This is how we arrive at the last stop of this series. If you haven’t done it yet, please make sure that you check out the other three: the introduction, the materials that were created because of a certain resource and the materials that were created with an activity as a starting point.
The aim (a most random definition)
First a brief explanation of the idea behind that heading and that concept and it is rooted in the most selfish question that teachers can ask themselves upon entering the classroom and that is: ‘What do you want, teacher?‘ and it can be further extended into: Why have you come to school today? Why are you entering the classroom?
The answer to this question will largely depend on the particular Pasha, Sasha, Ania, Javier, Rita and Julia sitting at the tables in your classroom (or in front of the computers in your online classroom) and it is with them in mind that we often start to change, to abandon, to supplement or to design activities and materials. Regardless of what the curriculum says, what the pacing schedule wants, what the authors of the coursebooks intended or, sometimes, what the DOS (or the parents) would want you to do.
For that reason, this post is dedicated to some of the coolest people that I have had a chance to meet, my students and some of the materials that were created because of them. Are you ready? Let’s go!
Storytelling project
‘Project’ was what I saw in the pacing schedule for my pre-teen online class last week. And I sighed. My kids are already a lovely A2 but they are quite young and, since many of them are new in the group and have been online for only eight weeks now, they are still a bit wobbly and cannot be ‘trusted’ with a task that is all about sending the students a set of questions and asking them to prepare a presentation, with photos and all. Online.
Instead, we did a storytelling project. Here are the main stages
- telling a typical A2 KET story, using the materials for KET A2 Writing part 2, first time together, as a group, second time, with a different set of materials, in pairs
- vocabulary revision part 1, with the special focus on the adjectives used to describe houses and rooms. Here we used a simple Wordwall game. Recently, we have been doing these twice, first with the whole group, then, individually as a competition, during the lesson time.
- vocabulary revision part 2, one of our favourite games: Tell me about it. We play it in teams, with teams taking turns to open the boxes and to describe the rooms and houses in the pictures and winning the points which are also hidden in each box.
- grammar revision, with the special focus on Past Simple and Past Continous and a quiz
- grammar revision game which was also our favourite in this unit. We called it ‘When suddenly’ and we play it in pairs. Students use the props (aka the key words, nouns and verbs) on the cards. Student A starts a mini story, creating a sentence using the Past Continous and the key word (‘I was walking in the park’) and student B finishes the story in the Past Simple tense (‘when suddenly I saw a crocodile’)
- story preparation: students work in pairs, they look at the set of the pictures (a house, a character and an object) and choose one of the set for themselves. They work together in the breakout rooms and prepare to tell their story. The set of visuals (taken from google) can be found here.
- story presentation, for the group. As the feedback, each pair chooses the story they liked most, apart from their own.
Easy-peasy personalisation tricks
- adding kids’ names to the homemade wordsearches, as a bonus prize, all of the names or some of the names (remembering that every child should be included at one point)
- replacing the names in the grammar handouts with the kids’ names
- using kids’ names in examples (when appropriate)
- creating quizes and game to practise grammar based on the knowledge of the group, for instance Present Simple 3rd singular (‘Anka sometimes eats fish’. Yes or no?)
- replacing the names in the grammar handouts and examples with the names of our class heroes such as Angelina, the Hen, the Flying Cow or Pasha, the invisible student.
Kids’ ideas for games creation and adaptation
- Hangman (aka the Monster Game): one of the students suggested that since we lose points for not guessing the letter, we should be getting points for guessing the letters
- Stickers Online aka Google Search Capacity Check which was fully shaped by students and the format of the lesson and which we are still using.
- ‘Go Fish’ – deciding every time on the rules of the game ie the person with the biggest number of cards wins or the person with the smallest number of cards wins
- Choosing half of the categories for the STOP game (aka ‘scategories), some (usually content-related) are chosen by the teacher is food, drink, verbs etc, the other half – by the students, usually we end up playing something random ie computer games or football clubs
Primary kids students and more advanced grammar
This was the phenomenon of the previous academic year when we were already at the A2 level with my kids and such serious topics as Past Continous, Present Perfect and Conditionals 0 and 1 and the kids were still only 8 and 9 (and 7, in one case, too). There is a post that I wrote about it, here and you will find there some generic games for grammar practice as well as the materials to our Science lesson that gave us an opportunity to practise and to use Zero Conditional in a very natural setting.
Messy choir is a more fun and a more creative version of a drilling task that we used while practising Present Perfect with already and yet.
Disaster TV was a lesson inspired by the materials from Superminds 5 coursebook by Cambridge University Press, only instead of ‘finding out about a disaster’ and ‘presenting it to your classmates’ (unit 1 page 20), I decided to go for a lighter take. The topic of Pompeii (although very interesting) was a bit too heavy for a group of young kids who had just gone out of a pandemic and a lockdown and I myself could not face reading about the destruction of New Orleans during the hurricane Katrina so we just didn’t. Instead we went for a project called ‘Disaster TV’ in which kids: chose their own disaster, real or made-up, discussed the details, wrote the questions and rehearsed them. Finally, we recorded a series of interviews with survivors of different disasters and we laughed a lot watching them later. It was absolutely necessary that we have some positive element in all the gloom surrounding the story of the Pompeii. If you are interested, you can find the handout for that project here. I wish I could share the videos, too because they are absolutely precious but we made them only for our personal use and this is what the parents agreed to.
If you still have some energy, please browse through this blog. This is what it is about: my kids and all I wanted to do in class.
Happy teaching!