to catch up. I decided to check all of these at the end of the week and leave little notes and comments.
  • We also did an interview game, to practise all the basic questions we have done so far, with all the kids interviewing ‘the new student’ and, during the Maths lesson, we were measuring ourselves and that also required a pairwork, so that the kids could easily read the measurements for their partner. Otherwise, it is very difficult to see how long your nose is or your mouth. This went really well and we had lots of fun!

Creativity

We have had some opportunities for creativity in this week, too!

  • We created a picture of an unusual plant and we labelled it properly with all the part plants. We watched a video from youtube and talked about the plants and their resemblance to what we know. Afterwards, we revised all the plant parts and I wrote them on the board and that helped me create my Coffee Plant, with leaves, roots and coffee cups in lieu of the fruit. Afterwards, as a group, we brainstormed some ideas for the kids’ plants and hey ho, they were on the right path. We did it in the notebooks and ‘the handout’ was only a small piece of paper glued in by me before the lesson, with the list of plant parts to use as a checklist in the end of the activity. I might actually put it all into a separate post later on. Fingers crossed!
  • During our zoo trip I was also the designated photographer and the photos will be used in a whole class project next week. There is more to come!

Teacher

This is only very much Anka-relevant and it might not work or be important for all the other teachers in the world. I decided to take a note here, though, to remember and to see how these things will be changing because they also affect how we work as a group and how I feel, too.

  • I am very happy because everyone is a tiny bit better at writing. Our handwriting booklets are filling up since we are already at T and all of my kids are better at dealing with this slot of the lesson. Something that was a huge challenge for some of my kids is not just a part of the lesson. Some of the students are working ahead of the group, since they are faster and already have a good handgrip and I am ok with that. Three have completed the whole booklet already and they get a tiny little break while we are working. I was thinking what to do about it and I decided to leave it as it is. It will be only a week more for us, to get to Zz and afterwards, we will all be on the same page again.
  • Even the kids who are beginners as regards English started to be more attentive and more productive, at least as regards the repeated parts of the lesson. They get a lot of langauge from the songs, too and it is really good to see. Everyone works very hard in Maths and Science and I cannot tell you how happy I was when on Thursday we did our first ‘copy and finish’ activity in English and everyone (but everyone!) took notes about themselves: I am Anka, I am 100. I am happy. I like cats. I’ve got a brother. Beyond happy, that’s what I was.
  • This was not a tantrum free week, far from it but I noticed that I am better at dealing with them and that also my students are making an effort to try to control their emotions, hard as it may be in some cases. There is hope, basically.

Coda

The ghastly month of September is coming to an end. ‘Wake me up when September ends’ the Greenday sings and this day is today! Hooray.

I will continue keeping notes on everything we do and I will add another post in a month, to see where we are with my kids! Until that day then! Happy October to all of you!

Happy teaching!