So, apart from being a teacher of English, a teacher of Art, a teacher of Science (occasionally), I am also (drum roll) a teacher of Maths, year 1 of primary (or Key Stage 3).
I am aware that perhaps not too many of my readers have Maths on their daily timetable but I decided to share these ideas nonetheless. It is because they are all rooted in the different ways of encouraging children to get involved in the activities that are challenging, tiresome and not always easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
For myself I simply wanted to leave a note and a record of the things we do, for future reference. On the other hand, I know that all of these activities have a lot of potential for the regular and the beloved ESL, for grammar and vocabulary practice or reading.
Treasure Hunt is a task that I have used many times over the years. It takes some time to prepare and to set it up, especially the first time, but once you do it and once everyone figures out the rules and procedures, it is a great task that my students have always loved and asked for if we stopped doing it for a while. The main idea of the task is that we go around the school, look for all the tasks hidden there and we solve them. Once all of them are completed, everyone returns to the classroom to check the answers. In the past, we used to collect new words, solve crossword puzzles with clues around the school. We used to look for answers to the quiz or instructions how to colour the picture. This year, we use it mostly for Maths, solving different addition, subtraction and multiplication tasks.
Usually, we go out as the whole class but this kind of a treasure hunt can be easily turned into a running dictation, with kids working in pair, one of them running, one – taking notes of the answers. This works especially well with really big groups.
As many as you can: most of my kids are huge fans of Maths and they approach the tasks with mountains of motivation. To be honest, I don’t really understand it, since my brain does not really feel happy around numbers and prefers words, languages and visual arts. But, I can almost risk saying it, my kids’ enthusiasm is infectious, so, in fact, I like teaching Maths.
‘As many as you can’ is one more task type that we do in class. It is super simple, it involves an A4 page of exercises that the kids work on individually. There is only specific rule and that is: everyone is allowed to do as many as they want or can.
I love this task because for the kids, it is an opportunity to approach a task without a lot of pressure and it works very well with a mixed ability group and for me it is an opportunity to see how well each and individual student feels about a particular topic. True, sometimes, the external factors get into the way and the number of exercises is affected by the kids’ mood or the levels of tiredness but, overall, it is a good indicator of how well everyone has learnt and how well they have assimilated the particular topic.
Oh, Petya: Petya is one of our invisible students and having him works very well in ‘find the mistakes and correct them’ tasks which we usually do at the end of the unit. I have already written about him before and you can find the post here.
Jigsaw puzzle is another idea that I have been using in our Maths tasks to encourage the children to go through the task from the beginning until the end. It is very easy to prepare because you basically need a page with the Maths tasks and another colouring picture (in the theme of the month, like Halloween or Easter). The colouring picture is cut up into pieces, into a number that corresponds to the number of tasks and they are put into separate envelopes. As soon as the kids complete one of the tasks, they can come up to the board, open the relevant envelope and take out one jigsaw puzzle. I also like to put the correct answer on the envelope, to give the kids a chance to also check their answers. Once all the exercises are complete, the kids put the jigsaw puzzles into a picture and we glue these into out notebooks. The pictures can be coloured in the end, as an option.
Password, password! is a variation of the previous task – we collect tokens for every exercise completed, only in this case, these are letters that, together, a part of a password. Kids work on their tasks, invidually but they take turns to come to the board to solve a task and to uncover one of the letters. This task works wonders for bonding and building the class community. Just like the colouring page, the password can be adapted in any way that fits the theme of the month, the number of the exercises or the number the kids in the class.
One of the first passwords that we did this year was: ‘We love Maths and we are fantastic!‘ I wrote it on the board, with the numbers for each letter and I used hyphens to break the sentence into words. But it can be anything!
Well, is it something that you could use in your lessons? Please let me know!
This year’s Magic Bag, Sargent-themed, courtesy of the Tate Gallery in London
Ingredients
a pretty bag, ideally cotton, or something that is not transparent. I am joking, of course, that it needs to be pretty, it doesn’t but it is true that it is better if it is appealing visually. I normally use one of my tote bags.
a set of interesting objects that are safe to touch that fit in.
Procedures
Students sit in a circle, on the chairs or on the carpet, with the teacher in the centre, at a small distance. The teacher revises the vocabulary in question.
I like to take out the bag and make a show of it – take it out of a cupboard or a box, show surprise, shake it perhaps if the content allows it, make a face and ask out loud ‘What’s in the bag?’ etc.
The teacher starts chanting, for example: ‘Anka’s got a secret, Anka’s got a secret!’ and this is a chant that we use for every student.
The teacher demonstrates how she puts the hand into a bag, finds one thing and tries to name it, for example: ‘It’s a lion‘ (topic: animals).
Afterwards, the object is taken out to check what it really is. The teacher asks ‘Is it a lion?’ and the kids answer. It can be also used as an opportunity for additional drilling of the key words.
The students take turns to play the game.
As a follow-up, the kids can do a simple listening activity and help clean up at the same time. The teachers says ‘Sasha, please put the lion in’ etc.
Why we like it?
The main reason is a very strong appeal of an activity that is involves motor skills, guessing, an element of mystery and fun. Kids love to put their hand it and try to recognise or to name the objects. It so happens that we use the same bag during the entire year so after the first time, the kids can recognise it and they look forward to it. This week I was walking in the school with my bag (that on that day was ‘just my bag’ and my kids walking past got excited and started to ask if this is what we would do in class on the day).
The other main reason is that this activity can be used with a wide range of objects and for a wide range of topics, from those more obvious ones such as school objects, toys or materials to some less obvious such as rooms in the house or comparatives. I have also used it for colours, in one of the first lessons of the course, although, of course, the children did not know many of the objects that we used and we focused only on sorting them out according to their colours.
There are plenty of variations of the activity and it can be repeated in a series of lessons. It has not happened yet, over all these years, that I would take out a bag and hear ‘Oh, no, not the Magic Bag again!’ from the audience.
As regards the chant, I like to use ‘Anka’s got a secret!’ or a simple question ‘Anka, what’s in the bag?’ which all the kids repeat and which is a great question to know.
As regards the procedures, the kids can simply take out one object or try to guess it in their L1, they can describe it with the adjectives that they have (for example pairs of adjectives such as big / small, heavy / light, smooth / rough, soft/ hard or the materials: it is made of plastic etc) for the class to guess. Recently, I have used it also to practise comparisons and every child had to take out two objects, to describe them and then to compare them when they were both out of the bag. If it is appropriate for the objects, the kids can also try to shake them in the bag to check what noise they make. Another option is of course the most tactile version of the game – kids touching the objects with both hands without taking the objects out, through the fabric.
The age range of the students can also vary. The youngest kids that I have used it with were 3 – 4 years old, the oldest were my teenagers and they also enjoyed it. The language that we expect the students to produce will depend on their level and age. When we played the game last week with my A1 primary year 1, they were able to produce a set of four sentences in one go because we used it in the final stages of the adjectives unit.
Naturally, the objects can be used to introduce the target langauge, to practise or to revise the language, verbally or in writing or even as an introduction to a listening or reading task.
As regards the less obvioustopics for example verbs or rooms in the house, it is still possible if the objects are used as symbols. ‘A spoon’ can mean ‘to eat’ or ‘the kitchen’, a pair of socks (a new pair!) can symbolise ‘to wear’ or ‘the bedroom’, ‘a tub of toothpaste’ can stand for ‘to brush your teeth’ or ‘the bathroom’ and so on.
During the pandemic, I also used the Magic Bag in class, although in the online version the bag was much thinner and I was putting one object at a time and demonstrating it to the camera. I also used to make noises with them, without showing them to the camera i.e. dropping them on the table, squeezing them, tapping on them etc or, as the last hint, showing only a tiny little corner of the object to the camera. It also worked very well! And, in the online world, it was also possible for my students to take part and do the same with things that they had at home.
Last but not least, this is a unique opportunity for the teacher to take the most random selection of things to school such as pasta pieces in a bag, a soap, a salt shaker, a spoon, a pair of socks, a tube of toothpaste, seeds in a bag, some flour in a bag, shells, stones, tomatoes, cucumbers, soft toys, an electric torch, a small jar, a pair of earrings, a ribbon, cones…
The question appeared in one of the groups on the social media and I realised that a) I have something to share here and b) I haven’t got any posts on the movement games for the little people.
One: Abracadabra
Resources: only a magic wand. It can be made at home and producing magic wands is now a real hobby of mine. The easiest version (in the photo below) can be even made with kids, in class. Some shops sell magic wands, too but, really, kids will respond well to a simple pencil if it is accompanied by some ‘Abracadabra’
How to play: We have been using the same line for many years now, with many groups: ‘Abracadabra, 1,2,3. You are….’. The game might be introduced with the first topic that lends itself to miming, for example ‘pets’ or ‘toys’. We start with the simple phrase ‘Abracadabra, 1, 2, 3. You are a cat / a dog / a frog etc’ and I support the language with the visuals namely flashcards displayed on the board and my own examples. The gestures we use for each of the pets, toys, fruit, transport, jungle animals, fairy tale characters, jobs are not universal, they are only our creation for that particular group. Please remember that the ability to represent characters and words through gestures is not a skill that children are born with. They are developing their symbolic representation and they might need the teacher’s support in the beginning of this journey. That is why the teacher’s example is so important.
After the kids have learnt their first adjectives, these can be extended into ‘You are a happy cat’, ‘You are a sad princess’ and so on. Naturally, the game is led by the teacher in the first lessons but later on, the children are invited to lead the game and to cast some spells in the classroom. They start with the very simple and basic combinations but with time they start to be really creative, both with the langauge and with gestures. Think about all these gems from the classroom: ‘a sad pumpkin’, ‘a sleepy cat’, ‘an angry princess’…How would you mime these?
A classroom-made magic wand
Two: Musical flashcards
Resources: only one set of flashcards, I normally use the set from the coursebook, A5 size.
How to play: We stand in a circle and the cards are lying on the floor, in the centre. We move around, in a circle, just walking. The teacher sings a song and my choice is usually ‘Happy Birthday’. As soon as stop singing, everyone stops and picks up one card from the floor. Afterwards we show what we have by using the word in a sentence. The simplest version is ‘It’s a cat’ but the structures can vary and be more closely connected to the vocabulary for example: I like + food, I’ve got + toys, I am wearing + clothes and so on.
After each child produces the sentence, we put the cards back on the floor and continue the game. It works well with all the groups although with my bigger groups, I encourage the kids to speak together, in kind of a messy choir, in order to save time and not to risk any dead moment in the lesson.
This is not a competitive game, no one is sitting down or dropping out, we all play throughout the game. No points are awarded either.
A classroom-made magic wand
Three: Everybody is dancing
Resources: None:-)
How to play: We stand in the circle and the teacher is chanting or singing the phrase (the melody is made up), and everyone is performing the actions. I normally start with the easy verbs i.e. clap, march, walk, eat, drink, dance and swim but we keep adding through the entire year, more complex and more creative verbs so by the end of the first year we have lots of them at our disposal because kids learn all of them just from this simple game.
The teacher is the one to lead the game for quite a long time but the kids can be slowly involved, too by giving them a choice of two verbs, for example ‘Sasha, everyone is singing or dancing?’, Sasha: ‘Dancing’, after which the teacher is singing or chanting what Sasha has chosen. Eventually, the kids are ready to make their own decisions and to produce full sentences. And Present Continuous (because that’s what it is) will come in really handy with storytelling and picture description.
Oh, one important thing: don’t forget to add ‘sleep’, it will work wonders to calm the kids down.
A classroom-made magic wand
Four: Snake!
Resources: a long snake made of paper aka a necessary number of scrap A4 pieces of paper glued or stapled together with a head of a snake drawn on the first one and the tail of the snake drawn on the last one. I actually like to use the A4 sheet cut in half for a thinner snake and I cut out the head and the tail. Perhaps a set of flashcards in the first weeks of playing the game or with younger students.
How to play: The teacher puts the snake on the floor, the kids come to the snake one by one and stand in a line on one side of the snake. The game is intended to practise one particular group of words with some distractors included, distractors here being any other words, not in the category. For example, if the main aim is to practise colours, the basic distractor can be numbers or even kids’ names if that is the beginning of the year and the children do not really know anything else.
The teacher calls out the words, in a random order. If the students hear the target vocabulary, they have to jump over the snake (or to step over if the kids are young and not very good at controlling their gross motor skills) every time they hear the target word i.e. a colour. If they hear one of the distractors, they don’t move. In a way, actually, it is a movement variation of ‘Simon says’ only no one is dropping out.
When we start playing, we line up and I show the kids all the flashcards and we revise all the words. I also tell them that today we play with colours. Later on in the year, when the kids have more vocabulary at their disposal, the teacher can raise the level of challenge and play with two or even three categories.
The game mostly focuses on listening for the target vocabulary and discriminating it from the distractors but it can easily be turned into a productive game with one of the students standing at the head of the snake, facing the group and calling out the words. In the early stages of the unit, when the kids still might struggle with remembering all the new words, it makes sense to let them look at the cards displayed on the board or on the wall or to even hold all the flashcards and to call out the words they want to use.
I created this game for my group in Pamplona in which I had 12 little kids and no room in the classroom apart from the relatively narrow aisle in the middle of the classroom. This is how the snake game was born. We needed something thin to fit in the aisle and I chose a snake because I hate them personally and stepping over a snake is a good move, very conducive to survival. But the kids accepted it and we loved the game.
The snake itself needs to be made but it is easy to store it and to recycle it and if it gets destroyed during the game, it is also easy to fix. Or to be recreated. During one of my training sessions, one of my teachers suggested using a skipping rope and that, of course, is a solution. However, I still prefere the paper because in case of a mishap and a kid tripping over the snake, the paper seems a safe option. If it gets torn, we can fix it, no harm done. A child tripping over a skipping rope, however, might result in a child falling down. Typing that up here I realised that if the classroom has the appropriate floor, the snake can also be drawn on the floor, with chalk for example…
A classroom-made magic wand
Five:I like cats, I don’t like cats
Resources: one set of flashcards, the regular A5 set that normally come with the coursebook and two cards with symbols for I like / I don’t like, for example a heart for ‘I like’ and a crossed heart for ‘I don’t like’
How to play: Before the lesson the teacher puts up the I like / I don’t like symbols on two walls in the classroom, on the opposite ends. In the real life, these two simply stay there for the rest of the year as we use them all the time. The kids get up and stand in the middle of the room, half-way between these two signs. It is good to put there a small stool or a table with all the cards, for example all the toys, pets, colours etc.
The teacher picks out one card, for example ‘green’, calls it out and the students go either left or right, depending on whether they like it or not. The teacher points at one of the group and says: ‘Green!’ and the kids reply ‘I like green’ and ‘I don’t like green’ together with the rest of their group. Afterwards, they come back to the centre (aka the stool) and the game goes on with a different word.
This is another stirrer that gives the kids a chance to move around a bit and to produce the langauge, with the additional support since they have the flashcards to reinforce the meaning of the word and since they produce full sentences with approximately half of the group. The kids can also be invited to lead the game by choosing the words to use.
The game can be used throughout the year with almost any vocabulary and there are a few adaptations possible especially as regards the settting. If the group is big or if the kids are too energetic and too tricky to control, the same game can be played with the kids sitting on the carpet or even on their chairs. Instead of walking to the left and to the right, they can stand up and sit down or clap their hands and stomp their feet or raise one arm or two arms for ‘I like’ and ‘I don’t like’ respectively. This will make the classroom management a little bit less challenging for the teacher.
A classroom-made magic wand
Bonus activities: My favourite movement activies
Resources: the access to the internet and youtube
How to play: All of these songs here have been created specifically for the purpose of ensuring some movement in the classroom. The main aim here is not the langauge production although they do include some language but, of course, the movement is the star here.
Move by Super Simple Songs – a real hit, nothing more to say.
The Rolly Polly Roll by Super Simple Songs – another hit but only if you have a carpet because kids might actually try to roll or to crawl. You’ve been warned:-)
The Jellyfish Song by Super Simple Songs – I love it and it is quite a challenge to turn yourself into a jellyfish
Head, shoulders, knees and toes – this is the first song we sing in the classroom, mostly because kids can participate without any language production, just by doing what the teacher is doing. I like to sing this one myself, without the audio, in order to be able to control the speed and the activity. There is a version by Super Simple Songs, of course.
Shake your sillies out by Jose Paolo Liwag – I love to use this one with my older students, actually when they can appreciate the need to shake our sillies out and to clap our crazies out…
The Dance Freeze Song by Scratch Garden – the hit of this summer camp. There are some cool verbs and dance movements and we just LOVED to dance! You can also teach your kids the most important verb in the world: FREEZE.
Action Songs for kids by The Singing Walrus – one more fun song, with the basic verbs.
Make a Circle by Super Simple Song – it is a very popular song, I have seen it in many lessons that I observed but, somehow, I have never used it myself a lot.
A classroom-made magic wand
Some things to remember
Before you start any movement games, make sure that the kids are ready. Ideally, these games can be played in the part of the classroom where we have more room, only the carpet, no or fewer pieces of furniture. If that is not possible, please make sure that you create this space, with the kids’ help, possibly, to make sure that it is as safe as possible.
It is also a good idea to introduce some rules related specifically to this movement part of the lesson and these will depend on the classroom and on the group. In my classroom, we used to do all the movement games on the carpet by the window and for that reason our only rule was: We stay on the carpet, to ensure that the kids do not wander around, run around and leave the safe space.
Make sure that you move to this other place of the classroom in an organised manner. In the beginning it might be necessary to call the kids one by one, by the name to avoid a situation in which we have to control a stampede of five-year-olds there and back. With my groups (the maximum number of students in our pre-school groups is eight), we have our chant. I like to go to the carpet first and singing, call all the kids one by one (‘Sasha in the circle, Sasha in the circle’) and to wait, holding hands with all the kids, as they arrive. The child who is just joining is the one to choose the next child (‘Sasha, who’s next?’) and for the last one to join us we all call out loudly (‘Sasha, come here’) so that nobody feels unwelcome. Some kids actually love to be the last ones to join the circle because it is a lot of fun to be called by the whole group.
When the movement game is over, we go to our tables and desks, one by one or in pairs and the teacher is the one to make a decision about the order, at least in the beginning when the kids are still getting used to the new element of the routine.
Bigger groups can use the same pattern, but the kids move in groups of two or three so that the preparation for the activity does not last longer than the game itself.
One of the other things that I always do as the first activity on the carpet is to make a circle, holding hands and run a few rounds of ‘big circle’ (we stretch our circle), ‘small circle’ (we gather in the centre), a few times with these two adjectives and with the other ones, too for variation, for example a low circle (we bend), a high circle (hands up in the air, still holding hands), a wavy circle, a shaky circle and so on. It is an easy, risk-free activity, the kids love it (especially when everyone is present and we can really make a big circle) and, most importantly, after arriving one by one and being individuals, we can do something as a group, something super easy, before we get on to the more creative and productive things.
These games are not only about movement, although this is their reason for being in the classroom and in the lesson. However, as always, the main aim is language production and for that reason the students as the teacher, leading the activity have been included in all of the games presented above.
Here is a little post I wrote, about 5 easy to prepare, low-key and YL-friendly and YL teacher-friendly activities that can be prepared with almost no time investment.
One: a boardgame
Boardgames are fun and they are of a great help not only because they provide opportunities to practise vocabulary and structures but also because they help with kids learning to play in pairs or teams, to learn to take turns and to cooperate.
The most basic set includes a printed board, like the one that can be found in Heinemann Children’s Games (published in 1995, omg), featured in the photo below, a dice, a set of checkers. Apart from that, the teacher also needs a set of flashcards or mini-flashcards. The students play the game and every time they land on a box, they pick up a card from the pile and use the word in a relevant sentence (ie they say if they like the food item on the card or they ask their partner a question). Once used, the cards go to the bottom of the pile to be used again. If there are more than one team playing, it is good to use a few sets of cards ie Do you like with animals, food and toys etc. Unless, of course, the teacher has time to photocopy and to cut up the mini-cards.
Here are some useful tricks:
Instead of letting the kids roll the dice on the table, give each team a plastic cup with the dice inside and show them how they should shake it in order to get a number. This will prevent the dice from rolling off the tables and slowing the game.
Instead of checkers, you can use a set of small paper toys, colourful paperclips, colourful magnets or even simple colourful pieces of paper on which the kids can write their names. I also like to use stickers (still unpeeled, on small pieces of paper). This way, no matter who actually wins the game, everyone wins and the sticker is their reward.
Do not worry if you do not have enough time to play the game until the very end, from Start to Finish. This way of playing is only a convention. The game is still fun if the teacher sets the alarm clock for 5 minutes, for example, and then finishes the game, provided that all the players within a team have had the same number of turns. After the game is stopped, the winner is whoever is the closer to FINISH.
Heinemman Children’s Games
Two: I spy with my little eye
The only thing that is needed is a picture, some kind of an illustration, taken either from the website or from the electronic form of the coursebook. I do recommend Starters, Flyers and Movers picture wordlists which can be downloaded for free and which include amazing picture scenes for all the topics relevant to these exams and levels. To be honest with you, it is one of my professional dreams that Cambridge University Press publishes them and makes them available for purchase.
These can be printed or just displayed on the interactive whiteboard or on the computer screen. Kids play in pairs but everyone is using the same picture. The basic version of the game includes the more traditional version of the game (I spy with my little eye something big / small and something green / blue / yellow etc) but it can be transformed into any picture-based riddles or description game or Yes / No game and in that case any vocabulary and structures can be involved.
Here are some useful tricks:
There are many variations of picture-based activities. You can find lots of ideas in my previous posts from the series All you need is …a picture which you can find here and here
If you have a dice (or even better – a dice per pair or per team of students), you can also use the same illustrations in a dice description game
There are plenty of illustrations available. I do recommend Starters, Flyers and Movers picture wordlists which can be downloaded for free and which include amazing picture scenes for all the topics relevant to these exams and levels. To be honest with you, it is one of my professional dreams that Cambridge University Press publishes them and makes them available for purchase. I also like to use any of the Starters, Flyers and Movers materials, the speaking visuals, the reading visuals, listening part 1 visuals. Lots and lots is happening in these pictures and they are appropriate for the younger YL.
Don’t forget to check out the silly picture scenes used by the speech therapists. They are lovely, colourful and fun and kids really (really) like them. I wrote about them a few years ago and I am still a huge fan.
As regards the older YL, I still use the activities with different visuals: photographs from the google search engine, the higher levels exams (PET, FCE, CAE and CPE past papers, especially the speaking visuals). I also love using the materpieces of the world’s art but, admittedly, finding these might take a bit longer unless you have your set of go-to paintings.
Three: Tell me about it on Wordwall
This, thanks to all the tools available on wordwall, has become one of my go to games. It is a set of pictures (template: Open the Box), with a number of points in each box. Kids work in pairs, they choose the box and they have to say something about the visual in each box. With the higher levels of primary or the older students, the teacher assigns a number of sentences that they have to produce. With the younger students, the teacher gives clear instructions regarding the language expected. Here is one example for the year 1 kids of the pre-A1 level: toys. During the game the kids could produce the following structures: It is a teddy bear. It is brown. It is old. I don’t like it.
The game is a great one because it works with individual students and groups, big and small. Everyone plays together and everyone produces because even if there is one student responsible for choosing the number of the box, everyone can say something about the picture.
I like to play the game as one of the first competitive games with a group of young learners, only we play it teacher vs all the kids (and I do my best to lose:-)
Here are some tricks
If you don’t feel like preparing these, go to wordwall, you can find all my games in the community. I made all of them public. You can find them here or you can enter wordwall and look for my profile Azapart.
The range and the number of structures can be adapted to the age and the level of the kids. I play this game with my preschoolers and my primary students but also with my juniors and teens.
Four: Riddles
Riddles are, by far, one of my favourite games with any age, with the youngest of students and with my teenagers and adults, too. In order to make it work, we only need a set of flashcards or a set of mini-flashcards. I have already written a (great) post about it and you can find it here.
Five: A list of words
I have to admit, I love being a lazy teacher and I always award myself some extra points for all these occassions when I figure out how to be lazy and effective. One of my favourite ready-to-use resources are the word lists from our coursebooks. Sometimes, these can be a set of pictures + words (younger students), sometimes a table with all the key words, for all the older students, juniors and teens. Sometimes, these are the lists that the teacher has to create, especially if we talk about the higher level groups and about working on the vocabulary related to a text (reading or listening). All of the activities below are used to give the students a chance to use the words again and again and again, they are a part of the controlled and freer practice stages of the lesson.
Tricks or some of the ways in which I like to use these lists:
The list is used as the basis for riddles (see above).
Questions: students work in pairs, to ask each other questions about the chosen items. Depending on the vocabulary set, these questions can range from very simple (‘Do you like…?’), in a variety of tenses, especially if they are verbs (‘How often do you..?’, ‘Did you…?’, ‘Have you ever…?’, ‘Are you planning to…?’)
Pairs: students work in pairs and look for ways of pairing up the words and phrases, based on: similar meaning, same first letter, same part of speech, some logical connection, to name a few.
Ordering: students organise the words according to one or more criteria i.e. the important and the less important words, the easy and the difficult, the familiar and the unfamiliar etc or, simply, organising them in the order of importance or preference to the student and then comparing their new lists with other students and justifying their choices.
Similar or different: students choose a pair of words or phrases for their partner to decide if these two are similar or different and to explain why. This is, by far, my favourite one, especially for the older and for the higher level students.
Here is a situation that I witnessed many times during an observed lesson with young learners: a teacher and a group of kids start playing a game, for example riddles. The teacher models, then the kids take over. One student sits in front of everyone, chooses a card for the other students to guess or to identify. Kids start shouting out words, one of them gets it and the teacher takes the flashcard and hands it over to the student who shouted the correct word. The game goes on and it takes about three rounds more for one of the students to get offended / upset / angry / sad about not winning. More often or not, someone starts crying. Oups.
It is not only about losing, although, to be honest, this is a serious problem, too. Here, however, the ‘failure‘ of some kids is clearly visualised with a flashcard. Frequently, it is also very unfair because it is the faster and louder kids that get the point and these are not necessarily the kids who really know the answer. Also, there is another dilemma in a situation when two students shout out the correct answer at exactly the same point. Will the teacher tear the card into halves? No, of course not. Sigh.
That issue, frequent as it was, was always addressed during the feedback session and I am pretty sure every session on games for VYL and YL included the commandment compressed down to ‘Don’t use flashcards as reward points’. This was the bread and butter of a trainer / VYL ados.
My real shock to the system was an invitation to volunteer at Sheredar, our rehabilitation camp for children who went through serious diseases a few years back. I had a chance to go there a few times and teaching kids was an amazing experience. However, before I went, our contact and coordinator, Ksenia, said: ‘They will be one big mixed ability group but you can choose any topic you want. Actually, do whatever, just don’t play any competitive games. These kids have fought enough’. It took me about a minute to understand that I have no games to play. All my favourite activities, those that I frequently used in my lessons, with kids, juniors and teens, all of those favourite ones were competitive. ALL OF THEM.
Should kids even be playing competitive games?
I have been looking for sources on competition in the EFL classroom and I have found…nothing. I started to look around for any texts on kids and competition and it turns out that getting engaged in competitive activities such as sports, for example, can be very beneficial for children.
competitive activities can be motivating and encourage kids to improve their skills
playing and losing and winning helps children to learn how to deal with competition and with the fear of losing
they are also an opportunity to learn how to deal with pressure and how to win and how to lose
they are good for building self-confidence
they teach kids about the existence of the rules that need to be obeyed
they can help form friendships and relationships, with peers and adults
and, also, even if they are sports, they can lead to improving academic performance in children
Although, of course, they can also have some drawbacks, such as too much pressure, negative feelings in children and for their self-esteem.
On the whole, competition is a good thing, although it is not a given that all the children take to it naturally. Some of them might struggle, which is natural, bearing in mind that not all the adults have learnt to deal with it successfully, and they should be given help and support.
EFL and competition
As regards our EFL classes, especially those with the younger learners, primary and pre-primary, it would be just reasonable not to abandon all the competitive games althogether but to keep an eye on the balance and on avoiding a situation when all the games and activities that comprise a lesson have promote competition. Apart from competition, there are the other beautiful C-words such as: cooperation, colaboration, cognitive skills development that can and should be the foundations for our classroom life.
Not to mention that everything that we do in our lessons, namely learning a language, is against the very idea of competition. All the kids learn for themselves and although they have the same linguistic aims, their overall results or results in certain areas of language learning do not depend on the results of the other participants. What is more, their progress is measured against their previous results and achievement, although, admittedly, the situation is slightly different when it comes to learning a langauge in the context of a state school where kids’ progress is graded at every step of the way.
Things to consider
The most important thing to remember seems to be the fact that we, as teachers, should not take things for granted and assume that all the kids in our group like competition and competitive activities and that all of them are equally prepared to win and lose with grace.
The other factor to take into consideration is the age of the students. The younger the students, the less likely it is that they have already had a chance to participate in those kind of activities and acquire these skills and that they have enough life experience to be mature about it. It is a combination of their age, cognitive and social development as well as life circumstances such as having a chance to attend kindergarten, playing at home with parents and relatives, having older siblings and so on.
Equally important is the bond between the students. A group of children starting to learn together in September is a completely from the same group in January or even in October, especially in the context of after school groups or afternoon language schools where children might land in a group of complete strangers with whom the only thing they have in common is the age and the level of English, not the family ties, the address or the school. The more they get to know each other, the more they bond, the easier it will be for the teacher to set up activities, including competitive games, and for the kids to handle ‘failure‘. After all, it is easier to lose and get over it when you play with friends.
What it comes down to in real life, with real children, is keeping an eye on the kids, checking how they react to different stimuli and then introducing some competitive games, carefully, step by step. However, with my youngest students, this non-competitive period may span over the entire length of the pre-school EFL. With the most recent group, we started to play only half-way through our third year together and even then it was the whole group vs the teacher (who always lost).
Every little helps
Here are some of the tricks and techniques that a teacher can use in the classroom while introducing competitive games or taming of the competitive games we often include in our lessons (tired and tested):
Playing the familiar games such as riddles or pelmanism in a less competitive way. First of all, we do not award points for the boardrush OR we award points to both teams for competing the task, not only to the team who is faster (especially that with boardrush at least it is sometimes very tricky to establish who really was the first one to touch the board). Points here can be pluses or hearts on the board or flashcards given out to the winner in a particular round. Instead, we finish the round, the praise everyone and we simply move on. The game itself (the fun of participating, the language produced or used) is the reward itself.
We do not determine the order of participation based on the successful participation, for example in riddles, when the student who guesses the word is the next one to play. Instead, all students take turns, one by one to make a riddle for the whole class, regardless of how good they are at guessing.
Playing ‘Simon Says’ without excluding the losers by asking them to sit down after they make a mistake, especially that a growing number of non-participating students is very bad for the overall classroom and behaviour management. Or, in the same way, playing the Treasure Hunt without establishing who the winner is. We all look for clues around the classroom or the school, we all participate for ten minutes and in the end all check our answers, without counting the points or the number of the elements or stages completed.
With pelmanism, instead of playing 1-1, with kids uncovering two cards at a time, the whole group can do it in pairs, with two kids always participating, ideally in different combinations. As soon as a pair is found, the teacher and the kids cheer for everyone, and the cards are put aside or given back to the teacher.
Play the game in the format of the teacher vs the whole group, to create the support for the individual child. If they win or if they lose, they will do it together, with all their friends, nobody will be singled out. Ideally, in such a situation, the teacher loses and has a chance to model the mature behaviour and how ‘a failure’ can be handled, but, of course, bending the rules in order to ensure that might not always be easy to do. If you are looking for ideas, I would recommend pelmanism. It is very easy to get distracted and to forget (or ‘to forget’) where the other card from the pair is located.
Any game can be played in teams, a team vs a team, instead of individuals competing with each other. This way, again, the support, the safety net or the safety blanket is created. Enjoying the victory or handing the loss is easier with your team. Even if there is one child who does not handle ‘the failure’ very well, there will be other children in this situation, too. They will serve as role models.
Having the teacher participate, as one of the teams, can also help soften the blow of the defeat. Again, the teacher will be the one to model the langauge use, the game rules application and the player’s behaviour, too.
If possible, talk to the parents whose children struggle with controlling their emotions while losing the game. If nothing else, it would be great to find out whether there have been any factors that could have played a part, whether the child reacts this way in other situations and to simply inform them what happened in class. Perhaps parents will be willing to discuss this topic at home, to reinforce what the teacher does at school and, perhaps, to also play games at home, to help the child tame that beast.
In one of the posts (see bibliography), I found another great tip. What is necessary is a quick game that can be played a few times, in a quick succession, in the same lesson. Some of these will be won, some will be lost, but the quick pace and the repetition will make either of the results, the victory or the defeat, not so relevant anymore and easier to deal with and to even forget.
Another approach that I have been using in some of my summer camp groups was the Points Poster that we used throughout the entire camp. It was very simple, only an A3 piece of paper, with the team’s name, displayed on the wall. Every time we played a competitive game, there were points, for example two or three stickers for the winners, a star for everyone else. All the kids took very well to it because winning the stickers was great but the joy lasted a brief moment only and very quickly the stickers won today would quickly get lost among all the other stickers won on all the other days. The defeat, on the other hand, was perhaps not the most pleasant thing in the world but it didn’t matter much because the students knew that they would be another game on the same or on the following day. What is more, because I was using some leftover stickers, of all kinds, sometimes it was more fun to choose one huge sticker for your team rather then three little ones…
Finishing each game with the teacher and the kids thanking each other for the game, with a simple handshake and ‘Good game‘, just like all the football or volleyball players do at the end of the match.
Any activity that can work towards bonding and building a community is also welcome
If there is the students who struggle with dealing with their own emotions while playing games, I have so far tried two things. One of them was pairing this student up with myself, in 1-1 games, in order to be better able to model, to monitor and to help the child control their emotions during the game. I have also experimented with pairing up with this child in the games that we played in teams because, again, losing (or winning) in one team with the teacher was easier to deal with.
Non-competitive EFL games
First, an anecdote. The heading of this paragraph is what I put into my google. Would you like to guess what the amazing Uncle Google came up with? Nothing.
‘Fun games’ – yes, ‘no prep games’ – yes, ‘exciting games’ – yes, sure. There was one post from the British Council (see bibliography) but not many of them are appropriate for kids and not many are actual games. And one article about an activity that still has winners and losers…Nada, nada, nada.
Here are some suggestions from the non-competitive games that I have played
Musical flashcards: a simple movement game, an adaptation of the musical chairs game, only without any kids dropping out. The teacher puts out all the relevant flashcards on the floor, kids move around with some music playing. When it stops, every child picks up a card and makes a sentence for example: I like bananas (topic: food), I haven’t got a cat (topic: food), I am wearing a blue t-shirt (topic: clothes) etc. Afterwards, the flashcards go back onto the floor, the teacher puts the music on for another round of the game.
All the logical games such as Find the difference (for example those that we have in the YLE Movers and Flyers) or Odd one out (for example YLE Movers) that can be easily adapted to any topic. A similar activity will be also based on the silly picture scenes that I described in an earlier post here.
I Spy: a variation of the game with a set of visuals such as a poster or an illustration from the coursebook. Kids work together as a group (in the early stages) or in pairs, they describe something in the picture, with the relevant sentences, depending on the age and level (I spy with my little eye something. It is big, it is green. It is next to the cat. etc). The student or the students who listen find the relevant object. This game is not competitive because there are no winners / losers and the game goes on until the child / children guess. As the game proceeds, the kids can offer more information and support to help their partner, for example the first letter / sound, the gestures etc.
Riddles: the same principle and procedure as above but it can be played with flashcards or a set of word cards or a set of words prepared by the kids.
Back to the board: it is a very popular game that can easily be played in a non-competitive way and this way it can go help build and develop a sense of community and give the whole group a chance to work together. One of the students sits on a chair in the centre, facing the group. The teacher writes a word or a simple sentence on the board and signals how many words it includes. The group work together to help the one student guess and recreate the word on the board. With the lower level kids, flashcards can be used instead of words although using simple sentences works wonders for the students to learn and to work better with the grammar, the sentence structure and, progressively, with the meta language.
Monster game aka Hangman aka Let’s save the little human: I love playing Monster Game with the lower levels because it helps the students work with literacy, spelling and blending and we always play it as a whole group with all the students contributing and working together to guess the letters and the words and to help the little human who is slowly losing parts of the ladder, the boat or the hotair balloon. To make the game less cruel, the element of getting points can be added (i.e. when the kids guess a part of the word or when they guess the most common letter or when they get all the vowels etc) and with my summer camp group the game finished with the kids drawing some food for the hungry monster because they developed empathy for someone hungry, even though it was a monster.
Telephone: this game is a variation of something known as ‘Whispers’, with the whole group sitting together and passing a word or a simple phrase, from the end to the beginning of the chain. This is not a very generative game or a very communicative one but it helps the kids work together towards one goal and it is easy enough even for the youngest kids.
Stations in the classroom: this is not really an activity but a format of completing tasks with kids. The teacher sets up a few stations in the classrom, for example in the four corners of the room. Kids move from one station to the other and complete the task such as unscrambling words, completing a simple handout, matching words and pictures, playing a round of pelmanims and many more. Kids complete a few tasks during the lesson and their job is done when they complete a full circle but they do not compete with everyone else in the group. It is up to the teacher to decide when then task is done and they can move on and in this way, even the ‘weaker’ students can play and participate without any pressure from the group.
Community building games: on of the 30 Creative Team Building Activities. I haven’t tried these yet but these definitely caught my eye: Cross the Line (22), Paper Chain Race (30), Shrinking Classroom (18), Building a tower (6 and 10). Or 22 Fun Team Building Games and Activities for Kids. Here I really liked: Forehead Dots (4), Some of them have the ‘choose the best / fastest team’ element which works to some extent as it helps the kids to bond within their team but I would still skip this element altogether.
Last but not least, among the things that has been on my wishlist of the things to try out in the classroom is the parachute and all the parachute games. Some ideas can be found here.
Coda
But, perhaps, the situation is a little bit better than it seems. While working on this post, I asked my audience on the social media about their opinion and I was very happy to find that those who responded use a mix of competitive and non-competitive games. At the same time, the teachers admitted that they have to deal with the competition-related stress in the EFL classroom, although not all the time and ‘some games, some days, some kids’ was the most popular answer.
What about you, dear reader? Do you play any non-competitive games with your YL students?
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.
Here is a most random post of a kind that I have never tried to get involved in: one long, constantly updated, written-throughout-the-entire-summer post, with all the fun things I did in class. A kind of a Summer 2023 Diary.
A little bit of a background: this summer I am teaching at a non-residential summer camp, for primary school children that has a special curriculum and a set of materials that were prepared by the educational management team at my school. Naturally, we, the teachers, are allowed to adapt and supplement these and, naturally, I am doing a lot of that. Here are my favourite bits so far.
I really like to swim
This is a small case study in the theme of ‘How to use a song effectively to teach vocabulary and to practise a grammar structure’ and I am very happy to share it here. Here is to hoping that the framework and the pattern can be adapted and re-used with other songs.
The song that we used was the amazing Milo and ‘I like you’ from Super Simple Songs. I love this song not only because of Milo but also because it includes a long beautiful list of verbs (hobbies and activities) that, as a result of the song, become a part of the kids’ vocabulary.
We started with the vocabulay introduction, with the teacher and kids miming, drilling the verbs and the structure (I like to read books) and playing Mime&Guess, with the teacher leading the game. I didn’t have flashcards to represent all the verbs that feature in the song so I prepared a set of my own mini-flashcards. Afterwards, we worked in pairs and the kids were miming the verbs for their partner to guess, each pair with their own set of cards. This way, the kids got a chance to get ready for the song itself. We listened to it and watched the video. At this point, I was singing but I didn’t push the kids to do so. I wanted them just to watch it and to enjoy it.
The following step was a proper pairwork. Each student got their copy of the handout and they were instructed to mark the activities they liked and didn’t like with pluses and minues. When this step was ready, we paired up, compared our lists and reacted (Student A: ‘I like to count stars’, Student B: ‘Me, too / I don’t’). This was something that we had already done in our lessons so it all went quite smoothly, including re-grouping. With six kids in that group, every student had a chance to talk to three different students.
At the very end of the lesson, we played the song again and, this time, I tried to encourage the kids to sing. Today, when I am writing this post, we have had only one lesson with this song and I am convinced the next time we meet in class, the response to this song will be even more active and productive.
Elephant
This is not a new idea. I have created this activity for my English and Art classes, again, with my pre-school students. However, the interaction of salt, water and paint is interesting in itself and it has a lot of potential for the older kids, as a science experiment and it was a part of a lesson with three experiments (together with the other two mentioned here, static electricity and the rainbow Skittles / M&Ms).
We went on with the drawing just like we did with the younger students, but the version for the older students included the following: learning the names of all the ingredients involved, trying to predict what we will do and what will happen (‘We will…’, ‘It will…’), describing the experiment while it was happening (Present Continous) and assessing it afterwards and grading it on a scale from 1 – 10.
Sugar Rainbow
No matter how old they are, the kids and the adults are simply in awe when they see the rainbow in a plate. Even if they have done this experiment before. Even if they are teachers. Speaking from experience here.
This is a very well-known experiment and you can find all the details here. I have used it so far in a lesson with my super advanced primary school kids to introduce and to practise the zero conditional. This time, since it is camp, we used it as a proper science experiment. The younger levels focused on the colours, the older and the more advanced ones could predict and assess and talk about the sugar dissolving fast and slow in the hot and cold water.
My little monster
I really love the folding surprise drawings and I have used them a few times in class already, although so far it has been done mostly with pre-schoolers and the follow-up activities involved a simple presentation, saying hello and a few Q&A, depending on the structure that we were practising at the time. It was an interesting experience to try to bring into the classroom with the older and the more advanced kids.
First of all, I decided to make it more creative and instead of a drawing dictation, with all the kids following the teacher and ending up with the same puppy or kitten, we all went our ways and created the monsters we wanted. One group used the collage technique using old newspapers and markers, the other opted for creating their own drawings and, indeed, in a short period of time they were actually able to draw their own beautiful monsters.
Second of all, I wanted a lot of language to come out of it. For that reason, as soon as the monsters were were, we sat in pairs and talked about them. The lower level group focused on describing the monster using the same structure (‘My monster has got…’), in a few rounds with different partners. The more advanced group had a set of questions starters (‘Has your monster got…?’, ‘Is your monster…?’, ‘Can your monster….?’ and ‘Does your monster like….?’) and they were able to keep up the conversation for a while themselves. The only requirement from the teacher, apart from the sentence starters, was to ask 20 questions.
Storybird
Storybird is a wonderful tool to develop kids’ imagination and the love for telling stories. You have to subscribe to be able to use it extensively but if you do, you get the access to a multitude of stories written by other users and their students and, even better, the access to a multitude of illustrations by budding artists which you can use in your stories. There is also an option of the trial period so you can start playing with everything that the website has to offer without investing and then you can make a decision whether you really like it or not. As for me, I haven’t even managed to go over everything that it has to offer but I am going to tell you about the one feature that I have used many times in my classes and why I love it.
We use Storybird to encourage the kids to express themselves more freely, in writing, without the hassle of actually having to write or type, during this delicate period when the students already have something to say but they do not yet have the fluency in writing, holding the pen, typing up or, in case of some my students, they do not write in English at all because they are still in pre-school. With the use of Storybird, I select the pictures and then kids talk and the teacher (yours truly here) is their secretary with quite a reasonable WPM (word per minute) numbers.
So far, I have used it in four different formats
The oldest learners, in a group of 1-1s: a set of thematic pictures, with the same characters, that we look at, figure out the story, order and then tell the story, slide by slide. This can be done at any point during the course.
Any group of learners: a set of any pictures, as the Year Book, at the end of the academic year, with the students choosing a picture to represent themselves and they can include anything they want about themselves, as they would in a year book.
The younger learners in a group: a set of thematic pictures for example toys or animals in which a student chooses one for themselves and then talks about it, using a set of structures, depending on their levels and skills. Students take turns to talk to the teacher and there is also a need for a task that all the kids will be doing alongside such as a colouring page or a wordsearch
The younger learners 1-1: a set of thematic pictures, for example toys or animals, with a student choosing 5 or 6 or how many of their favourite and they talk about every single one of them while the teacher is typing up.
Kids talk, either producing a discourse or a narrative with dialogues, the teacher types it all up, we publish it privately, we read it together, with either the students or the teacher reading the text and then, and this is definitely the best part, the book can be pdf-ed and downloaded and shared with everyone. There are even two modes for that: a simple e-book or a craft-version, for the kids to print it and assemble it into a real book which they can later read together with their parents.
The only thing that I have a love-hate relationship with on Storybird is that since it was not created for the EFL teachers per se, it has a huge range of illustrations sets but in a rather random order. It gives me a lot of joy to be going over them and admiring the artword BUT it is time-consuming and you can use only the illustrations of one author in a book, without the options to collate different pictures. On the plus side, there are so many different styles and approaches represented that it can be used to teach Art, too. And, once you have found your favourite bits, you can reuse them with different groups.
Apparently, the best transport in the world…
The best transport in the world
This type of a speaking activity can be adapted to any set of vocabulary. We did it with transport because that was the theme of the day but I have already tried it with animals (‘The best animal in the world’), professions (‘The best job in the world’) and cities and countries (‘The best place in the world’), with different age groups and levels. This week’s camp group were kids aged 8 and 9 who are somewhere in the A1 level, mixed ability.
Before we started the game, I introduced the question (‘Which one is better?’) and a few comparatives to use while describing different means of transport (faster, slower, louder, quieter, more beautiful, more interesting, more expensive, more dangerous) and it is important to highlight that the students already knew all of these adjectives as we used them in some of the previous lessons of the course.
There is only one resource necessary and that is either a set of flashcards in a pile, a set of word cards or even a set of the electronic flashcards such as these, anything that guarantees that the words will be coming up at random.
The teacher or the students taking turns pick up two random cards and compare them, i.e. a boat a nd a bike, answering the question ‘Which one is better?’, they justify their answers and choose the one. Then we proceed to another random pair and so on, until we go through all the cards. The ‘winners’ or ‘the better ones’ in each pair are kept separately as they have qualified for round 2. The activity continues until there is one winner, the best transport in the world.
There are a few variations to the activity, for example, with bigger classes, the students can be divided into smaller groups and they can do the whole activity on their own, choosing their best trainsport. As the whole class feedback, the groups present their results or they can have the final of the finals. Another solution is diving the cards among the groups and having them run the qualifiers for the whole class debate to choose the winner. For the classes where the students don’t know each other very well or when they do not quite get on with the group, to avoid any kind of competition or peer pressure, the final stage can be replaced with choosing your Top Three, individually. Last but not least, there is the option of extending the activity into choosing the worst of the worst from among ‘the losers’. That is also a lot of fun.
I am pretty sure I have already described this activity somewhere here because I have been using it successfully for ages but this summer I am revisiting it and with a lot of joy, too.
Preparing the activity is very simple as you need only a picture to colour with a copy for each student and a few sets of pencils, crayons or markers, one per pair. As for pictures, I usually use the YLE Cambridge Starters, Movers and Flyers listening materials (without the audio) or, even better, the black and white clip art. Googling ‘toys’ or ‘zoo animals’ or ‘clothes’ will give you a nice set of pictures. If there are some more complicated and less common words, I create my own pictures, also with the black and white clip art.
The more important aspect here is the setting up of the activity as its success (maximising production) will depend on it. I start with putting the students into pairs and assigning roles (‘a teacher’ and ‘a student’). Afterwards, I give out the copy and the pencils but only to the students as they will be the ones working hard.
The next step is modelling. In an ideal world the real teacher can do it with one of the stronger students, at the board: The teacher says ‘The rocket is green’ and the student colours the rocket green, then they continue with the other toys. ‘The teacher’ is the one making all the decisions, the student is listening and colouring. That’s the ideal world. I have had classes in which it was necessary to have a round of the teacher starting the activity in all the pairs, one by one and only later monitoring. It is not the most efficient as some pairs will be just waiting (and only possibly obsesrving) but it has been the most effective way of setting it up with new groups and students who have never worked in pairs before (yes, they do exist).
The students continue speaking, listening and colouring for some time and then they swap roles. They can continue colouring the same picture or the teacher can give out another set of copies. It is important to note that not all the items have to be coloured in. The roles swap can take place after 5 minutes, for example, depending on the group and the remaining items, toys, animals or clothes, can be coloured in later on. The kids can finish the picture in any way they want, without their partner’s instructions.
The best thing about this activity is that it can be done with even the lowest levels as the structure used is pretty simple but it gives everyone a chance to practise the key vocabulary and to listen and to speak. There is another way of extending it, in the feedback stage. Since all the kids will have a different picture, with different colours, they can share what they have either in a whole class feedback (Teacher: My giraffe is green and yellow. S1: My giraffe is pink. S2: My giraffe is yellow. etc) or, with another partner after they have been regrouped. A lot of production:-))
This is the lesson that I designed while trying to come up with an activity that could become a fun project lesson, something else than just a poster or a role-play. It is not my original idea, I have come across these online but I needed something that would be feasible with a group of primary beginners.
The main idea of the project is a kind of a role-play in which one student interviews the other in the format of a test. Our days was space-themed and that is why the kids were taking a test for an astronaut, answering the questions about themselves and about their skills (‘Can you…?’) because this was our target language on the day. However, this can be adapted to many topics such as a test for a traveller / explorer, a test for an athlete, a test for a student of English and so on.
I was considering a few different set-ups for this activity but since my group was a mixed ability group, my two strongest students did a lot of interviewing, with the kids taking turns to come up to the table to answer the questions and to demonstrate their skills. In the end, they also interviewed each other. All the kids who completed the test, were getting their passports with a stamp and they could sit down to decorate and to colour them. In the end, we had a small awards ceremony, with the appropriate music and applause.
I was happy because everyone really did practise the language and the kids were very excited about completing the tests successfully. So excited, in fact, that during the follwing lessons, on seeing some templates in my hands, they would ask again and again whether we would be doing the passports again. If you are planning a similar lesson, you can find my template here.
Going shopping
There is a separate post describing this activity and the resources necessary. You can find it here.
Making instruments and making music
This activity and this lesson has also become a post. You can find it here
Monster bookmarks
Again, there is a separate post devoted to these beauties. You can find it here.
Dedicated to Monsieur Alexander (6 y.o.) and Mademoiselle Victoria (3 y.o.) with big thanks for reminding me how important riddles are even if you speak the languagevery well.
Why? Because you simply must!
Riddles are an opportunity to develop focus and listening skills: you are required to listen until the very end as all the elements of the riddle are important and they can help you figure out what the answer is.
Riddles help to develop cognitive skills while you are guessing as you are required to put together different pieces of information, to understand, to synthesise and to analyse.
Riddles help to develop cognitive skills even more when you are creating your own riddle as you are required to apply and to evaluate the information you providing to make the riddle challenging and achievable at the same time.
Riddles are something that we use and enjoy in our L1, from the early childhoodand it is only natural that we will try to bring them into our EFL lessons, with kids and with adults.
Riddles help develop creativity.
Riddles are fun and they create plenty of opportunities for bonding, in a pair or a group.
Riddles, in L1, help the kids develop the awareness about how the language works, how the hidden meanings, the homophones, the collocations and this can also be transferred, at least partially, into the EFL or the ESL
It is obvious that the context of the EFL and the ESL does not always allow for the riddles and their benefits to be used fully and completely even if only due to the limitations of the language level which, in case of some of the young learners, might be as low as A1. This does not mean that they cannot be used. On the contrary, they can be introduced from early on.
Riddles, regardless of the context, are an opportunity for the students to speak and to produce a mini-discourse.
In the EFL/ESL classes, it is relatively easy to choose the vocabulary range and the structures for the students, depending on the level and the topic. This range can be easily extended.
How to? Riddles in the EFL classroom
The simplest version of the game can be played with preschoolers and we usually start simply with guessing ‘the secret word’ which is the card that the teacher and then the students choose and hold close to their chest and the class are guessing. This version is used to introduce the very idea of the riddles. When the kids have become more familiar with the format, the level of challange can be raised and the production maximised by asking the kids to describe the card they are holding in the simplest of way i.e. with the colour, operating within the colours of the objects on the flashcards used (‘It is green‘ or ‘It is green and red‘). With time, more adjectives can be added (‘It is big’, ‘It is small’), the categories (‘It is a toy’, ‘It is a pet’) or even opinions (‘I like it’, ‘I don’t like it’). There is a post devoted to one of the ways of dealing with riddles with the youngest learners. You can find it here.
The primary (or the more advanced pre-primary) students can start adding simple categories in their discourse (‘It’s a toy’, ‘It’s an animal’, ‘It’s in the schoolbag’) and start describing the word using the relevant structures. For example, with food, we use the following four: ‘It is cold’, ‘It is hot’, ‘You eat it’, ‘You drink it’) and these are the structures that the students know and will need anyway and these particular four can be supported by a relevant gesture. The same goes for the animal riddles set: ‘It is big’, ‘It is small’, ‘It can run’, ‘It can fly’, ‘It can swim’. I also like to add ‘I like it’ and ‘I don’t like it’ even though it does not quite provide enough information for the children to guess the object as the class may simply not know what one of us thinks about it, it gives the student making a riddle an opportunity to express opinion and to make it all more personalised. With the youngest students the teacher can assist production in the beginning by asking questions such as ‘Is it hot or cold?’ or ‘Can it swim, fly or run?’. This set of structures can be developed and extended depending on the students’ age and level.
As regards the more advanced and older students, the riddles can be made more extensive and more resembling the riddles that the adults and kids play in English as their L1 or the riddles they play with their L1 with the use of simple homonimes or homophones, a wider range of vocabulary or structures or complexity for example by making a list of words not to use when to describe a certain word, describing it with associations (i.e. kids, fun, outside to describe the word ‘playground’), with metaphors (i.e. ‘It is the brain of the computer’ for ‘hard drive’ or ‘It is the opposite of a mountain’ for ‘a cave’) or, even, by a mixture of these (‘Tell me what it is and tell me what it’s not’)
As regards the material and the support for the teacher one of the following can be used: flashcards, mini-flashcards, a page from the book with words and words and images, a poster, a set of wordwall cards, a list of words.
All the pairs. Somehow the penguin, the gorilla and the mouse got left out.
Ingredients
A set of pictures of animals, flashcards or on Miro. That’s it.
Procedures
Revise the vocabulary and ensure that all the cards are displayed at the same time for the kids to be aware of all the options
Model by choosing a pair of animals and putting these cards aside and justifying your choice. With my pre-primary kids, I like to use the first person statements (I’ve got 4 legs etc) as this is what we do with the younger kids (to enable the kids to talk about themselves and the animals without having to introduce the additional structures and to keep it coherent with the songs that we use ie Little bird or As quiet as a mouse). I also tend to vocalise the language ie I’ve got 4 legs (for the cat), I’ve got 4 legs (for the elephant).
Invite the kids to take turns to make their own pairs and to describe the rationale behind it.
This is what our Miro board looked like before we started
Why we like it
An opportunity for the kids to use and to develop the higher order thinking skills in the EFL context
The students are in charge of what they want to talk about and what they can talk about. It is appropriate for mixed-ability groups.
Little or no preparation as the flashcards are already there, the physical cards in the offline classroom or the set of pictures on Miro which, once prepared, can be doubled easily and used only for that activity.
A great variety of structures that can be revised and some opportunity to learn the new ones as the kids might have the ideas that they cannot express in English yet and this game can be the springboard which will help to introduce these. If the teacher speaks the kids’ L1.
Lots of opportunities for adaptation and using them with different sets of words such as toys, fruit, food, transport and, naturally, the relevant structures. I like to start this game with animals because of the range of easy structures that even the very young beginner students can use in order to complete task and because of the variety of topics that can be included (the colours, the number of legs, what animals can do, what they eat, where they live etc)
The level of challege can also be easily adapted, for example, the set of cards can include only 8 items or the teacher can focus on putting the animals into pairs basen only on the colours or the size which are probably the two most achievable categories, both cognitively and linguistically.
This is a neverending activity because the cards and the animals can be grouped and re-grouped over and over again to let the students create new and less obvious links between the items. Conversly, it can be shortend as needs be.
As regards the interaction patterns, this activity can be used with groups, with kids working together, at least in the beginning, or in pairs if we have the appropriate number of sets of cards as well as with 1-1 students, both online and offline.
There is also some potential for adaptation in the area of materials. The most obvious choice are the flashcards, the mini-flashcards or the Miro board. The teacher can also create a handout with the animals pictures and/or names which the students can colour-code as they are putting them in pairs. This might be a good solution for the kids to work in pairs in the offline classroom.
Last but not least, this activity is an opportunity for the kids to develop the listening skills (as they want to find out the justification for their peers’ choices) and the speaking skills (as they want to present their own reasoning, too). I simply love to observe how my students start with the simplest and most obvious connections and how they venture out into more and more creative ones.
Any role-play or a dialogue i.e. a transcript of any listening task which is a dialogue (i.e. Movers listening part 2, part 3), any written dialogue (i.e. Movers reading and writing part 3), any functional langauge introduced in a dialogue or a role-play
A pencil or a highlighter for each child
Procedures
Start with the main aim of the task is, ie listening in case of task 3 of Movers or reading in case of Movers, introduction of the functional language, etc. Go through all of the stages outlined in the teacher’s book or whichever ones you see fit in your teaching context.
Give out highlighters or pencils, ask the kids to open the books and look at the text again.
Introduce the concept of a banana (or whichever random word you want to use). Explain (and demonstrate!!!) that you will read the text slowly with some bananas in it and that if the students hear the word ‘banana’ they have to highlight or underline one word that comes immediately afterwards. Model with a few words.
Read the text with the bananas as the kids listen, follow and underline or highlight. The words chosen to be highlighted are the key words for each specific dialogue and their number depends on the dialogue and on the age and level of the students. With the older students and the more complex texts and language, the students can highlight two or more words that constitute a phrase or a collocation. This can be signalled with a repeated number of bananas ie banana banana for a two-piece phrase or banana banana banana for a three-piece phrase.
Ask the students to work in pairs and read the dialogue again and to use their own words and phrases instead of every banana.
Afterwards the kids can change roles and read it again or change the partners.
If the kids are ready, in the final (and optional) stage of the activity, they can close the book and role play and recreate the dialogue and the converation based on what they remember.
Why we like it
It requires no preparation, unless by preparation you mean opening the coursebook and finding the role-play or finding the teacher’s book and making copies of the transcript of any listening activity
It offers a great opportunity for the students to practise their speaking skills in an activity that is both controlled (as we have a framework) and free (as there are quite a few options to choose from)
It also offers a chance to work on the grammar accuracy and the transformation skills
It can be done online or offline
It can be done with a variety of levels. The highest level I have used it with was B1 (teens), the lowest level, so far, was A2 (primary).
So far, I have only tried it with dialogues but now, writing that post, I started to wonder about the potential of that activity for discourse building and creation. The original text could serve as a potential framework and support for the students to use. I am yet to experiment with that option.
All the letters of the alphabet written in one or two columns, with some space to write, next to each letter
Procedures
The teacher divides the students into pairs or teams and gives out the paper with the letters of the alphabet or asks the kids to write these down.
Step 1: The teacher announces the topic i.e. Clothes and asks the kids write one word (or phrase) for each letter of the alphabet or, more realistically, for as many letters as they can. The teacher gives an example. Ideally, the teacher creates her/his own list in order to have a set of words to model the other stages of the activity.
The teacher sets the time limit (i.e. 5 minutes for the younger kids and 3 minutes for the older kids). It might be a good idea to use a song instead and after the song finishes, the activity does, too.
The kids work in teams and make a list of the words within the vocabulary set. After the time is up, the teacher stops the game.
Step 2: The kids exchange the lists and count the words or phrases which their friends have managed to write within the set time limit. The teacher writes the results for each team on the board.
Step 3: The teams read the words on the lists and choose: the most interesting word, the most unusual word, the funniest word, three words you also have, three words you don’t have, any word you don’t understand or remember etc. The teams work in pairs and find out why their partners put these words on the list. If possible, the kids exchange the lists with another team and repeat the procedure once or twice.
Why we like it
For the students it is a great opportunity to revise and recycle vocabulary. All the beginner levels aside, even when the main lesson aim is to introduce and to practise new vocabulary, chances are the kids have already learnt, heard, used or seen some of the words. After all, the vocabulary sets are repeated and extended from level to level, not to mention that most kids have more than one source of English in their lives: the state school, the language school, a private teacher, brothers, sisters, parents, videos on youtube, cartoons, stories, computer games online…This game is one of the easy ways of revising all this vocabulary to prepare for ‘something new’
For all the reasons mentioned above, it is an absolute necessity for the teacher to find out how much the kids already know as regards a certain area in order to do a very focused (if a very contained) needs’ analysis and to adjust the volume, the level and the intensity of the new material presentation later in the lesson
It is very easy and requires no preparation whatsoever.
It helps to improve the students’ self-confidence because it gives them an opportunity to see how much they know already.
It can be used with any set of vocabulary, either thematic (i.e. clothes, food, animals) or content-related (i.e. the words necessary to describe a picture, the words used in a certain text or a listening task, a video)
The final task can be easily adapted i.e. choose 5 words to describe yourself, choose 5 words to use in a story or in a dialogue, choose 5 and describe them for your partners to guess, use a dictionary to find the words or structures for the missing letters, compare the lists with your friends to find the words or the structures for the missing letters, use the words to describe a photograph, use the words to talk about your day today etc.
