#eflideas

Crumbs #83 Clouds or Working with the vocabulary

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Ingredients:

  • just a set of words that you are working on
  • flashcards, wordcards, a page of the coursebook with all of the vocabulary to be introduced and practise
  • a board to display the category or a powerpoint to display them in an online less

Procedures:

  • Introduce and drill the vocabulary as usual, with flashcards, electronic flashcards or realia
  • When the kids feel comfortable enough with using and prounucing the word, move on to the second part of the presentation / controlled freer practice that this activity is
  • Display the question and ask the students to answer it. When we just get started with this activity or if the group is small, we do it together as a class, later on, the kids do it in pairs for a moment or two.
  • The whole activity is a categorising task, according to the kids’ preferences and opinions.
  • I started doing it with my online students and the questions were presented in the form of colourful clouds on the slides, hence the name of the activity.
  • All of the options that I have come up with and used with my kids include: I like / I don’t like, It’s interesting / it’s boring, I’ve got it / I haven’t got it, It’s made of metal / plastic / paper, It’s easy / it’s difficult, I always and I never, It’s big / small, Tell me more about…

Why we like it?

  • It is a low-key, (almost) no-prep activity.
  • It gives the kids an opportunity to use the new language together with the familiar structures, in a few different ways.
  • It is not quite creative but it is personalised because the students categorise the words according to their ideas and preferences.
  • The lower levels (i.e. pre-A1) can only categorise the words, the higher level kids (from A-1 upwords) can provide a simple justification for their choices.
  • The most productive of them is ‘Tell me about’ but it might not be feasible with all of the topics and vocabulary sets.
  • It is not very challenging so all the students can complete it.

Happy teaching!

New year and new preschoolers! (and an old teacher:-)

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There has not been a school year in which I would not actually go to school, not since 2007, anyway but, somehow, every year is different, in its own way. This year I went back to teaching a lot of students individually, online, and then back to groups of preschoolers offline.

The classroom and the resources

Long story short: Nothing happens overnight, nothing happens in a blink.

Naturally, I hope for all of us teachers out there, that we enter the classroom in a kindergarten, in a language school, in the student’s home or in a language studio and everything is just as we imagined and the classroom is just perfect, teacher and student-friendly and we have all of the resources and organised beautifully.

In case it is not (and, most likely, it will not be so, in about 99% of cases), it will take some time to get it into shape.

During our sessions on the course I keep telling teachers that it is the most precious thing, to have this ideal pre-school classroom at the back of your head because it will help shape the real environment in which we find ourselves with our students.

This year, it has taken me about two months, to turn the classroom into a place that we all enjoy being in and which works out logistically, with our routine and with our numbers.

It is not a very big place and we have to share it with some other classes, groups and adults, but we have enough room for the small chairs and the hello circle, one big table for our writing and craft and a bit TV and room in front of it for dancing and singing. We have two small cupboards for our resources and lots and lots of walls for our posters and materials.

I have already figured out the layout of the resources and I have organised the flashcards, too. I am not using a basket this year but I have a box for all of the resources for each group where I keep all of the resources for the unit. It makes preparing for each group a bit easier without putting them all away every single day. And, at the same time, I can put them all away not to get in the way when someone else is using the classroom.

The teacher

There is only one thing here (a word from an old hand): dear teacher, be good to yourself. We want the best for our students, we work hard, we teach, we prepare, we reflect and do a better job next time. No two groups are alike and but, with a little bit of time and patience, we can get good results. Kids Can! Teachers Can!

The kids

My students are, of course, amazing. Some of them have been with the school for some time, studying with some other teachers in the past, some of them are new to the school and to learning English. The approach is just being open-minded and working, step by step, towards the routine that I would like to have.

The older group have got used to it pretty quickly and it was relatively easy to just work effectively, with an established routine.

The younger group is still work in progress because we get new students joining in. As a result, wee have been at the stage of ‘building the routine’ since September, simply because every time I think ‘oh, I think that’s that’, there is a new student and, in a way, we go back to square one.Everyone needs a fair chance and the time necessary to figure things out, to get to know the other children and to learn the ropes. It does help a lot that the ‘old’ students (aka those who have been in the group since the start of the year) are our beautiful role-models and we are catching up again.

The activities (and the pairwork)

Our hello circle is quite a long one and in every lesson we talk about all of the following:

  • Homework check
  • My name is…and I want…(kids introduce themselves and ask for something, I draw it on our mini-whiteboard)
  • What’s the weather like today? (asking and answering questions and then putting the relevant pictures up on the board)
  • Hello song
  • Clothes: Who’s wearing jeans?
  • Christmas Words Advent Calendar (only in December)
  • Literacy practice (only the older group)
  • A revision game (based on what we have covered so far, different, depending on the group)

The older group have started doing pairwork and it has worked amazingly well.

  • They have been in one group for two years already and they know each other very well
  • They have had a chance to lead certain activities
  • I have used the seating from the hello circle (small chairs in a circle, we only moved them a bit for the kids to face each other)
  • We have used an activity they already know well (a set of flashcards and a question – answer: Are you scared of…? – I’m scared / I’m not scared /I’m brave / I like..). We have done this activity a few times with the teacher leading and with a student leading for the whole group.
  • If you are interested in setting up pairwork with a beginner group, have a look at the earlier post here.

The other activities that have been a hit this year:

  • Secret words here
  • Soft toys: for body parts, for prepositions, counting and colours
  • lots of adjectives for emotions (now we have 16 to choose from) for our hello circle
  • Funky Envelope
  • Little hearts for ‘I like’ and ‘I don’t like’ and a very big heart for ‘I love’ which the kids requested))

Happy teaching!

‘This feeling is a message from my brain!’ Talking about feelings in primary.

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How do you feel today?

Easily, the emotions (and adjectives) have always been a great passion of my professional life. One reason is that they are a little bit unappreciated in the early years EFL world (a personal opinion) and they can make a huge difference in communication, even for the little speakers. The other reason is that they help the kids describe how they feel and, apart from that making them want to talk because they are sharing something personal, that is a precious something for the teacher to know. Having 9 happy preschoolers and 1 angry preschooler in the classroom or having 5 happy, 3 sleepy and 2 sad preschoolers makes a huge different and, whether you want it or not, it will have an impact on your lesson. Basically, it is better to know than not to know, in order to prepar and to adapt, if needs be.

And then we found the song…

It was only last week that, together with my students, we were trying to remember what was our first Hopscotch song. It was, probably, The Fractions Song. What a hit! Itt really (really) helped us get the concept and to memorise the fraction vocabulary. Not to mention the catchy music and the hilarious plot. And when, after about three weeks of listening the song, we found out that each (more recent) song includes bloopers…we were collectively in love.

I had never heard about that channel before so I got down to researching and I found piles and piles of treasures. Some went into the category ‘subjects’ and some, the really delicious bits, into the category ‘oh, my, the langauge we are going to pick up here!’. One of the latter, was the Feelings Song with as many as 56 beautiful adjectives.

Quite a few words, actually, and some of them from the higher CEFR shelves so I decided that we will just sing the song and aim for picking up a few words, such as hangry, disappointed, overwhelmed or inspired.

It was only much later that I decided that the song will fit perfectly in our end-of-year concert as it has a plot, all the emotions have been neatly divided into groups, like almost 5 acts of the play, there is an introduction and a funny ending, too. And a beautiful message. So, having sung and listened to the song for about two months, we took to staging it and really looking into the other words.

A conversation

At this point in the game, we had been starting every single day with a conversation about our emotions. ‘How do you feel today?’ ‘I am…because…’ and to help us with it, we use about twenty different emotions such as angry, sad, sleepy and confused which we have on posters on the walls of our classroom.

I made into two additional lessons in which we learnt and revised the feelings from the song (or most of them, I still decided to skip a few). We went through all of them, clarified the meaning, practised pronunciation and devoted time to talking about our own examples when people might feel disappointed, overwhelmed, angry or inspired.

A self-reflection

I admit, initially, I only wanted something to write. My kids, now in their year 2, when putting letters in the Latin alphabet is no longer scary or tiresome, take pleasure in writing (insert: a little joyful dance that I can actually say this!) and we are now working on writing neatly, without mistakes, remembering about the punctuation marks and spacing. We write the date and the topic and we sometimes take little notes. This is exactly what I wanted to do last Tuesday, just write something neatly. I figured out that it will be a feasible and open-ended task if we all finish the sentences: I always feel…I never feel…I sometimes feel…I rarely feel…

It was amazing how the kids took time to think and to decide how exactly they feel in certain situations.

Showtime!

Somewhere in April, when we started to discuss our plans for the end of the year concert, I realised that this is the song that I want us to do. Initially, I was even considering turning it into a theatre show, with a few acts (one act = one set of emotions) and some conversations in-between, a musical of sorts. But then, the end of the year itself, the tests, the whirlwind of May took over and I decided to scale down. The plan was as such: we are going to sing the entire song and we will present the emotions to the audience as there will be parents and younger kids.

In order to turn it into ‘a video’, we started to prepare illustrations for an emotion or for a pair of emotions. I prepared the cardboard (A4) and the drawing materials, I also wrote the emotions on them, in big letters and I prepared a few examples, to show the kids that the emotions can be illustrated either by the situation (i.e. our ice-cream drops onto the floor = we are disappointed) or the associations (i.e. the rainy day, colour blue, wilted flowers = we are sad). We got down to work.

I think, in the end, we prepared about 40 illustrations and all of them were absolutely brilliant, either because my kids can really draw well or just because it was a fascinating experience to be going through the creative process and the creative decisions with my students. Some emotions were more difficult to draw (I dealt with them), some were really popular and so we ended up having about four pictures illustrating ‘love’.

I put them into groups, as they are in the song, and put them into a chain with coloured paper that had the text of the relevant verse on the back. Two of my more responsible students were assigned as the holders and as the verse would come up, they would pick up the big and beautiful streamer from the floor to present to the audience. And to peek at the lyrics.

The video finishes with the bloopers in which the emotions (represented by a cookie-like creature) are thrown out and up (Attention: don’t keep them in, don’t bottle them up, deal with them!) and we had a few ridiculously funny conversation how we could illustrate that without frightening the parents or the little kids with the year two kids suddenly making the ‘throwing up’ gestures…But we decided to go for the amazing streamers throws that one of my students suggested.

We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed and my kids actually sang the whole long song, almost entirely from memory and it was a really touching moment, for all of us. Not only because we loved the song and because it was the end of year 2 but also because, while we were singing, it was already obvious that our school was to close down, for ever, and, naturally, we had A LOT OF different emotions to deal with at the time, all of us, kids, teachers and parents.

It was beautiful, it was touching and everyone was amazing. We gave a good show and we created fantastic memories. That is what will matter in the long run.

Happy teaching!

Advertising April: Great Artists at work. Andy Warhol

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The language

This time, I decided to let the topic and the language lead the way in all the lessons this month. On the one hand, it has already proved to be a great way of revising the structures we know (I like, Do you like, adjectives) and, even more importantly, it will help us aling what we know beautifully with our artists and their ideas.

Andy Warhol and the idea for the lesson (that I owe to my friend, just like this whole idea for the series that was born during a conversation) was that instead of focusing on Andy, we focus on food and creating our amazing combinations of it. No suprise then, that the lesson had to include the amazing ‘Broccoli Ice-cream’ from Super Simple Songs and our own version of it, too, which we created with a set of flashcards. The kids were taking turn to pick out two flashcards randomly from the pile and sing a new version of the story (‘Do you like bananas? Do you like sandwiches? Do you like banana sandwiches?’). And the rest of us reacted.

The artist

‘Miss Anka! It’s him!’ It is precisely when the Art teacher smiles, upon hearing a comment like that! The kids were super excited to see Andy again because most of them have already met him, either in our Chebourashka lessons and our Christmas tree lessons or both.

This time, we invited Andy again, to introduce him as an artist and as a copywriter and the art director, too. As usual, I used a presentation (this one here) to show his advertising portfolio and the kids were calling out the products advertised.

We also looked at all the soup cans, read the flavours and chose our favourite one.

The Magic Soup

The art

I showed the children the template of the Campbell soup can (I got mine from Fine Art Coloring Pages Archives · Art Projects for Kids, Thank you!) and explained that everyone can create their own. We made a list of all the decisions to make: flavour, name, logo, colours. This time I did not prepare my own model (I did not have a template available before the lesson, a rookie mistake) but I decided that this time we will have a chance to brainstorm together and that it might also be a source of inspiration for my students. It also so happened that I had my older / smaller group first so I prepared my soup cans with them and when I already ran the second lesson, with my younger / bigger group, I had lots to show to inspire them and it all worked out just fine.

I was really happy because all the kids could accomplish this task and we had a lot of different types of soup posters and our noticeboard looks like a print by Andy.

The Zombie Version of Campbell’s

All the kids worked very well, also the young ones and most of them had a very clear idea of what they wanted to get from the very beginning. The selection of colours took a bit longer but it was also beautiful to see how they were all coming together.

Not to mention that I love all the final products and, again, I could not but keep repeating ‘Oh, that is a lovely idea!’ My students treasured their creations, too! It was one of those lessons when I had to beg to at least get the permission to photograph the posters because so many of my students just snatched their works to take them home as soon as possible. At least I have the photos!

I was planning to ask the kids to make a list of all the ingredients but, somehow, it did not always work out. Next time, I will have to ask the kids to start with the writing, before we get to create properly.

But look at that! We’ve got some magic soup, some tomato soup, some garlic soup, some sun soup, some octopus soup as well as some darkness soup and some zombie soup. I am happy. I hope that Andy would be happy, too! Just look at all these colours!

One of my creations
The Darkness Soup
The Garlic Soup

Happy teaching!

Just a little bit of Art (in your English classroom)…Erik Bulatov once more!

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This time, I did not teach my regular Art lesson. Last Thursday, in the middle of a regular unit but at the end of the term, with all my kids already tired and looking forward to holidays and with the first properly spring days outside of our windows, I decided to let our hair down and engage into some creative activity as part of our regular English lesson. Yay to great ideas!

The language

This time round Erik Bulatov joined us in our regular English lessons. At the moment, we are in a fanstastic unit ‘Going places’ (Global English, CUP) and we have already revised the transport, learnt some less traditional transport, we did our Big Transport Tournament (choosing the best one, in qualifiers, quarter-, semi- and finals which was basically a lot of speaking) and now we are comparing the transport (‘Are they similar or different?’). We have also worked on the verb ‘to get’ and all its meanings (aka ‘The best verb in the world’).

And then I needed something lighter, more fun and more creative for the last lesson of the term.

The artist

I taught this lesson before, twice, in different ways (the previous posts can be found here and here). I reused the presentation I prepared before even though some of the students have taken part in my Art Explorers lessons already and it worked well.

We talked a little bit about the meaning of words and the meaning of pictures and I introduced the Artist of the Day. We looked at his paintings and the meaning and how Bulatov tried to show his ideas through words and through images.

I have also showed the kids again the images in Portuguese I created for the previous lesson (in the posts mentioned before).

The art

I showed the students the template I prepared, just a simple word TRAVEL in block capital letters and together we brainstormed their own associations with the word. Afterwards, I explained that their task will be to illustrate the word in such a way so as to show the word speak: as a word and as a visual. And that all ideas are good ideas. I gave out the pencils and the markers and they got to work. They were working and I was just supervising and helping with the content as we had to do some research to look for images or for information.

Afterwards we had a short presentation for everyone to see all the ideas (‘This is my poster. I’ve got…because…and…’) and when all of them were done, we also had a feedback session. I wanted to praise everyone together, as a group, apart from all of those individual praises I gave while monitoring and I also wanted to highlight that we had lots and lots of different ideas and that they were all precious. One of the students suggested choosing the best poster but I objected. I explained that all of the posters were great and so different that it is impossible to choose one, the best, they are all great.

Apart from that I also wanted to ask the students for their feedback and whether it was easy or difficult to use the words and images in such a way. This was also a precious part of the lesson.

It is also important to mention that this lesson, untraditionally, was longer as it took more than 1 academic hour that we normally spend on Art in our Art Explorers. I could do it because we had a double English on that day and it was absolutely necessary as only a few of my students are the regular creators and I did notice that these did have a different time management mode and ideas generation mode. The others needed more time to make decisions, to generate ideas and to execute them. Which is something to bear in mind. If it hadn’t been the last day before the term break, we would have created in one lesson and carried out the presentation + feedback on the following day.

The teacher watches and ponders…

Oh, this was one wonderful lesson!

I was really really curious how my regular class would react to the Art content as out of all the students only three or four attend the Art Explorers regularly, all the other ones do not have the chance to stay for the afterschool classes and only some of them attend our term break classes when these take place.

But it went well…I mean, it is a good lesson and, for me as a teacher, it has been tried and tested so I was confident and I knew that great things might come out of it. But the kids took well to it. They were curious about the artist and his paintings, especially that they were in Russian and they were interested and invested in answering the questions I asked.

The brainstorming session, something that we rarely do in the Art Explorers, also helped because it helped the (potentially) less creative students generate ideas or, at least, to see that there is a range of interpretations to choose from. To be honest, some of the kids really surprised me with their ideas and their interpretations as they were fresh and spot-on.

The presentation was a great idea, and again, something we rarely do, because only in our classes we have more time and a relatively even levels of English for everyone to produce and to understand but it was also worth it. I need to think of how to smuggle elements of it into our Art Explorers classes.

My favourite part, however, apart from the creation, was the feedback and all of the comments the kids made. The general consensus was that sometimes it was easy and sometimes it was not to come up with the ideas and to deal with their execution. I really loved the fact that there was such a variety of the interpretations and they the kids had a chance to see everyone else’s angle, too, further broadening their horizons. Some of my favourite ones were the following: travel represented by the sights from around the world, travel represented by things that we need to travel, travel represented by the flags of the countries that the artist likes, travel represented by the flags of the countries that start with the letters t, r, a, v, e and l, travel represented by the travel associations that look like the letters of the word or, even, travel represented by the potential problems which you might encounter while travelling…

The most beautiful line and the one that I will finish this post with was a question from one of my students, one of those cool one, the older ones, the ones who do not attend the regular art classes. It went like that:

‘Are we going to do it again?’

Happy teaching!

Movement March. Humans!

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Oh, I was so not sure what to do with March this year…Last year we did ‘Monochrome’ and so repeating and extending the theme was an option, of course, but I wanted something else. I was brainstorming with me, myself and this is how I stumbled on the idea of movement. M is for movement!

The funny thing is that when I get those ideas, the theme for the month, it is never a fully-fledged curriculum. I starts with the word and the alliteration and then I go on brainstorming and coming up with ideas. For instance, right now, half-way through ‘the unit’, we have had two great lessons but I still don’t know what we are doing with the rest of the month. The only thing I know is that the ideas will come to me, for sure.

The language

As regards the language, I decided to continue our theme from the previous month, the verbs and the Present Continuous, because I have a cunning plan of turning it all into picture description and, eventually, into storytelling. We still play our ‘What are you doing game?’ and describing different pictures, in the most simple of ways. And we also sing Pete the Cat’s, Rocking in my school shoes.

The artist

In the first lesson of the month, we did not have one Artist of the Day. Instead, I introduced a few different creators who helped us illustrate how movement can be depicted in art: through humans, shapes and lines, colour, nature, texture, animals and even words. This is, probably, the biggest number of artists that I have ever manged to squeeze in one lesson with Chagall, Bulatov, Hokusai, Kandinsky, van Gogh, Samokish and Riley. Seven. Wow!

It was lovely to see that my kids recognised some of the paintings as we used van Gogh, Bulatov and Chagall before…

Here you can find the link to my presentation.

The art

We started with looking at my example that I prepared before the lesson and called ‘Walking the snake’ to illustrate the idea and the whole project: choosing one or more of the characters from the photographs and giving them a new life – a new activity, a new environment and a new movement.

Then we outlined the main stages of the whole process (1) choose the photograph(s), 2) choose the new settings, 3) draw and glue or glue and draw, 4) think of the title) and we got down to work.

And I was working with the kids, creating my own pictures, to better illustrate the stages and to help them generate ideas for theirs.

If I were to summarise this lesson and my associations with it, it would be through the smile that appeared on my face every single time I walked past the noticeboard in the hallway where our pictures were displayed for a few weeks. Every single time. And that’s because they are beautiful.

The movement in the pictures is more or less distinct but all of the characters are doing something in their new settings although sometimes we know it only from the title of the picture (‘Doing nothing’). One of my students also tried to make a moving picture in the form of a simple puppet. Some of the pictures were even controversial (if you look closely, ‘Sitting’ is set in the bathroom) but it met all the requirements of the task and I had to accept them. One of my students, one of the more creative ones, took the task to a brand new level and focused not on the humans but on the place and, of course, I allowed that as I was very curious what will come out of it.

I would really like to use this technique and this task in one of our regular lesson, I just need to think what piece of grammar I can combine it with…

Happy teaching!

‘Competitive games in the YL classroom’

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This article, just as the earlier post here, has come to be as a result of the many (many!) conversations with my trainees and what I observed in my own classroom. It is fair to say that it has become my latest professional passion / obsession / interest. The post that I have written here (‘A balancing act. Non-competitive EFL games for kids‘) is one of my proudest moments on the blog but was just the beginning of the whole story. And one of the top 10 articles on the blog!

The article that I wrote for the Modern English Teacher (Issue 33.6 Nov-Dec) is a continuation of this research anad the search for solutions. It is, unfortunately, only available to the MET subscribed members but I am really proud of it and I can definitely say that the solutions that I came up with and the ideas that I suggest really do work. After a year and a half pretty much all of my YL are now ready to play competitive games. I do recommend!

Happy teaching!

Autumn gloom and classroom management. Setting up the routines in year 2

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Well, miss Anka, you did not do a good job. The classroom management that was supposed to be updated monthly got abandoned. The end of October happened but everything else happened, too so the post didn’t. Here is a two-month reflection then.

Starting the lesson

The start of a lesson has become more SS-centred as I am barely involved. There is now a very interesting role to play, namely the one of the Hello Master. This is the student who takes over the teacher, sits in the centre of the room, starts with ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Hello everyone!’ and asking everyone how they are. In November and December this person is also responsible for changing the numbers on our CountDown to New Year’s Day poster. Apart from that we have two Helpers and two more additional roles, the Game Leader (who helps with choosing the game, divide the class into teams etc) and the Decision Maker (aka the one who helps out with solving any doubts, if we have any). The kids love that and they sometimes ask me to assign a special role to them or they remind me that ‘Miss Anka, I haven’t been the Hello Master for a long time!‘

We still write the lesson plan on the board and the What time is it? and we still sing the Month Song, about how we feel, about the weather and everything related. I started to put up on the board some pieces of language because there is so much language emerging. It is absolutely necessary to keep it in memory, a bit.

It has also become a tradition for us to add a few more names to our list of students on the board. Sometimes our birds feature there (we have a well-frequented bird feeder), sometimes the toys that the kids bring, sometimes even the weird presences i.e. Poor Toe (aka a personalised version of the toe that one of my student hurt). But that means that they kids feel more involved in the lesson and they speak more.

Classroom management and rules

Our rules haven’t changed at all. They are still hanging above the board, we revise them in the beginning of the lesson and we refer to them when necessary but no new rules have been added.

Rewards chart

Our rewards chart is not quite a rewards chart but an activity chart which we use to mark attendance, activity, language production, cases of unwanted behaviour (like before, a simple description) and special rewards for great ideas, fair play, being a good friend and so on. I now simply take a photo of the board at the end of the lesson to use it later on, for assessment or to share with the parents.

We have also started using a greater variety of symbols, stars, suns, flowers, hearts. Yesterday, we managed to get to about a half of the solar system on the board, for different tasks. Basically, one more way to motivate the kids.

Reflection and feedback

These photos and notes are very useful because I have to add marks and note participation in our electronic journal for the parents but I also use them to give feedback to kids.

At the end of every week (which for us is Thursday), I take notes in every student’s notebook, giving them a mark for the week for English, for Maths and for behaviour. This is also my opportunity to thank them and to praise them for something special they did during the week. It is now our tradition to look at these notes in the beginning of the lesson on Monday. I also noticed that I started to comment on these notes during the week, on random lessons for example to praise some students for the behaviour that improved or the behaviour that needs improvement.

I realised that the notes from our tests are too rare and the notes from the electronic journal may not get through to the children as the parents are the main recipients and I needed a direct channel between me and the students. Hence the feedback.

We have been doing it for three weeks now and I know that these notes matter to kids. I keep them secret, written on a page that has been folded etc, but they announce everything to everyone anyway. They do anyway when they have something to be proud about.

Story and songs

To be perfectly honest and depressing as it is, we haven’t had lots of songs recently. We sing the Multiplication Songs from Jack Hartman in every lesson but we haven’t learnt any new songs.

In the same way, we have done lots of reading (fiction and non-fiction) but none of them were real stories. Oh, no! How did it come to that? I have no excuse and I am just deeply unhappy that I let it happen. Sigh.

Socialising

We have been interacting a lot in the classroom:

  • every English lesson starts with the sight words reading practice which we do in pairs. One student is the teacher, the other is the student and I sometimes ask them to give each other grades.
  • we did project presentation in pairs and small groups (asking and answering questions about the perfect house)
  • pairwork games such as riddles
  • Hello Master is my absolute number 1 when it comes to the favourite parts of the lesson, the one that kids do all by themselves, with the teacher being merely an observer
  • we have even played some team games and I am really proud of my kids because now they are ready to do it, on most days.
  • we have also been changing the seating arrangements and pairs since we have had some changes and the group needs a chance to be formed again, from scratch almost.

Creativity

This is the area that I am happy with because we have done enough in that area.

  • we celebrated the Craft Day (which, apparently, falls on the 16th November, at least here) and that is why we made beautiful monster bookmarks
  • we celebrated the Thanksgiving Day and we made our Thankful Turkeys, with feathers made of everything that we are grateful for (The list, for my kids, includes: mum, dad, gran, grandpa, brothers, sisters, pets, Adidas and Roblox).
  • we described and drew our Ideal House and they turned out great, especially that we were getting ready for the project day, reading, looking at photos and talking about all the unusual buildings and rooms from around the world that I could find
  • we wrote out first article in English about a special place. There wasn’t much creation per se since we wrote about real places but we had so much fun researching that and the final product, our journal, looks amazing.
  • I have also noticed that more and more of my kids have been wondering into my classroom during the long break in order to do creative things, using all the resources I have in my magic cupboard.

Teacher

Over those last few weeks, I have been a very tired teacher and I did a lot to save the energy and to use it wisely. Listening to music, chocolate and careful choices while lesson planning helped me do that.

At the same time, I have also been a very happy teacher because I could see how much progress my students have made in English and in Maths. This has become especially clear in all the speaking lessons because the unusual houses and rooms really made the children curious and willing to express their views. That, together with all the cool adjectives that we learnt. During our speaking lessons, I would give them stars for participation and beautiful English and it was just beautiful to see how fast my board was filling up stars. They had ideas and they wanted to share them, in English. A truly joyful moment!

I have also been a very happy teacher noticing how my students are growing up and getting better at dealing with their emotions during our competitive games, learning to be in a group, getting over their own insecurities and being proud of their achievements. We are not a perfect group, the picture perfect class (Well, wait, do I even want us to be that?) and we are not even at the OK stage (not consistently, anyway) but we are getting there. I hope.

Happy teaching!

Working with sight words. A handful of crumbs for the primary students.

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This is a post dedicated to my trainees and course participants because, as it often happens, good ideas surface while talking to other teachers. Thank you! And I hope you find it useful)

About sight words

If in one line, sight words are those precious bits of the English language that, in a way, are exceptions are they do not follow the rules of phonics and which, at the same time appear in the English language with a high frequency (hence another term used to refer to them ‘high-frequency words’) which makes them very relevant to anyone learning to read and write. ‘Sight words are the glue that holds the sentences together’ (sightwords.com) which makes them a necessary part of literacy development, even if they had to be learnt by heart.

There are two lists of these words, the Dolch Sight Words List and the Fry Sight Words Lists and they are organised either by the year (Dolch’s) or the frequency with which they appear in English (Fry’s).

Available resources

There are lots of resources available for parents and for teachers of the English as L1. Naturally, just like in the case of phonics, we need to proceed with caution as they were created for children who already communicate in the language so the meaning of all of these does not need to presented, clarified and practise. Here are some of the

Sight words in primary EFL (a very objective take)

It is some kind of a paradox that sight words do not make even a cameo appearance in our mainstream coursebooks for primary. Or perhaps it is not, actually. After all, despite all the changes and developments that have taken place over the last two decades (my time in EFL), literacy development over all of the years of primary still falls under the category ‘Areas for improvement’.

Year 1 is usually well-taken care of (or at least it is the year 1 coursebooks that have shown the greatest progress in the area) but the same cannot be said about levels 2 – 4. It seems that once the kids are out of year 1 and once they have gone over the few phonics sets, they are all ready to read and write pretty much everything, as long as it has the appropriate lenght and more or less the vocabulary and grammar that follows the curriculum of the level.

It does not work like that and it is not only my opinion. Every time I run a course for primary teachers and meet teachers from a variety of backgrounds and contexts (bilingual, freelance teachers, state school teachers, private langauge school teachers), they all come with the same problem that could be summarised as: ‘How do we teach the kids to read? My students are in year 3 and they still cannot read. The book does not help. I don’t know what to do.’

Yes, as teachers, we are going to be supplementing, staging and facilitating the process and the kids will eventually learn to read and write but it would be wonderful if this area had more systemic support and attention.

Enough of this whining. Let me tell you how we approach sight words with my students:

  • Year 1 of instruction is fully devoted to phonics and sight words are put on hold. The reasons for that are simple. First of all, phonics have to have the priority and I don’t want to overload the students who are taking their first steps in English and in literacy. Second of all, I am taking my time to ensure that when we start working on sight words, kids are not complete beginners and may actually know some of the words they are to learn and to practise. This is also the time when we start moving from sentence reading / writing to text reading / writing and these words really do make an appearance. We start learning and practising sight words in year 2.
  • I divided the words in my own (very subjective) way, according to the categories such as grammar words, adjectives, verbs, etc, to facilitate recognition and memorisation and to enable to come up with meaningful practice activities, something more than just reading. So far I have been using Dolch’s list but I am going to upgrade it, as soon as we get through it. The lists have been colour-coded, printed and laminated and we take one list per week.
  • Read and put your hand up: the introductory exercise, the children are looking at the list and I read the words, one by one. The kids listen and raise their hands if they know the word. The aim of this activity is for me to understand where we are with the words regarding their meaning. Naturally, if we find something new, we explain them.
  • You’re the teacher, I am the teacher: kids work in pairs. They take turns to lead the activity. ‘The teacher’ points at the words in the table, ‘the student’ reads them out loud.
  • Line by line: we work as a team, kids take turns to read one line of the sight words. If the kids are quite strong, they can point at two or three words at the same time.
  • Knock, knock!: one more copy of the sight words is displayed on the door of the classroom. Kids read a number of words on entering the room (i.e. 3 or 5). The words can also be colourcoded, randomly or by the level of difficulty, i.e. 5 words per colour (depending on the list). Kids choose themselves which colour they want to read.
  • Bingo!: teacher prepares a set of cards with the words in question and hands them out among students (4 or 5 cards per student). The teacher reads the words in a random order. The child who has the card with a certain word puts it up to signal to the teacher (‘I’ve got it’) and they put the word away. Whoever runs out of their words first is the winner, like in a regular Bingo game.
  • Make a sentence: this activity requires a bit more than just a list but there is so much potential that I decided to invest time in preparing the resources for it. You will need two sets of cards, one with sentence starters made out of sight words (i.e. I have, I can, I like, I don’t, Do you, I will, I didn’t…etc) and the second set with adjectives (i.e. blue, green, long etc). Kids pick out one card of each and show to their peer for them to make a full sentence made out of these two bits and their own ideas.
  • Invisible sentence: kids work in pairs, like in ‘You’re the teacher! I’m the teacher!’ but instead of just reading the word, the student who is a student makes up a whole sentence or a question with that word. It takes a few rounds of practising together on the board for the children to get the idea, for example with teacher and one of the students taking turns in choosing the word but once they get it, it is a marvellous activity and, apart from practising reading, the kids also put them into context. If there are still some less familiar words or even the unknown words, this is a perfect opportunity to fish them out and to clarify them.

There are just a few of them but we have just started our adventure with sight words. There is more to come, for sure!

To be continued…

Happy teaching!

How to plan for kids without bending your back backwards. A five-step manual

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This post here is my response to the challenge set by my teacher-friend Michael. Challenge accepted. Let’s go, 5 steps.

Lesson aim

The first-est step. Always.

The session devoted to lesson planning on our YL course is called ‘What do you want teacher?’ and that is for a reason. Making a decision why we enter the room and what we want to achieve by the end of the lesson is key. Is the vocabulary the focus or is it a grammar point? Or any of the skills? What is the context? Do you want to focus on the language or the most important thing on the day is the work we put in developing social skills or building the routine? It might be something suggested by the book or chosen by the school curriculum but not always. And even it is, there is always room for adjustments and adaptation. At the end of the day, there is the teacher and there are the students in the classroom that matters most. The programme and the coursebooks are to be adapted.

After the aim is selected, there are more follow-up decisions to make, namely the selection of the focused task (aka the main productive activity) of the lesson?

That’s it, done. The main thing is done and it probably took about 5 minutes. The next step will be looking for things that will help make it happen.

Books basics

The coursebook and whatever it contains is already partially included in the previous step. Most of the time, this is what we use, for convenience and just because we can. The coursebook is not the enemy of course and there is a lot of useful material. Though, not all of it.

I presume the main activity has already been chosen and the next decision is regarding all the other exercises, activities, audio and visuals that are there (and in the workbook and teacher resource packs) that either match or don’t our aim and our focused task, or, in other words, our A or the lesson and our Z.

The most important thing to remember and the thing that is on constant repeat during our sessions and in my conversations with teachers is: the book is not there for us to follow to the letter and to cover and to include all the exercises.

Things you can repeat

In every lesson for YL there are certain elements that we can and that we should repeat because they help us construct the framework and the routine. They include either the elements of the routine: the hello song, the how do you feel today, the rules revision, the homework check, the goodbye as well the elements that are short-temporarily fixed: the songs we are singing in September, the games we are playing in the unit of toys, the story we are reading in the chapter on the jungle animals. All of these will feature in the lesson over a month. It is good to included them in the plan, keeping them on the side, in order to be able to use them.

The missing bits

Having got that far in the lesson planning, it might be the time to figure out how much time we have already taken out of the lesson time and how much time we already have left. Then, look at all the activities there are in the coursebook, all ready and waiting to be used, and, only if necessary, to replace them with some other activities, from another sources or self-designed.

Most of the time, the coursebook will do the job just fine.

Something for the balance (bits)

What I like to do at the very end, when the lesson is already ready, to have a quick look at everything, to check it for the contents and for the balance and variety

  • the ratio of interaction patterns
  • the ratio of different activities: songs, stories, creative and hard work
  • the ratio of new and familiar
  • the ratio of settlers and stirrers

And, when something is off, I fix it. Done!

Instead of a coda

Here are a few words of wisdom from a grandma teacher and trainer / mentor / observer:

  • we want good lessons to be our everyday but that does not mean that every single lesson needs to be an Oscar-worthy (or a Nobel prize-worthy) unit at the cost of the teacher’s sleep, peace of mind, family life or salary. Yes, I sometimes invest a little bit more into my teaching, in terms of planning, resources and time but, after all these years of experience, I also have lessons that are ‘just regular, no fireworks’.
  • we sometimes plan lessons and as soon as we get to school, out of the blue, we come up with something entirely different and it is the best lesson ever. Yes, that happens, but (here comes a very subjective line), it is the result of all the brainstorming and thinking that has already taken place. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have happened.
  • designing your own activites does not have to take ages and it does even require a teacher to be super creative. I personally find it much easier to prepare something for my lesson from scratch, rather than spend hours of looking through materials and resources to match the needs of my group and then, on having found it, still waste time on adapting it to what we (my kids, my course and our lesson) really need (here you can find some of the posts on material design).
  • our coursebooks have a lot of different resources and pictures among them which can be used in a million different ways with very little effort. A picture is an actitivity and you can read about it here, here and here.
  • in general, being a lazy teacher has a lot of benefits. You can read about it here.
  • here you can find another post about the everyday lesson planning

Happy teaching!