Mr Milk, the unsung hero

I have committed a piece about Pasha, the invisible student only to realise that there are more unsung heroes in my classroom. Enter Mr Milk.

The beginnings

Mr Milk has been a frequent guest in my classes for a very long time now and, and unlike in Pasha’s case, I know that for sure because I remember the students (8 and 9-year-olds, A1 level boys plus Nastya) and I do remember the classroom itself: Moscow, Sokolniki, 2008. Since then, it’s been twelve years and a quite a few generations of students.

This time round, I also remember the sources of inspiration. One of them was the game I played with my cousin, Magda. When we were much younger, we used to come up with silly names for characters according to the formula: a very traditional first name and an everyday household object for the family name. Hence Peter Radiator and Archibald Loudspeaker. It must have left a mark because up to this day, I get weirdly excited when I come across such surnames in real life. Tetradkina, Karandashovna, Sobachkina*…Oh, what a dream!

The other sources of inspiration was definitely the amazing videoclip for the Blur’s song Coffee and TV. It’s just the ending of the main character dying and going to heaven has (so far) kept me from using it in class.

Mr Milk arrives when…

• we start talking about other people, moving away from ‘I am’, ‘I have got’, ‘I can’ and ‘I like’
• we introduce Present Simple 3rd singular. No day is too weird, too amazing or too everyday for Mr Milk.
• we introduce Past Simple and start telling stories. Mr Milk is a superhero and literally anything can happen to him.

The best thing about Mr Milk is that he rarely stays on his own and as soon as he feels comfortable, all his pals, relatives and enemies so that we are never short of people to talk about. Mr Cheese, Mr Coffee, Mr Apple, Miss Umbrella, Mr Banana…And once he comes, he never leaves. And, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea why the kids like Mr Milk so much. But they really do.

The next step?

Well, that’s easy. It takes very little for the kids to start coming up with their own characters’ names. This week, for example, we spent a good portion of the lesson talking about the adventures of Mr Bike Strawberry. After they had decided whether ‘Bike’ was better as a name or a surname, that is. Oh, there was a caterpillar, too.

This particular story involved Mr Bike chasing the teacher, an absent teacher, happy students drinking lemonade in class and one sad football (sad because everyone was kicking it).

And, as a result of all that, one real life teacher, very very happy at the amount of the language produced. And eternally grateful to Mr Milk.

Here, in the other post, you can read about using noughts and crosses to tell stories in class.

Happy teaching!

*) Tetradkina from the words тетрадь (notebook), карандаш (pencil) and собачка (a little dog). Although, to be honest, I am not quite sure if all of them are real Russian surnames.