Very young learners

A piece of cake. The everyday lesson planning: Pre-schoolers

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photo courtesy of Юлец

Welcome to my classroom. I will take you through the lesson planning for one of my preschool groups. They have just started to learn English, they are four and they come to us only once a week.

This was our lesson number 5 and I taught it last week, just one of the lessons, without any fireworks or magic, just what we do. The only thing that was different was me taking notes and photos every step of the way. The planning took about twenty minutes (plus photocopying and preparing the classroom).

This IS how I plan and it was only a few months ago, while talking to a friend and a colleague (insert virtual hugs to Vita), I realised that if I had to pick up a metaphor for my approach to lesson planning, I would go for a cake: I figure out what I want (the visualisation of the amazing piece of baked goods, just a second before you cut it up to serve) and then I come up with all the ingredients to buy, all the equipment to prepare and all the steps to take to get there. Just like while making a cake.

Welcome to my lesson, step by step. Get ready for a lot of I’s!

Step 1: Getting started

An A4 piece of paper is where I always start. A single piece of paper and a few colourful markers. I use the same approach to planning for all my lessons, regardless of how old the students are or what their level, but for pre-schoolers it is especially important.

Leafing through the pages is not necessary and, let’s be honest, not recommended or even impossible when simultaneously you are managing a group of four- or five-year-olds. The lesson plan is always on the wall. It is relatively simple and thanks to the big font, the structure and the colour-coding, I can read it, even from the other end of the classroom. Sometimes, I take it around with me and pin it in the other corner of the room, all that depending on the activity. If for example we are doing something completely new, for the students or for me, my notes for this particular activity are a lot more detailed.

Step 2: The framework

This is the typical framework that I use for all my pre-primary groups and individual students. The lesson is divided into the three main slots, regardless of how long the lesson is. As a result, the length of each third varies and it can last 20 minutes in one real hour class, 15 minutes in one academic hour class or even 10 or 5 minutes in the shorter online classes that lasted 30 or 15 minutes respectively. As with any lesson planning, assigning time slots should be only approximate because a) anything can happen b) we adapt our and the coursebook authors’ ideas to what actually happens in a particular lesson. To be honest, if I were to give up one lesson plan / lesson ingredient / craftsmanship element, timing would be the first one to go.

I start from the scratch in every lesson although I have been playing with the idea of improving the approach – printing the template, half-filled in with all these elements that are constant, then laminating it and using whiteboard markers to plan to minimise the time expenditure and the workload but I have never got round to it. Not yet, anyway.

Step 3: The aim

I start with the lesson aim. I mean, we all do, in a more or less conscious way. Only about a year ago, though, I started to force myself to verbally formulate the aim of each lesson and to write it down. The results of that little, non-time-consuming teaching habit have been nothing short of amazing.

I know most of the coursebooks that I am / we are teaching with very well, I have gone through most of them once at least and I have my favourite activities and solutions and so on and, of course, at the bottom of my brain, I know why I do this or that. But, having to actually think about a particular group and a particular lesson, on a particular day and having to say it out loud has made a bit difference and has made me more aware of what I do and why.

But there is more to it, too. There have been a few occasions over this year when I really wanted to include something to supplement the coursebook, a game, a song you find or an idea you wake up, include it at all cost, just because the idea seemed very appealing. On those few occasions, the lesson aim got skipped or left for the very end of the lesson planning, as if by accident.

Only it was not by accident. Because when I got to the point when I was ‘just’ supposed to summarise it in the lesson plan, I simply could not. It did not come together because the lesson, at this point, was just a collection of activities, without any real focus or an obvious outcome. All these lesson plans were redone and the activities reconsidered.

For that reason, now I always put the lesson aim at the top of the page, as my frame, my spotlight, my runway. A clear lesson aim also helps to reflect on what happened in class afterwards.

In this particular lesson, I wanted my students to start talking about emotions. They had already been exposed to the three key words (happy, sad, angry) and their symbolic representations but without actually producing much. In this particular lesson, I wanted to try to take it a bit further, to the production stage, ideally in the form of a full sentence ‘I’m happy / I’m sad / I’m angry’.

To be honest, ideally, this is what should have been written on the page ‘I’m happy/ I’m sad / I’m angry’ but it got compressed to only three words, mainly because I have taught the lesson a few times already and it would be a full sentence by default. Just to prove that the lesson plan was for the lesson itself and not for ‘publication’.

Stage 4: I will always love you

This is the easy thing. The first and the last block, in brown, are the admin bits, with the students entering and leaving the classroom.

We line up in front of the classroom, count how many people are present, we say hello officially and we check the homework (more on that kind of a hello routine soon to come!) and we sing our goodbye song and choose stickers, get homework and choose the stickers before everyone goes home. These never change, although sometimes I only send the homework through the WhatsApp group or explain it directly to the parents. This was a standard lesson, though.

The other element that always appears at that point are all the songs and chants to be sung in class. These depend on the topic of the lesson and later on, the students can sometimes decide which one we are going to sing. This group here is at the very beginning of their English adventure so for the sake of establishing the routine and because we only know a few songs, we sing all of them in every lesson.

Songs work here as some kind of punctuation marks and during the lesson, we basically sail from one song to the other. It helps to ensure the balance between settlers and stirrers or songs offer at least a tiny little bit of a change of a pace and an opportunity to move but they also help to ensure that there are periods of the lesson when we all do something together so it helps to keep the balance of different interaction patterns (whole class vs individual work, pair work or taking turns).

Step 5: The centrepiece

At this point, I am adding the main activity, our focused task during which we are set to make the lollipop puppets with our three emotions (plus colours and some functional language). I have done this activity in that format a few times and for that reason there are no detailed instructions, the staging is already in the blood.

Another thing that appears at the time is the storybook. At this point in the course, we use storybooks only as supplementary material to revise and to reinforce the target language from the lesson and this is how Pete the Cat helped us. We revised the colours and emotions only using a different resource.

Step 6: The familiar

The next step is adding the other elements of our routine. These are not as constant as the hello or goodbye routine but not as changeable as the focused task or the target language practice.

Since it is the beginning of the course, there is not much to pick out from or to revise and since we are still working on building our routines and I try not to add too many new elements, not to overwhelm the kids.

Our revision activity has been the same for all this time: we count up to ten on fingers, we count the people present, boys and girls and teachers and we count other things, in this lesson dinosaurs, in this lesson in a book and our plastic toys.

Our music and movement has been pretty much the same from the beginning of the course and it is only now that the kids are properly enjoying the activities. This applies to the songs and the magic bag game, in which we use plastic fruit. They don’t know the fruit names so at this point we only focus on their colours (‘It’s green’).

As for our How are you today part, the plan was to do it in the traditional way but with the introduction of the finished product. I thought that this might help the kids become aware of what this toy is and how to use it (pick one and place it in front of our face, while saying ‘I’m happy’). By the time we’d get to making our own lollipops, they would already be familiar with them. It would also help with giving the instructions.

Step 7: The key elements

The things to add now, will be the details of working with the target language and with the revised language, in order to ensure that they best contribute to the completion of the focused task.

What I did plan, however, was the colours practice with a variety of activities: not quite in the order in which we did them. The main and the new one here was ‘open/close’ also known as ‘what’s missing’, a memory game and the most challenging activity here (as it involves cognitive skills and language production, focus). Everything else was either a preparation for that or a supplementary game, which can but may not be used, in the end. I like to make a list like that to prepare myself for their different moods, participation and involvement levels, etc. Having a list of potential games which we can play, without any major changes to the materials set or the seating arrangement I found it to be quite useful.

The fish game here acted as my potential plan Z, only if we have time. In the end, I used it later in the lesson, instead of the magic bag activity since they were both quite similar (students taking turn to perform an individual task with a motor skills development focus and colour revision.

In this lesson, the connection between the focused task and the target language practice is not as strong but that is because it is only the lesson 5 in level 1. Thinking about it now, after the lesson, I think that, ideally, I should have included some additional activity to combine numbers and colours, for example in the form of colourful happy, sad and angry faces, that we could categorise by emotion, count etc. So see, there is always a way to improve things)))

Ready!

The lesson plan is ready. Perhaps now, looking at it, in its full, finished glory, it is easier to see why I do not include any timings. The framework itself outlines the time slots for each stage of the lesson, alongside their aims, although they are not articulated clearly and they are the following:

Column A: the introduction to the lesson, hello and revision, the aim: settling in, duration: about 20 minutes.

Column B: working on the target language, the aim: presentation, practice and production, in varying ratios, depending on whether it is the beginning of the ‘unit’ or the end of it, duration: about 20 minutes.

Column C: production, the aim: production, with the hope of more freer practice and spontaneous production, although, of course not during the first few lessons of the level 1 course.

Looking back

The lesson went well and, apart from the few things mentioned already, I did not really have to change anything else. Not that it would be a very bad thing to do. Regardless of what has been planned, the thing that matters most is a group of the little people who are sitting in the classroom, how many of them there are, how advanced they are, how they are feeling on the day. Flexibility, first and foremost. And then – the reflection bit. Because we can always make things better.

If you are new to teaching pre-schoolers, have a look at my post about the first VYL lesson survival kit.

Happy teaching!

The first VYL lesson survival kit

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My first VYL teaching experience…

…was in Spain. There were eleven kids in the group, we met for two real hours but only once a week. Some of the students were five and some were six and already in school which, of course, made everything a bit easier.

Our classroom was not quite what you would call a VYL teacher’s dream come true. We had huge, wardrobe-size tables that no one, save for Hulk, possibly, would have been able to move and they were so big that when my students sat down, they were barely visible. There were only eleven little heads bobbing above these huge tops…

In terms of the space, we had a tiny strip of the floor in the aisle and another one between the first row and the podium with the teacher’s desk stood because, of course, there had to be a podium. I did not speak my students’ first language and they were beginners in English.

If that had not been enough, just before the first lesson, I was informed that one of my students was allergic to most foods, and the allergy was so strong that we were not allowed to bring anything edible into the classroom, not to put his life at risk. I was also told that, should I notice anything suspicious, any potential symptoms of an allergic reaction, I should immediately leave the classroom with my underage students (one of them unwell) and run about 200 meters along the hallway to fetch the person who was qualified and equipped with the injection that would save his life.

As a result, naturally, I spent the entire academic year stressing out to the maximum of my brain’s capacity. Because something might happen to him, he might try to tell me and I might not understand. And perhaps I don’t run fast enough to get to the office room on time…Or I have to leave all the kids in the classroom and it will be a huge traumatic experience for them…I was dying before, during and after the lesson and perhaps because of that I managed not to focus too much on the potential methodological failings of my first year with the little ones. We had fun, we learnt a lot and my kids were amazing. And, probably, because of that experience, I am what I am today. Alvaro, Jesus, Luz, Uliana, Itziar, Amalia, Oihana, Beatrice, Andre, Eva, Maria. The amazing students.

If you are about to start teaching English to preschoolers…

Let’s start from a happy ending because there will be one: you will start teaching a new group of preschool beginners, they will fall in love with you and with learning English. You will get the access to a source of pure, undiluted life energy twice a week. You will adore teaching the future to speak a foreign language. The parents will be grateful, the kids will start shouting their first words as soon as they enter the school. The songs you teach will stay with them forever and they will sing them while in the car on the way home. And, many many years later, while they are taking their FCE or CAE exam in a few years’ time, they are going to look back and smile thinking of their first English teacher. See? A happy ending.

Before you get there, though, and it is still a long, long way from now, you just have to survive the first 45 minutes of the first lesson.

Surprise!

That is potentially the biggest problem that during that first lesson anything can happen, literally anything. Some kids will have already started kindergarten so they are used to staying on their own, with ‘a stranger’. Some children have started ballet classes or swimming lessons so they know that mum is not always around and, instead, there is another adult and that they will be ‘learning’. Some kids have had a conversation with their parents that prepared them for this new experience and now they know what to expect. Some children may have even learnt a few words, some red, blue, green, pink and onetwthreefourfivesixseveneightnineten, usually like that, as one word. Some are ready.

However, it will be only some of them and this year, due to the pandemic, possibly fewer than in a regular year since for quite a few of them the academic year and the socialising would have been interrupted. The thing is that you really need to meet them in person and then start discovering them all by yourself.

What can go wrong?

Well, let me think and reminisce a little:

  • tears as soon as you enter the room (for the first two weeks straight, actually)
  • running in the hallway screaming (in their L1) ‘I don’t want to learn any English’.
  • lying on the carpet for 40 out of 45 minutes of the lesson time, looking at you but absolutely refusing to interact in any way whatsoever
  • covering their ears when you speak English
  • responding to you in Turkish (the L2), not in Russian (the L1) and not in English (the foreign language, that was a fun one!)
  • leaving the room to bring the nanny in
  • hiding under the table. Standing by the door during the entire lesson
  • speaking very very quietly
  • asking to see mum every ten minutes
  • asking why you don’t speak Russian
  • hugging the bear and not letting go

Just to name a few things.

Ten things that you can do

One. Do not panic.

Being experienced does give you some heads-up, true, but it is a bit nerve-wracking anyway, no matter how many years you have on your resume. It is quite likely that the first lesson will be an awkward one. It’s ok.

Two. The parents are on your side.

It might not always be possible but it would be great to meet the parents and let them know what you are going to do during the first lesson. Ask the parents to stay at the school, close to the classroom. You will be on your own during the lesson but it is good to know that, should it come to the worst, you can just open the door and call Masha’s dad or Tima’s mum to help you deal with the tears or the unwanted behaviour. Keep the doors of the classroom closed and collect the kids in the hallway. Line the kids up and find out what their names are. Say hello and count everyone. Open the door to the classroom and take the kids in, one by one. The parents will help you here, they will wait with their children and keep an eye of them while you are organising the students in the room.

After the lesson, take the kids out and explain the homework to the parents, too.

Three. Get ready.

Prepare a lesson plan, trying to predict what can go wrong, with the classroom management, instructions or materials and to prepare a plan B. I have found it very useful to put up a poster on the wall with a simplified version of your lesson plan, big font and colour-coded, something that you will be able to glance at without turning your back or taking the eyes off your group.

Get all your resources ready and in order. You will have your plate full as it is so you don’t need to wonder where the pencils are or try to reorganize all your papers when the kids are already in the classroom.

Four. Priorities.

One of the most important things during the first lesson and during the first ten or even twenty lessons, is working on the classroom routine. Your students have no previous learning experience of that kind. They don’t know what is expected of them because they literally, have never done that before. Go step by step, especially between the stages or when you are moving between the parts of the room. In a few weeks’ time, yes, you will be able to say ‘Everyone, let’s make a circle’ but for the time being, do get up, stand where the circle is supposed to be and call Petya. Wait for him. Then call Misha, wait for him to come. Then Marusya, wait for her to join the circle…Don’t worry that you are wasting the precious lesson time. No, you are not. You are establishing the routine and investing in the future.

Five. Your basic teaching tools.

Don’t forget that you have the most important teaching tools on you – your face, your hands and your voice. Use them to help you, to show the kids what to do, to praise them or to discipline them. They don’t speak the language, yet. Your face and your voice and gestures must match the message you want to convey, your soft voice and a smile for praising, your other voice and a serious face when you want to tell them that something should not be happening.

Six. Model.

Demonstrate. Model. Show. Always. Verbal instructions and ICQs (instruction checking questions) matter, too but your students will not know any of the words you are using and modelling will be essential. No matter what your activities are, give the instructions and do it first yourself, possibly a few times. If you are going to use a handout, prepare two spare copies for yourself – one to complete before the lesson and to use as the finished product to show the kids what the aim is and another one to be completing with the kids during the lesson.

Seven. Peer observations

Ideally, there would be enough time for you to arrange a live peer observation session with somes more experienced colleagues. Watching real kids during a real lesson can be especially beneficial, and even more so if you can have a look at the lesson plan and to talk to the teacher after the lesson. Arranging peer observations of the online lessons should be even easier to manage. In the school where I work, we also record lessons for teacher training purposes and we keep them on the database. This way, the newly qualified teachers can access them easily and watch them from home.

If none of these is available, there is still youtube and lots and lots of videos of teachers who want to share their activities and favourite tools. Every little does actually help. A lot!

Eight. Do the reading.

There might not always be enough time for the extensive reading and research before the first lesson but you have to start somewhere. Have a look at these two posts, on the methodology videos and the literature devoted to teaching English to very young learners.

Nine. Smile.

No matter what, keep it up. Smile.

Ten. Bring the ferret.

Last but not least, to quote a great mainstream Hollywood manual into the work with the very young learners ‘The kindergarten is like the ocean. You don’t want to turn your back to it’. Kind of.

But, actually, go on and re-watch the Kindergarten Cop with your teacher’s eyes. Especially the ferret bit…

Have a good one! And remember – the second lesson will be better than the first and the third one – better than the second one. I promise!

Happy teaching!

P.S. Here you can read about how I plan my lessons with pre-schoolers and here about our entering the room routine.

There is one more, newer post, with more focus on the teacher during the first VYL lesson.

Colourful Semantics in EFL?

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Have you got something that you could file under ‘professional interests‘ (or, more to the point in some cases, ‘professional obsessions’)? Mine is language production.

That is why I am always on the lookout for new ideas on how to trick my students into producing more and more. And more. Some of these ideas can be found on this blog, in the posts on the discourse clock, pairwork for pre-schoolers, using songs or cognitive skills-based activities to develop speaking. Today – a new post in the series.

It was probably one of those free-falling searches on Instagram, with no rhyme and reason, that got me to Saffira Mattfield’s (@onlinespeechie) Instagram post on Colourful Semantics. A very special moment, like when you stumble upon a proper toolbox with the screwdrivers and bolts and saws and monkey wrenches…Or, when in the supermarket, you wander into the baking aisle and, all of a sudden, all the professional decorations and ingredients right within your arm’s reach…This amazing and a very powerful feeling of: ‘I could do so much with it!’

Colourful Semantics

The approach was created in the 90s by a UK-based speech therapist Alison Bryan in order to help children develop their speaking skills especially as regards the use of full sentences, storytelling and so on.

The main idea behind colourful semantics is the colour-coding of parts of speech and the parts of the sentence and developing the habit of including all the necessary ‘ingredients’ in the simpler or more complex sentences. This is done with the use of the cards, like those in the photograph below. Subject (who?) is orange, verb (what doing) – yellow, object (what?) – green and, location (where?) – blue.

Colourful Semantics cards from @onlinespeechie Saffira Mattfield

Children start with building simple sentences by using only two cards, for example ‘The girl’ (an orange card) and ‘is painting’ (a yellow card) and putting them next to each other on the template. Later on they move to constructing sentences made of three elements, for example ‘The girl’ (an orange card), ‘is painting’ (a yellow card) and ‘a balloon’ (a green card) or even four, by adding the blue card with the location, for example ‘in the park’. They not only learn to remember to include all the elements but they can also manipulate them physically. The sentence itself becomes less abstract since it all its key elements are represented visually.

If you are interested in all the details, please have a look at the bibliography.

Colourful Semantics cards from @onlinespeechie Saffira Mattfield

Colourful Semantics in EFL? Yes, please!

Colourful semantics perfectly resonates with everything that I have been doing in my lessons. Grammar structures and the format of the sentence are an abstract concept, beyond the grasp of pre-schoolers especially those who live in their own country, surrounded mostly by their mother tongue and not exposed to a sufficient amount of the target language. By using some kind of a visual representation of the parts of speech or the parts of the sentence, we make it more accessible to them and we enable production.

This visual representation can be realised through:

  • using gestures such as ‘pointing at yourself and sliding the hand along your body to draw attention to your clothes’ for ‘I am wearing’
  • using symbols such as ‘a heart’ for ‘I like’ and ‘a crossed heart’ for ‘I don’t like’
  • using flashcards such as ‘big’ and ‘cat’ to elicit a chunk ‘a big cat’

And…colours!

While making the sentences, students will be required to use all the required colours, ‘to tick all the boxes’, this way building a full sentence or a phrase. Of course, they might require more support from the teacher who will have to ensure that they did not skip any of the elements, but, the hope is that with time, including all the elements will become a habit.

Colourful semantics in the EFL classroom: how to get started

Step one: very easy

Get in touch with Saffira (@onlinespeechie) in order to get your own set of the ready-made cards. It is a perfect way of familiarising yourself with the colourful semantics in practice and to understand how it can be adapted to our EFL context. Although, of course, these cards can be used in the EFL classroom as they are, depending on the level of your students.

Step two: adapting the idea to your groups’ needs

The materials presented below were used with a group of the second level of four- and five-year-olds. Since they were still learning online, they were not using any real cards but only the visuals created with the Miro board. The unit was built around the topic of the house and included some furniture vocabulary, the prepositional phrases ‘the cat is on the sofa’ and some of the Present Continuous based on a story as well as a song.

The boards were used to practise these phrases were used later in the unit, when the student had become familiar with all the basic components. The main structure ‘The mice are having fun’ was introduced through a song. The first time the cards were used, the teacher was a very active participant, taking turns with all the kids to make sentences. In the following lessons, the teacher only modelled the activity and was responsible for moving the pictures around in accordance with the sentences the kids were producing.

The first set was designed to support the production of the sentences with the preposition ‘on’ which were later practised in a freer practise activity (‘My room’) whereas the second one focused on Present Continuous which was later reinforced in a storybook activity.

For the time being, a decision was made not to adapt the original colour-coding system and instead, a set of colours was assigned freely to each structure, to help the children associate them with each particular components of different structures, rather than with the whole system.

Reflection time

I have just started experimenting with this approach in my classes but the first steps in the world of Colourful Semantics have been more than exciting. This is definitely not the end of that adventure. Right now I am working on a set of cards that I could share with the parents of my students so that they could be printed, cut up and used at home.

Want to find out more? Start here:

Bryan, A. (1997) Colourful Semantics: thematic role therapy. In Chiat, S., Law, J. and Marshall, J. (Eds) Language Disorders in Children and Adults: Psycholinguistic approaches to therapy. London

Bolderson et al in (2011) Colourful Semantics: A Clinical Investigation. Child Language Teaching and Therapy October 2011 vol. 27 no. 3 344-353

Saffira Mattfiled @onlinespeechie

Colourful Semantics from London Speech Therapy

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.

The Unthinkable or About choosing to stay online with VYLs.

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To online or not to online, that is the question?

No, not really. That, for sure was never a question!

Not for me, that is. I am a dinosaur teacher and I had always been against teaching pre-schoolers online. Or, actually, teaching online in general. If, before the 15th of March 2020, you had asked me what I thought about it, my answer would have been as short as it would have been decisive. No.

No. No. No.

I love my beautiful classroom, all the puppets, the flashcards…My rucksack that makes me look and feel like a proper Mary Poppins, the box with all the precious junk. How we sit in a circle to read a story and how we make stuff or play with a Magic Bag…

But, then, hey-ho, the pandemic happened and I and we just moved online. Just like that. Just to prove that the EFL teachers are the most amazing species. Just to see whether one can, in fact, develop professionally, at a head-spinning pace, learning about new approaches, techqniues, platforms, games, tools, tricks, websites, solutions…and about their effective use in the online EFL lesson.

Yes, indeed, one can. In March many of us (including myself) had very little or no idea about the online classes but look at us now. Superheroes!

But guess what? The Universe had other surprises in store for us (I mean, of course, it is 2020, the year of surprises), like this idea, here…

‘Can we just stay online?’

I don’t know about you but I have spent the last 100+ days dreaming and daydreaming of going back offline. But while I was doing this, the other stakeholders had their own ideas and this is how we (the parents, the admin and the Mary Poppins here) found ourselves discussing the options and, actually, willingly, considering choosing to stay online with the youngest children, regardless of the situation in the city.

Well, that was a bit unexpected, to put it mildly. However, once I got past the stage of the initial shock, I was able to look at it all in a more objective way (as in: not blinded by my own old age and stubbornness:-) and actually see some of the benefits, for all of us.

So here goes, in no particular order

Pre-primary online is better because…

  • We can do it! A good quality online classes for pre-schoolers are not a marketing spin. Impossible is nothing! We learn, we are engaged, we have fun, we produce, we develop, we bond. We are loving it and we are looking forward to the next one. You only need to want to make it work and just like with the regular classes, everyone needs time to get used to each other, the routine and the rules of the game.

  • It’s virus-free. Covid 19 aside, little children get ill more frequently. That’s just the way it is. It does happen that they might not be entirely healthy when they come to their afternoon English lesson or that, being ill, they miss a lesson here and a lesson there and they do not make as much progress as they could have. The online classroom is a perfect solution here: we can all participate, even if we sneeze and cough and the school and the teacher do not lose money over the classes that would have to be cancelled.

  • It lowers the affective filter. There were a few students in my groups this year who definitely benefitted from moving online. In the classroom, they were amazing and a pleasure to teach. They participated but at the same time struggled, now and again, with being separated from mum. They simply flourished in the online classroom. I can see how much more confident and at ease they are, sitting in their own chairs, in their bedrooms, with cats, toys and, most importantly, with Mum at an arm’s reach. What’s not to like here?

  • It is less stressful for the teacher. It is a little know fact that VYL teachers, in the course of their career, develop a set of eyes around their heads and can produce a pair of additional arms, on request. They are ready for everything that is happening, for everything that is to happen and for everything that might potentially happen, too. Why? Because acting in loco parentis is a huge responsibility. And a lot of stress, even for those experienced teachers. The online classroom comes with an army of the best teaching assistants there are: mums, dads, grandmas, sisters, brothers and nannies. The kids are safe, every single one of them.

  • Parents like being in the classroom. So far, the classroom has been this galaxy far-away which the parents had no or very little access to. Of course, teachers talk to parents, they explain the homework, they give feedback. They share songs and send out the invitations to the open lesson, twice a year. Now, however, the whole course is one big open lesson and the parents are a part of it. More even, they are having fun. Not because they want to interrupt or tell the teacher off, not to take over and not because they do not trust the teacher and would rather keep an eye on things. It’s because they can finally see how their children operate in the world of the foreign language, how they become more independent and how they are learning new things and making progress.

  • Parents can get properly involved now. The parents are there, they learn our songs, they play our games and they see exactly what we practise and how. If there is time and willingness, they can easily extend the English lesson time, take it ‘out of the classroom’, this way contributing to their children’s progress. During the lesson time, they can be involved in too, helping the teacher model the activity but also helping their child understand that, yes, you can sometimes speak to your mum in English, too.

  • Flexibility and frequency. 45 minutes in the real classroom is just enough for the little people. 45 minutes in front of the computer screen might be a challenge, especially if they audience is only 3 or 4 years old. For that reason, we decided to experiment and chop the lesson time into smaller bites. Now we meet for thirty or even fifteen minutes at a time but more often. The students are involved throughout and stay focused, the financial expenses or profits are the same, and such lessons are very easy to plan. The most important thing, however, for me as a teacher, are the benefits for the learning process. When you are 5, you learn quickly but you also forget quickly, so by increasing the frequency of the lessons, we create better conditions for learning and can expect better results. It is already happening!

  • The lesson time = the speaking time. The ‘time constraints’ mentioned above as well as the online format had an impact on the lesson structure and routines. The students have the coursebooks but it is used only at home, for revision and for homework. When we meet in our online classroom, it is to learn new things, to listen, to sing and to speak and speak and speak. And I really like that way.

Much to my amazement, I am a happy online teacher but that doesn’t mean that I have stopped dreaming about the offline world or that any decisions have been made. It’s too early, anyway, so I am still on the fence, just ‘sitting, waiting, wishing’, like in a song.

What about you? Has this been your experience, too? Have you noticed any other benefits of the pre-primary EFL online classes? I would love to hear from you.

Happy teaching (online or off:-)

Pairwork for pre-schoolers: Where the angels don’t fear to tread*

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Ha! It was working!

Again, I made it happen. They were sitting in pairs, facing each other, making riddles, answering, all by themselves. I was sitting in the corner, just keeping an eye.

First reaction? To run out of the classroom, shout it from the rooftops or, since they were just in the hallway, tell me students’ parents. But then, just then, I hesitated because, in my mind’s eye, I saw their reaction. What if I really did rush out, with a victorious ‘Your kids can play in pairs!!!!’

What would they do? They’d just look at me with an eyebrow raised. They do know that their 4 and 5-year-old sons and daughters can play in pairs. They did see it, a million times, in playgroups, in the playgrounds, in kindergartens, at home…what’s the big news here?

Indeed. If you at the types of play and the age slots when kids normally are capable of engaging, then yes, for a long time, children are only taking part in unoccupied play (0 – 2), solitary play (2-3), onlooker play (2.5 – 3.5) and parallel play (2.5 – 3.5) but even the children aged about 3- 4 do engage in associative play and, a bit later, from the age of 4, in cooperative play. And that means, that for most of the EFL students (with some exceptions as there are school which admit 2 and 3-year-olds), there is nothing, from the point of view of child development, that should prevent children from interacting with each other and working together towards a common goal, without the adult, or rather, with the adult being involved only marginally.

Consequently, they should be able to take part in a pairwork activity in an English class because why not?

Naturally, some provisions related to the age of the participants will have to be made and the whole definition of what a pair-work activity is, adapted. And things such as the inability to read and write, the level of English, the duration of the activity, the ability to stay on the task…but these are the things that we work on anyway so…

Personally, I think I became obsessed with pairwork in the early years about five years ago. The group I was teaching was big, nine or even ten students at a time. They were absolutely amazing, some of them I still teach today, but there were ten of them and I felt really unhappy. They did not produce as much as they could have as we had to focus on whole class activities. Until, one day, I had enough of that, and out of this desperation, I started taking my first steps towards pairwork. From that group on, nothing was the same, pairwork was there on the table, for this and for all the other groups. There is no way back.

This year, with my new level 1 group and with the BKC Conference approaching, I decided to run an experiment, a small case study, just to put the pairwork with pre-schoolers on a timeline, out of curiosity and for the other teachers, too.

The group

There were seven kids in that group, two boys and five girls. The youngest of my students was around three, the two oldest ones – five years old.

The course

The group studied once a week, for sixty minutes. We had a pacing schedule and we did use the coursebook. In many ways, this was a typical level 1 group. We did things in the way that I normally did them with a level one group, the only real difference was that I kept my eyes open and I kept the journal of the whole experiment. Throughout the whole project, I did plan to go through it in the most organic of ways, without speeding the process, observing the kids and moving on to the next stage when they were ready.

Stage one: weeks 1 – 12: the start of the course

During these first twelve weeks of the course, we did absolutely everything that we do when we start with a new group, including:

  • The first vocabulary sets: colours, numbers, school things, toys
  • The first functional language phrases: hello, goodbye, blue, please, thank you, who’s next, are you ready, it’s big, it’s small etc.
  • Establishing and working on the routine
  • The first everything: the first lesson with the coursebook, the first story, the first craft, the first video, the first holiday
  • Developing social skills, building the class community

Stage two: a new game: week 13

Since the kids already knew the toys vocabulary and we had played some simple flashcards games, I decided to introduce a more complex game and the basis for the whole project: the guessing game ‘Is it?’

In week 13, we played the game for the first time, ever, with the kids sitting in a circle, with the teacher leading the game. I did have to play it up a little bit, in the beginning, pretending to be student A and student B but they got the idea of the game very quickly. I did accept the one-word production but some of the older children started to ask full questions from the very beginning.

Stage three: students take over: week 14 – 18

At the time I was not sure when this particular stage would happen, I wanted to wait for the kids to be ready and I was getting ready to wait. But, surprise surprise, they were ready, already in the following lesson.

I did play a few rounds, with me in the lead and then, invited a few of them to lead the game. They did need my help with holding the cards and keeping the game going but that’s really it. It was all natural and they were more taken aback by the fact that, out of all eight of them, not everyone did have a go.

Stage four: team vs team: the stage that did not happen

When I was staging the whole process, I did plan the stage in which the kids divided into teams would be playing the game, with one set of cards.

The idea was that would be slightly more independent, at the same time not being exposed and supporting each other in the game and the teacher could still supervise them effectively.

However, when we were sitting down to play the game, one of the pairs, grabbed the cards that were lying on the side, took them and, without any further ado, started to play the game, with the child sitting nearest, using full sentences.

This is when I realized that we were ready for the next stage so we proceeded.

Stage five: pairs: lesson 19 – 24 and onwards

It just happened and it was a success, despite the fact that between the whole Christmas break took place between lesson 18 and 19 and the fact that a student came back after a longer trip. As soon as the kids saw the materials, they knew what was to come (I knew because they were commentating in Russian) and to reinforce the whole idea, I prepared another set of seats, in another part of the classroom.

Stage six: the follow-up: interrupted by the pandemic

Here, again, I can only tell you about everything that I was planning to do, and everything that I could not do because we are chased out of the classroom by the coronavirus.

The first step was to be switching the vocabulary, to push the boundaries of the familiar and the unknown a bit, and play the same guessing game with school objects and colours.

The second step was to switch the game and, hopefully, swish through a few stages and use a game to play in pairs, Abracadabra, Pelmanism or One or many.

Reflection

All in all, it was very easy and pretty straightforward despite the fact that the kids were quite young and despite the fact that we only did meet once a week. I would imagine that, if we had classes more regularly, for example twice a week, even less time would have been required and we would have met our aims even faster.

If you haven’t tried pairwork with pre-primary, then use the first opportunity and go for it!

The contributing factors

  • Seating arrangements: very important, especially for the first few times with pair-work. It does make it a bit more complicated for the teacher, to put together mini-stations with two stools facing each other or, even better, two stools at a small table, in a reasonable distance from the other mini-stations but it really does contribute to the whole project. Kids can only see their partner; they have a small working space in front of them and the other pairs are automatically excluded. Out of sight, out of mind.
  • Material arrangement: very important. Colourful flashcards are great and beautiful to look at but they proved to be too big to manipulate for some of the little hands. It was too much of a challenge to shuffle them, one of twice they did spill onto the carpet and if the kids really wanted to keep them a secret, they did press them tight to their chests and the flashcards got folded and creased. This is how the black and white mini-flashcards appeared. Even if they got torn, lost, destroyed, it was super easy to replace them. To make sure that they were not see-through and they don’t fly out of the little hands, the colourful envelopes appeared. The students very quickly learnt to associate these envelopes with this particular game
  • Material coherence: This is in order to ensure that they students will be using the full structures and that they will be using the grammatically correct language. Naturally, it will depend on the activity and the vocabulary set. In our case, we started using pairwork with toys but I decided to eliminate ‘puzzles’, ‘crayons’ ‘blocks’ from this particular game. I did not want my students to overgeneralize and use ‘Is it?’ with a noun in plural and, at this point in the game, they had not learnt the plural form ‘Are they?’ and I did not want to overcomplicate things.
  • Voices to show interest: especially in the beginning, while modelling, when the teachers themselves are their own student B and student A. A little bit of theatre goes a loooong way here.
  • Decision making: or in other words, teaching kids to be independent. In a regular lesson, there are plenty of opportunities for the students to make decisions about the lesson – choosing the colour of the stool to sit on, choosing which song to sing, which game to play, the order in which they join the circle, or who is the next one to lead the game. This way, step by step, the little people learn that the teacher is always the hub and not the only hub in this little community and it all comes in handy later on, during the pairwork tasks.
  • Leading the game: as soon as the kids become familiar with the activity, they can be given the opportunity to ‘be the teacher’ and lead the game. This way they will be producing more language but, from the point of view of pair-work, they will be also better prepared to take a bit more responsibility for the game.
  • S-S interaction: as with leading the previous point, the students should be given many opportunities to interact with other students, without the teacher. Obviously, with the little ones, these exchanges will be limited to saying hello and goodbye to each other, not only to the teacher, to students asking each other ‘How are you?’, to students giving out pencils, asking for them and saying thank you etc.
  • Pairing-up aka Clever teacher: Ideally, of course, everyone should be able to work with each other and be on good terms with everyone in the group and building these relations is one of the general aims of the course. However, getting to that place is a process and work in progress and it will take time. For that reason, it might be a good idea, to consider pairing children up in a way that will be contributing to pairwork, with the hope that the benefits for the community spirit will be secondary here. There might be two factors to take into consideration, on the one hand pairing up the children that work well together, on the other pairing up the younger with the older, creating perfect conditions for this pairwork ZPD, with one student the expert, the other the novice.
  • Functional language: We started with the key language necessary for this particular game (Is it…? Yes, it is. No, it isn’t) and only later, when the time came, we added ‘I give up!’ which turned up to be necessary. When we were about to start the proper pairwork, I added chants to give it a proper framework, ‘Are you ready? 3…2…1…Let’s play!’ to start the activity and ‘Let’s finish. 10.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1. Well done!’

If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on Colourful Semantics, discourse clock, using songs and activities based on developing cognitive skills.

References

*) This is the presentation I gave at the BKC IH Conference: Exprience, Excellence, Expertise, Moscow February 2020

Discourse at the age of 5?

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From the series: We want more!

Of course! You can hear kids blabbing in the hallway. To their mums, dads, nannies, friends, school’s security guards, all these never-ending stories of kindergarten adventures, scraps with siblings, birthday parties, visits from gran, new toys, rain in the playground, teeth lost, dead grasshoppers found…

They do it in Russian, of course, but that just proves that they are capable of discourse and that we, teachers, cannot really use the excuse of their age to justify all the one- word exchanges in the classroom.

Of course, they are already fluent users of Russian so they will be able to produce lots more, naturally but this post is not about catching up with the L1 but about what is feasible for the pre-primary students, pre-A1 level with the total of 90 or 120 minutes of exposure to the English language. More than just single word utterances.

I present to you… (drum roll): A discourse clock.

The tool itself is neither very complex or especially revolutionary. It is a just a neater and a more VYL-friendly toy which was created to support the kids in producing the language.

How to?

  • We play a game of riddles
  • Teacher demonstrates: moving the hands around the clock and producing sentences about a secret animal, from 12 o’clock to 12 o’clock. Kids guess the animal.
  • Kids take turns to make sentences about their secret animal for the group to guess.

Why we like it?

  • Moving the hands around makes this taks a little bit more kinaesthetic and it helps to structure the whole discourse by sequencing it and by highlighting all the topics to mention. The clock hands never stop half-way through. They have to make a full circle and they can only make a full circle when the language is produced.
  • The icons offer the visual support for the students and they represent all the language that they should know. But, apart from working as ‘visual reminders’, they can also be used by kids to ask for teacher’s help, by pointing at the word they need to use, without having to resort to their L1.
  • It is ridiculously easy to adapt to different topics and levels of challenge. The most basic animal clock can only include ‘big/small’ and ‘colours’ and more areas can be added to it as the kids progress through the unit or the course.
  • It works in the classroom and online.
  • Eventually, the clock becomes unnecessary and the kids are ready to produce longer stretches of discourse without it.

If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on pairwork in pre-school, using songs, activities based on developing cognitive skills and Colourful Semantics in EFL.

Happy teaching!

VYL speaking activities and the cognitive skills development

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Where to look for inspiration for pre-primary activities? Coursebooks will be probably the first point of reference for many of us, but not the only one. There are kids and their interests, too and this is how pets, favourite toys or books make an appearance in our lessons, Frozen and Co. There is the internet and what other people have created, used and share and we are really truly blessed to be teaching in the XXI century, with Instagram, Facebook and youtube. CLIL and ‘real subjects’ are another great source of inspiration even if our students learn English as a foreign language. Sometimes it also happens that we find some randomness and we really really really want to bring it to class and we design the whole lesson around a story, a glitter gun or our new puppet.

In this post I would like to focus on activities whose beginning and the main driving force was the development of the cognitive skills or, in other words, everything contributing to the development of the thinking skills: memory, focus, logic, connections, information processing, patterns etc.

Why?

  • Because our students are 3 or 4 or 5 and 6 and they are developing these skills anyway. Using that and applying activities and concepts they are familiar with in their ‘L1 life’ to benefit of our English lessons is something that we do. This is how songs, chants, stories, crafts and puppets took over our classes.
  • Because the kids will be drawn to them and motivated by this cognitive challenge. And this is how we are going to ‘trick’ them into producing the language.
  • Because it would be simple be a waste not to use them.

How to do it? Keep on reading.

Categorising

This is something that can easily be done very early in the game, with the level 1 students and even with the younger pre-primary. ‘It’s big’ and ‘it’s small’ is probably one of the easiest concepts to start with. ‘You can eat it’ and ‘you can’t eat it’ is another. This is what I always start with because it is easy to demonstrate and even the youngest students giggle when you demonstrate ‘eating’ a pencil or a schoolbag.

Later on, the time comes for more complex categories, either based on personal preferences (I like it / I don’t like it) or the knowledge of the world (it’s hot / it’s cold, it can swim / it can fly / it can run or you eat it / you drink it).

Another, very simple way of applying this principle is categorizing objects by colour. These can be any objects that the students are familiar with, for example toys. The activity presented here was created for a 3-year-old student and used during the first week of the course. It went very well, the student was responding to the teacher pointing at different objects and responding to simple questions ‘Is it blue?’ with ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ but by the end of the lesson he started to produce his first chunks such as ‘a yellow car’, ‘a yellow robot’.

Odd one out

The inspiration for this and the following activity came from the Cambridge Young Learners Exams. The language level of these activities is, of course, way above the abilities of a typical year 1 or year 2 pre-primary student. However, cognitively, these are the tasks that preschoolers adore – looking for differences, similarities and connections and they will certainly be able to say ‘It’s blue, it’s blue, it’s blue. It’s red’

Most of the original exam materials can be used in class but with all the magic of the miro board preparing a task adapted to the needs and the level of the particular group will literally take two minutes.

Find the difference

Again, this is a task that children are familiar with. However, the original exams tasks as well as the tasks intended for language practice might contain the language that is above the students’ level or might be too complex visually and too detailed, hence inappropriate. However, this problem can be solved quite easily by selecting two random illustrations of the topic of the unit ie the farm, as it has been done in the presented activity used in lesson with a 5 year old year 1 student (courtesy of pintrest.com and clipartart.com) and we produced sentences such as ‘I can see an orange cat’ and ‘I can see a grey cat’

I spy with my little eye

It is a great game that does not require any preparation or special materials because that involves only looking around, listening and speaking. However, in its original form, it might be a little bit challenging for the EFL kids whose dictionary is very basic. For that reason, we play this game in a different way, based on a poster or a set of flashcards depicting only familiar vocabulary.

The most basic version ‘I spy with my little eye…something big’ can be easily extended into ‘I spy with my little eye…something big and pink’ or even ‘I spy with my little eye…something big and pink. It’s in the water. I like it’. The kids will be listening and speaking and required to process more complex information in order to complete the task.

Shapes

For some reason, shapes, for some mysterious reason, are not one of the key topics in pre-primary coursebooks, despite their importance and general appeal. Luckily, it is easy to fill that gap and supplement.

You need to start with introducing the key vocabulary, at least the four basic shapes, but after this obstacle is dealt with, they can be used and referred to frequently. Creating familiar objects from shapes, counting them, calling out the colours is a fun activity and can be included in every unit, regardless of the topic. And we can look for shapes around us, in the classroom or in any picture we are dealing with.

Sequence 1

This is a great activity that is especially useful in the first lessons with the new vocabulary as it really helps with drilling the single words or words in sentences. In the beginning the sequences can be very simple and straightforward, for example ‘robot, teddy, robot, teddy’ (or ‘It’s a robot, it’s a teddy’) but not necessarily. There are a lot of opportunities here and the students themselves can be involved in creating these.

Sequence 2

Sequencing is not about figuring out and reciting what should go next but also which elements are missing in the set. In this lesson we were revising the foot items and there were four things in the set, something we eat, something we drink, something yummy and something good. We were counting and adding the missing elements. Later on, new sets were introduced and children were asked to say what is missing (something we drink) but they could choose their favourite drink ie milk, water, juice and so on.

P.S.

The basic overview of what cognitive skills are: here https://helpfulprofessor.com/cognitive-skills/

If you are interested in how the concepts change based on the level of cognitive skills of the human being, check out the 5 Levels series on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcUey-DVYjk)

PPS

If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on pairwork in pre-school, discourse clock, using songs and Colourful Semantics in EFL.

10 ways in which you can use gesture in your pre-primary classroom.

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The Gesture is King!

How can you tell a VYL teacher?

It could be the Mary Poppins’ bag full of markers, stickers, a storybook and random treasures that they carry. It could be because you can catch them hum ‘Baby Shark’ or ‘Broccoli Ice-Cream’ while they think no one’s listening. It could be also that it is difficult to catch them in pretty tights and dresses because many an outfit was destroyed by clumsy little hands. By accident but irreversibly, too.

Look at the hands, too, a lot more expressive than those of an average teacher, hands that constantly gesture and motion, a habit that is difficult to drop even outside the classroom.

It is true that Total Physical Response stopped being the new black a few decades ago and nowadays referring to learning styles is looked down on or even mocked. Nonetheless, the gesture is one of the vital components of the pre-primary classroom, simply because it works and it helps the teacher and the students to communicate more effectively, especially if the students are 5-year-old beginners.

One: participation

Throughout their pre-primary adventure with English, the students will always be pre-A level but as the course progresses, their vocabulary range will grow. But in the first few weeks of the course those kids really are a clean slate. Thanks to gestures, however, they can participate and be involved in class activities.

They can for example wave ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ to the teacher or other children, silently, they can participate in ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes’, touching or pointing at the correct body parts because they will be mimicking the teacher’s gestures and not because they know exactly which part of the body is the head and which ones are toes.

That is why including gestures will be important in the beginning of year although they can be used to the same effect at the start of each unit. Students, still not familiar with the new vocabulary, will react to it by miming ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘princess’, ‘sheriff’, ‘book’ etc. Before they are ready to produce the words orally.

Two: clarification

Little students cannot use a dictionary or translation into L1 because sometimes the teacher does not speak it. In that case, the teacher has limited resources to clarify the meaning of the new words. The visuals and the realia will help, of course, but adding gestures is definitely going to reinforce the meaning. Two hands together with palms touching and moving apart (a book), fingers of one hand scratching the air (a cat), the arm touching the nose and waving (an elephant and its trunk), a hand cupped around the nose (a clown), two hands touching above the head (a house) and so on…

Three: memorising

Almost automatically, adding these gestures will help to ensure that the kids will remember the words better. There is evidence that suggest that sign language and gestures in general active additional neurons and the information can be stored and retrieved more effectively.

Four: support for production

Once the gestures have been introduced and become a part of the classroom reality, they can be used by the teacher to support the language production by the students. While they are trying to answer a question or to make a sentence and if they experience any difficulty retrieving the word or the structure, instead of whispering the word or giving the L1 equivalent, the teacher can hint at the word by producing the familiar gesture, assisting the student but not actually saying the word.

Five: asking for clarification or support

Similarly, their use can also be extended to asking for clarification or support by the students themselves. Chances are that after the children have become familiar with the gestures used in class on daily basis, they will be using them actively, too.

This was one of the surprising discoveries I made during a classroom research for my MA degree. When a communication breakdown occurred, my five-year olds did resort to familiar gestures to ask for a word they wanted to use but forgot. They still remembered that the word ‘long’ was accompanied by two hands flying apart or that the word ‘sandwich’ was demonstrated by pressing two hands together, one on top of the other, even though the words themselves had not stuck in memory. The produced the gestures asking for my assistance and then, provided with the word, went on with the sentence.

Six: imagination, creativity and symbolic representation

The development of symbolic representation in pre-primary children is an important stage of their growth as human beings (Bruce 2004, p. 170) and introducing and using gestures is one of the ways in which a teacher of English can also contribute to it.

It is fascinating to observe how, at first, very young learners only imitate the teacher and reproduce the gestures exactly, as they are introduced and how, later, they move on to creating their own ways of representing certain words or phrases. And how the teacher can actually learn from the students here because their 5-year-old ways of miming a clock, a flower, a pumpkin or a melted ice-cream are much better and much more interesting!

Seven: instructions

This is, probably the most straightforward way, used from the very first minute of the course. The students, entering the classroom don’t know any English and can’t react to all the teacher’s instructions if they are not accompanied by some gestures: one or both hands being lowered for ‘sit down’, hands palms up being raised for ‘stand up’, waving the hand towards the chest for ‘come here’.

Eight: classroom management

Naturally, gestures can be used to praise the students or to show disapproval for any unwanted behaviour. Both thumbs up or a high five (or a double high five for really special occasions) show the teacher’s approval, both palms crossed at wrists might signal ‘stop’, the index finger put across the lips will work as ‘silence please’.

The gestures may vary, from class to class or even from culture to culture. What matters is that the teacher is consistent with the gestures they use with a specific group. Examples? For my youngest students the small waving hand (something similar to the way the Queen would wave hello) became a sign of warning, although I seriously doubt that anyone else would ever read it this way. For my group, however, it was closely related to our rewards chart, kids’ names on it and stars or smileys drawn next to them. Sometimes, during the lesson, I would indeed wave my hand slightly, to remind them that if they don’t stop misbehaving, I might erase one of their stars. And it worked, for us.

Nine: emotions

Knowing how your students are feeling is very important in general, but especially with the pre-primary children as their reactions and participation will be closely connected to whether they are happy, sad, angry or scared. The teacher should be able to read those emotions but children will also be taught to recognise and to express them, in English.

The first lessons will start from the the basic adjectives accompanied by gestures (a big smile and arms up in the air for ‘I’m happy’, a sad face and fingers drawing the tears rolling down the cheeks for ‘I’m sad’, a frown and stomping for ‘I’m angry’, eyes covered with both hands for ‘I’m scared’) but then more and more of them can be added. These emotions can help the teacher, too, for example to signal that they are happy with students’ achievements or sad when they are misbehaving…

Ten: bonding and creating a community in the classroom

Last but not least, everything that we do together in class, helps the children to bond and to create a community in the classroom, with its own rules and ‘traditions’. Not only songs or stories can be used that way but also all the miming games. They are easy, everyone can participate and they are a great stirrer, too.

After the teacher’s modelling and after everyone becomes familiar with the game, the kids, one at a time, are allowed to lead the game and to suggest what you all could mime. And this is when the real fun begins.

It doesn’t have to be very complicated, only the emotion adjectives and fruit, pets, school objects, anything you are studying at the moment. Have you ever tried to mime a cat? Probably yes. Have you ever tried to mime a happy cat, a sad cat, a sleepy cat? Yes? Then you should definitely try to mime an angry pencil then!

I wonder if I have managed to convince you, dear reader, that the gesture is the absolute king of the VYL world…

Happy teaching!

T.Bruce (2004), Using symblos,in: T. Bruce, Developing Learning in Early Childhood, London: Paul Chapman Publishing, pp 170 – 195

Teaching children online: the basic tools

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Without any lengthy introduction, here are some things that you might want to get ready to help you create magic and to make sure that your EFL Kingdom is as amazing online as it is in the real world.

You will need…

….a way of managing the group, starting and finishing an activity

It is not quite about a rewards chart. First of all, not everyone is a fan of these (but that is a topic for another conversation). Second of all, you might not even need it with some groups. My kids have, for example, have grown out of it. They know what is expected of them and I can proudly say that this kind of external motivation is no longer necessary in their case. And, in case you still need it, Class Dojo will come to the rescue here.

….a way of rewarding your students.

What I was thinking about, however, was a way of showing my appreciation for their efforts, hard work and creativity. I can still smile, I can still clap my hands, I can show thumbs up or give a virtual high five.

But, to make it more fun, you can also use a sound machine, with different sound effects and if you don’t have one, you can download your favourite sounds, free of charge, from one of the sound libraries, for example, zapsplat.com and use the sound of the cheering crowd to praise them or the sound of a crocodile growling to express your lack of approval in a fun way.

Some of the off-line tricks will still work here, 123 eyes on me or clapping your hands (to get their attention). As a virtual teacher you will also have the power of muting your students’ microphones to ensure that no one else is speaking but you (or, rather, that they can hear nothing else but you) but it still would be good to reinforce that with some visuals, too.

For that reason, I have prepared some road signs that we are going to use in our virtual class. They are pretty much universal around the world; the kids know them very well and you may have used them in the real classroom already. It’s best to start with a few basic ones, for example: Stop and Go, adding more with more specific symbols.

…a class puppet

If you have used one in the real classroom, it will be good to invite it into the virtual world, too, even if the kids will not be able to hug it or to play with it. Even if you won’t be able to throw it and catch it in the Q&A session, like we do with our Flying Cow. It is good to have it because it will help you preserve the continuity and, especially in case of the younger children, it can be very useful with getting their attention or giving instructions (‘Let’s listen to Teddy’)

Saying hello and goodbye to your puppet will also give the lesson a nice frame. Not to mention that this can also be a perfect opportunity to involve the kids. They are at home, so bringing their favourite toy to class is not going to be a problem and, once they get used to it, they can start taking turns in leading the hellos / goodbyes with their puppets.

So if you haven’t been using a puppet yet, get one asap!

…a set of flashcards.

In the classroom it ss super easy. The set simple comes with the coursebook and you can just use it, adding a few extras that the coursebooks authors have not thought of.

You can share the cards with your students’ parents, to print, colour and cut up and this way, each student will have a set during the lesson. Learn Kids from British Council has the basic sets if you don’t want to make your own set.

https://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/flashcards

However, that option might not be valid for all the parents as they simply might not have the printer at home.

Another option is to make your own set with Quizlet and the advantages are that first you will be able to use it in class to present and practise the language but you can also share it with your students and they can play with it, later.

If you use Super Simple Songs with your students, don’t forget to check out their flashcards, too. They have a set of beautiful cards for every song! You can download and print them, of course, but you can also use the pdf version during the lesson in your virtual classroom. https://supersimple.com/content-type/flashcards/

Last but not least, if you can, have a set of real flashcards, too. They can come in very handy, too!

…some ideas to get the kids out of their seats.

Whether they are at school already or only at kindergarten, our students are children and will need a mixture of settlers and stirrers that will help them remain focused and involved throughout the lesson.

You can play:

Abracadabra! In the classroom we do it with a magic wand but the good thing is that any (yes, any) pencil can easily become a magic wand! Abracadabra, 1..2..3..You are…a cat, a happy cat, a hungry monster, sleeping, flying… You don’t even need to get up for that!

Go to the Gym. Ask the kids to stand up, move the chair away and pretend that you are working out at the gym. Raise your arms… Wave your arms… Touch your knees… Touch your toes… Turn around…

Show me something green! Ask the kids to stand up and bring something green, yellow, pink, yellow and pink and show it to everyone else. You can ask ‘What colour is it?’ for all the kids to chorally answer ‘It’s green’

Touch your nose. A very easy game, if the students know body parts. It can be later extended by adding other verbs such as move, shake, clap, dance and freeze. In the real classroom we play it with the dice where 1 means clap, 2 means touch and so on. The kids can roll the dice and make a command for everyone to follow ie touch your nose, eyes, legs, clap your hands, feet etc.

Online, it is best to start with one verb and keep adding more, for the students to grow comfortable with them and not to overload them. Or the teacher can provide the verbs for each student. In the era of coronavirus it might also be better to replace touch with point, too.

Jump three times. This one is a more active game and it might be better to introduce it later when the kids get used familiar to the routine and the online reality.

Ask the kids to stand up and ask them to jump three times. Ask the students for suggestions: jump three times, five times, ten times…You can also introduce other verbs like skip, hop, sit down, walk on your toes etc.

Happy teaching!

We Want More! (vol.1)

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Creative use of the language or…LEGO!

Because that’s what language is: LEGO blocks.

It does come nicely packed and organised in our coursebooks, with a set of instructions on how to assemble it to make our own city, farm, car or whatever it is that we have been dreaming of. So we show the kids how to play it (and the name, LEGO, comes from Danish phrase ‘leg godt’ or ‘play well’)

However, if you are a true Lego fan, you know that keeping this Death Star on your shelf forever and ever is not what it is about. The feat has been achieved, it is there but after a while it starts to collect dust and it just get boring. It is not the end of the story; it is when the real fun starts! You take it off, you disassemble it to the very last, minute block and then… you start putting together your own, innovative spaceships.

With languages, the same rules apply and our students should be taught that, even those young ones or those very young ones, too.

How? Easy. Keep on reading…

It can start with a favourite song, one that everyone has already mastered, one that everyone knows very well and one that is somewhere on the brink of becoming yesterday news, not yet but soon.

The only thing that you need to do is to sing it but change a word and wait for the students to correct you. It will not only help you check if they were really listening but it can become a great new game – ‘correct the teacher’. It will generate the language from the students but, most importantly, it will show them that a song or a chant are not a chain of random sounds but a collection of bits and pieces that can be manipulated and replaced with other bits and pieces. This is also the first step to inviting the students to create their own versions of the song (more on that in another post).

Another way of encouraging the students to be creative about the language is to come up with the new, alternative names for the familiar objects, for example colours of crayons and pencils. Of course, for that they have to have some vocabulary in order to be able to participate but asking for ‘apple pencil’, ‘chocolate pencil’, ‘pumpkin pencil’ instead of the red, brown or orange one can be a fun game which will create an opportunity to climb onto the higher level of the Bloom’s pyramid, from knowledge to comprehension or perhaps even application as we are going to encourage the kids to create new associations with the familiar colour. Not to mention that, as language teachers, we are going to provide them with an opportunity to revise the language in a fun way and make it memorable.

The same game can be played with any chunks of language that the kids are using to create the impossible combinations i.e. put on (put on your jacket, shoes, hat or put on your apple), verbs and body part verbs (clap your hands or clap your…nose), classroom instructions and nouns (open your book, bag or open your…pen).

Making purposeful mistakes is a great incentive for the students to take over and to produce the language. Most frequently, it will be a typical teacher support technique. When the students cannot recall the word they need in a lesson, the teacher can ‘make a mistake’ and point at the picture of a dragon and say ‘I can see a tiger’, in the hope that it will help to bring back the forgotten word from one of the students. However, it can also lead to generating more language when it is applied to the content familiar to the student, for example, a story which is being retold in the following lesson. Even if the students are quite young and pre-A, they can participate by echoing after the teacher but supplying the correct word, for example the teacher can say ‘Ben is a cat’, kids can ‘correct’ the sentence by saying ‘Ben is a boy’. If the students are very familiar with the story (for example because it is the third or fourth lesson in which the same story appears), they can be even encouraged to produce more complex sentences, i.e. ‘Ben is a boy’, in an attempt to correct the teacher’s incorrect sentence of ‘Lucy is a giraffe’ and so on.

Another way of reinforcing this idea and fostering creative use of the language is using visual representation of the chunks that constitute a sentence or a phrase. A good example that will help to demonstrate the idea is the structure ‘I like’ that is depicted with the use of hearts, for example a red heart might stand for ‘I like’ whereas a crossed heart will mean ‘I don’t like’. When these are used with the flashcards depicting some food items, students will be able put them together and recreate the sentence and generate a lot of language by manipulating one of the elements, the heart or the food flashcards, at the same time learning that while the combination ‘I like’ + ‘pizza’ is a correct one, the other set ‘pizza’+’I like’ will not be accepted. The same technique can be used to create other structure and the only challenge for the teacher here will be coming up with symbols for ‘I’ve got’, ‘I can’ or ‘I’m wearing’…