#crumbslittleideasfortheclassroom

English, kids and Igor Stravinsky

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There are many roads that lead to Rome which here will be a synonym of a good lesson. Sometimes it is boredom, when the teacher cannot even bear to look at the coursebook and the official educational materials. Sometimes it is the students, when they bring their world with them, when they learn quickly or, why not, when they don’t behave in the way that we would dream of. Sometimes, it is a random resource, a storybook or craft materials, that you really (really!) want to use.

Sometimes, however, you also find yourself in the middle of a film, Off the Record, a documentary on Laurent Garnier, the DJ, and you gasp because you find out how among all the other things cool that he has done and does, he also takes part in music lessons in a small school, somewhere in a French village, and there, with teens, he explores the meaning of different music styles, he gives them a chance to experience different kinds of music and he guides them into translating these impressions into visual art…

I gasped because I could not decide which reaction I should go for first. Shout out loud ‘Laurent, I love you!’ (just because he finds time to do something for his community and because of all things, he chooses to teach)? Shout out ‘Laurent, me, too! We do it, too!’ (because we entertain ourselves with my students with a similar exercise, albeit on a much smaller scale, when we play the Musical Challenge)? Or shout out ‘Pause the movie, for a moment, for heavens’ sake! I am being flooded with ideas and I need time to take notes!’ Because the Musical Challenge I have put together, good as it was as a warmer or a speaking activity, turned out to have a lot more potential and it be a brand new direction and at the same time an opportunity to combine teaching English through Art that I have been toying with for years now, craft and project work that, I was sure, could help me generate lots and lots of English. What’s not to like?

Crumbs # 19: Teaching English Through Music: Igor Stravinsky

The notes below constitute the outline of a 45-minute lesson I taught during the summer to my primary students aged 8 – 9, of a strong A1 / YLE Movers level whose speaking and listening skills are closer to A2 / YLE Flyers. I had only two students on the day so we did all of the activities whole class.

Revision

  • A revision game: adjectives – opposites, with the wordwall cards and then a miming game (one of the students choosing the word to mime for the other kids to guess). Another option are the present tenses or the verbs that the kids might need for storytelling.

Russian fairytales

  • Illustrations of the four traditional stories : About the Fisherman and the Goldfish, the Three Pigs, The Hen Ryaba and The Firebird
  • Kids turn turns to retell the stories. There is no pre-teaching of any vocabulary, the teacher feeds in the words on the go.
  • Kids choose their favourite story and talk about their favourite Russian story

Listening number 1

  • Teacher shows the photograph of Igor Stravinsky, introduces him briefly
  • Teacher tells the students that he wrote music for one of the four stories
  • Teacher plays a short piece of the Firebird (for example 38’40 – 40′) and asks the students to guess which of the stories the music could illustrate
  • Feedback, teacher tells them that the music they heard is called ‘Firebird’ and that it is one of the most popular pieces of modern music.

Listening number 2 / Art

  • Teacher gives out the template and tells the students that it is a cover of a record / CD with Firebird and that they they are going to design the cover and the illustration.
  • Teacher says that they are going to listen to another piece of music and draw what they hear. Teacher tells them that perhaps it will be for people who don’t know the story of the firebird, who don’t know Russian fairytales at all and that we need to help them understand what kind of music they might hear.
  • ‘All ideas are good ideas’ is the motto of all of our creative projects, it is good to bring that up again.
  • Teacher puts the drawing materials and ideally there would be a choice of pencils, markers, crayons, finger paints, watercolours etc. Each student can choose their own.
  • Teacher plays the final piece of the Firebird (40′ – 46′) and the students are creating their piece. The length of the listening can be extended, either a longer piece can be chosen or the another excerpt can be added, depending on the group and their involvement.
  • If possible, the kids can be involved in discussing what the music might be illustrating. The Firebird is very energetic and varied, there is a lot of potential for that.
  • If there is time, kids can prepare two covers, based on two different excerpts from the suite.

Presentation

  • Kids take turn to present their album covers. They can use the following questions as framework: What is there in your picture? Why? Do you like the music? Why? What are you thinking about when you are listening to it? Kids can either ask each other these questions or use them to prepare a discourse.
  • All the album covers are displayed on the walls. If there is time, the group can listen to the chosen excerpt again.
  • Feedback and error correction.

How it went and what I learnt

  • In short: we loved it.
  • The kids produced a lot of language throughout the lesson (the teacher is happy).
  • The kids loved the fact that they could talk about the stories they knew and that they could paint (something that we rarely do). They seemed to enjoy listening to the music, too.
  • Observing how their ideas are born and shaped was a fascinating experience for the teacher, too. The first impulse was to draw a bird made of fire but, as they listened on, the other, better, more individual and special things began to appear. And they kept working on them, as the music led them.
  • Afterwards, they talked a lot about their pictures and the creative process. Normally, I ask if I can take the final product, if it is ok to photograph it or to put it on display. This time they were the ones to ask whether I was going to put them up on the noticeboard. It was a lovely moment.
  • The thing that surprised me most and that was the biggest challenge (or ‘challenge’) was the same thing that made the activity meaningful, motivating and generative, namely the fact that we used the Russian traditional stories as the basis. First of all, they had a lot to say about them and cutting corners (aka a short summary of the story) was out of the question. They wanted to tell me everything (as in: every little detail, significant or not). Second of all, because they were retelling the stories as they knew them, in Russian, they were very reluctant to give up on the beautiful, literary language for which they are not ready yet, in English and looking for those higher-shelf equivalents did get in the way and it did slow them down. Sometimes they were so unwilling to abandon the beauty that they used Russian. It was touching and it was beautiful and I still have not decided what I can do about it and how I can overcome this ‘problem‘ in the future. Because, of course, I want more!
  • What you can see in the pictures is a beautiful birch tree Daria and a tsunami, to which a sunrise was added, as an afterthought, a few notes later belongs to Antonina. Mine is the sunset which, lame as it is, I am quite happy with because only now did I make a connection between the firebird and the sun. Let it be.

Happy teaching!

P.S. Why Stravinsky? Apart from the fact that “Firebird’ is one of my favourite music pieces ever, it happened so that a few months ago, I used him as a reference with my young teens and their brains just went blank. They had never heard of him. Naturally, I decided to fix that. I rather like the idea that in about twenty years from now, my kids will hear the name Stravinsky in the conversation and their first association will be ‘Yes, we had this lesson once with our English teacher, Anka…’

Malevich and his Black Square are next in line, for the same reason.

So, Teaching English through Music anyone?

Crumbs #18: Our Solar System. A perfect group project work for early years. Perhaps)

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This started as an activity for the CLIL lesson devoted to space and Yuri Gagarin but after I published it on Instagram, one of my friends suggested that it might be a great idea for the end-of-year revision activity. And it is that, indeed. Thank you, Rory!:-) Hence this post.

Ingredients

  • An A1 piece of paper although, to be perfectly honest with you, it never is that. Every time I have made any murals (and that’s what this activity really is), the preparations started with a pile of A3 sheets of paper, a roll of scotch or a glue stick. It is easier and faster (no shopping trips) and more adaptable (because the teacher is in charge and the poster can be made bigger or smaller, depending on the size of the group or the theme of the project).
  • Creative materials of your choice – pencils, markers, finger paints or watercolours. This time we used markers, in my opinion better suited to the age of the kids and the task.
  • A place where all the students can draw simultaneously. In my classroom, we use the space in which we normally do the movement activities because we have a big carpet there and it is always a lovely variation to our everyday routine, both for the little kids or the teenagers that like visiting another classroom from time to time. A big conference table or a set of desks put together will be a great solution, too.
  • A decision as regards what language, vocabulary and structures, you are going to focus on in the task. In the original task, we created our planets with all our favourite things, our favourite number, colour, food, drink, animal, transport etc.
  • It is necessary to stage the activity carefully. The kids sit down on the floor around the poster, the teacher draws the sun in the centre and counts the kids and then draws one planet for each child around the sun. In the first step, each child chooses a marker and writes their name. Then the teacher ‘dictates’ the first topic and the kids draw it and say what they are drawing. In my classes, we use the song for that ‘What’s your favourite colour?‘ by Super Simple Songs and its variations because it offers the question – answer set (‘What’s your favourite…?’ ‘I like….‘). For some kids it is necessary to sing, some are better prepared to respond to questions without the support of the music. The teacher waits for everyone to finish each stage and the fast finishers can be encouraged to draw more than one item, to look at other students’ drawing, react to them (‘Do you like…?’) etc.
  • Round-up: If there is time, the students stand in a circle around the poster, first at their own planet and then, on ‘1..2..3! Let’s fly!‘, they move one planet to the left. Everyone reacts to what they can see on the new planet, for example ‘I like…‘ This stage can be repeated a few times, depending on the time available. Afterwards, the poster is displayed on the wall. It can also be used as part of the presentation for the parents in the following lesson.

Why we love it

  • First and foremost, it is a great project for the whole group and it really does contribute to building the community and that is because of the fact that we all sit around one big piece of paper and because of the concept of this activity – a solar system of which all the students and the teacher are a part.
  • It might be especially suited as the first project work for a pre-school group as everyone has a chance to contribute to the project but it is automatically clear that no one can take the final product home, as first of all, from the very beginning it is obvious that there is only one copy, that it is too big and that all the planets stay a part of the system and cannot be separated. Frequently, this issue can be the biggest problem with the project work for the youngest of students as they become attached to their creations and the first question they ask is ‘Anka, but can we take it home?’. Not this time.
  • The activity itself in its original version is very flexible as its timing will depend on how long the children are interested. Perhaps only three elements will be included, perhaps ten. The format of the activity also helps with staging as the children do not know what is to come and will not start going ahead of the group.
  • The song format helps to encourage the kids to actually produce the language, especially that in our case we used this question-answer set beforehand so at the time of this particular lesson, the children were already used to it and used to responding to it.
  • It can be used with all age groups and levels as the language content can easily be adapted either to more complex ways of discussing favourite things, drawing their own planets to practise the vocabulary of the natural world (with a more extensive presentation at the end of the project), creating a planet which is a symbolic representation of each student. For the older students, the planets can be filled in with words, rather than with images.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs # 17: New beginnings. Things to do before the lesson.

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They are growing up. My students are no longer the little babies they were when we said our first ‘Hello!’. Six years is a long time, after all. And because they are changing, the lesson is changing, too. I like to think that, in a way, we are growing together.

An example? For five years and five months my students would wait for me outside of the classroom, in a neat line and we would check the homework and have a little chat, 1-1, with them slowly entering the classroom (more about it here). Well, not anymore. Two months ago we stopped. For good.

Because it turned out that, all of a sudden, the kids like to be in the classroom before the lesson. The choose their seats, take out their books, draw on the board or show each what they do in Maths classes at school. They also like to hide to surprise me (if I happen to leave to get some water or flashcards), walk around to inspect what I prepared for the day or just sit down and read they books.

And because over those six years we have managed to establish what’s OK and what’s not OK in terms of behaviour and because they have grown up and become more mature, I just let them do it and take over the classroom during the break. Plus, let’s be honest, they seem to be enjoying it a lot and I just don’t have the heart to forbid them and to continue to impose lining up.

Instead, I had an idea: how about a before-the-lesson activity for the early comers? It turned to be a very good idea indeed!

Ingredients

  • A whiteboard and a set of markers.
  • An activity that can be prepared on the board before the lesson for the students to work on potentially unsupervised (although in real life it differs, depending on whether I can be in the classroom during the break or not)
  • A set of easy instructions written on the board and an example
  • A longer break before the lesson – not obligatory but highly recommended
  • It might be necessary for the teacher to hint that there is something on the board that needs dealing with, at least when this part of the routine is introduced. It is quite likely that the kids would just not approach the board if there are any notes on it.
  • Ghost letters, focus: pronunciation. Students underline the silent letters in the words written on the board
  • Letter snake, focus: reading / writing. Students divide the chain (or a snake of letters) into words. Each snake can be made as challenging as necessary ie only the words themselves, the words with letters-distractors, the words in a sentence.
  • Letter stories, focus: reading/ writing. Students divide the very long chain (or a snake of letters) into words and sentences. I used a different colour for each line of the story and neat breaks between the lines, too, not to overwhelm the kids. Forgot to take a photo:-(
  • To rhyme or not to rhyme, focus: phonemic awareness. Students put the rhyming words into pairs. Again, colour-coding is supposed to be make is a bit more achievable and visually appealing.
  • Messed-up, focus: vocabulary revision. Students put the halves of words together.
  • Angrams (and Secret Messages): These are just silly anagrams which are a nice task, more necessary for the Starters students but fun for everyone. It can be a set of random words, connected by the topic (or not) or sentences, especially if there is an especially important message that the teacher needs to pass on to the students. The message below appeared on the board before the second lesson with the mock Movers test, in an attempt to praise the kids and to motivate them. It worked!

Why we like it

  • Those who come early can wait for the lesson doing something in English.
  • They provide additional practice and revision in different areas and skills: reading, writing, vocabulary, pronunciation
  • Different kids come early on different days so they get to work in different pairs and teams which seems to strengthen the sense of community in the group
  • It seems to have become ‘fashionable’ to arrive early for class (not that it has even been a problem) but it is obvious that they have already developed the habit of walking in and checking what’s on the board
  • The teacher is applying all her creative powers to come up with more and more pre-lesson activities

Happy teaching!

Crumbs#16 The Musical Challenge!

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The first challenge ever (primary, A1)

Today about an activity that requires almost no preparation and is a nice break from the coursebook and from the everyday. Plus – you can draw. Ready? Let’s start the Musical Challenge!

Ingredients

  • A piece of paper, some drawing tool and a few tracks.
  • The choice of the tracks will depend on the teacher but it is good to include a variety of genres, songs or music with different tempo and instruments. I like to pick songs with a long intro and in a language that the students do not speak, not to let them be influenced by the lyrics.
  • Tell the students that you are going to play a short piece of music and they have to draw what they are thinking about when they hear this music. Highlight that all ideas are good ideas. Give the students an opportunity to include words, for example is some concept are difficult to draw.
  • Model, with a sample track.
  • Play about 30 – 60 seconds of a track and give the students up to a minute to finish drawing after the track stops. However, this is a fast-paced activity and its main aim is to provide material for speaking, not the drawing itself. Some students might want to make their drawings too pretty and too detailed and that will take time.
  • Put the students in pairs, let them discuss the songs. If possible, it might be a good idea to play the track they are discussing in the background to create the appropriate atmosphere.
  • Remember to put the questions / structures you want the students to answer / to use on the board. It will help them produce and stay on the ball.
  • Final feeback can include choosing the favourite and least favourite song.

Why we like it

  • It is very easy for the teacher to set up. It is enough to play the audio from the phone or even from youtube, pratically no preparation is necessary. It is possible to prepare a grid with numbers but it is much easier to give out an A4 or an A5 piece of paper that the students are asked to fold into halves until you get eight or six boxes. It works well, too. Because of that, it can easily become your go-to last minute, no-prep activity that can be added to any lesson.
  • It works well with different ages, not only with higher-level students, although, obiously, they will be able to produce more langauge and to discuss their own associations, metaphors, using more advanced language such as modal verbs for deduction. At the same time, even the younger and lower level students can describe their illustrations using simpler structures (I can see, he is wearing, he is happy) and to express their views (I like this song, I don’t like this song because…). The youngest students that I have done this activity with were about eight years old and studying in the A1 level.
  • The teacher has a lot of flexibility, this activity can be stopped whenever it is necessary, after four, five or eight tracks. The activity does not really have an end so it does not matter when it is stopped, for example when the students are not quite interested.
  • It can be further extended into a homework task. The students can be asked to choose a song, prepare their drawing at home and then play the song for everyone in class and either draw or just talk about their associations before presenting their original picture. If the songs are played in other than L1 or English (or if the beginning of the song does not include any text), the discussion can go in the direction of the story that the song is telling, based on the title, the summary or the single quotes.
  • It gives the students a chance to express themselves through drawing. We do a lot of that with the younger students but as we go, higher (level) and older (age), drawing and colours do disappear from our lessons, sadly. It is good to bring these moments back. They students do enjoy these.
  • It is a fascinating opportunity to see how music can be seen by a group of people and how different these associations can be.
  • It is highly personalised and open-ended, all ideas are good ideas
  • As a result, that kind of an activity generates a lot language.

The last time we did it a few week ago, we used the following tracks (we also read a text in our coursebook on music and fashion in the last 70 years, this is how all of the songs appeared here and how I listened to Ed Sheeran for the first time in my life:). Now, have a look at the pictures illustrating this post and have fun guessing which song inspired them. The Joni Mitchell, River

The Rolling Stones, Gimmie Shelter

The Clash, Should I stay or should I go

Ed Sheeran, Perfect

Backstreet Boys, Tell me why

Buddy Holly, Everyday

P.S. My kids loved the Clash and the Stones! Not all is lost)))

Happy teaching!