#eflideas

Crumbs #45 Five ways of personalising content

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In this post I would like to share a few activities that I came up with for my students that turned to be very effective as regards students’ involvement, the amount of language generated and the opportunities for the target language practice.

All of these are only samples, activities and materials to serve a very specific purpose with a very specific group of students. However, I do believe that they can serve as five case studies that help to create the framework for creation and adaptation of such materials.

#1 You today and you in 2017

This is the activity that we used with my teens, in a freer practice activity focused on comparatives on the B2 level, including simple comparatives, less, as…as and the comparatives quantifiers. The kids were working in pairs, they were answering the question: ‘You today and you in 2017. How different is your life?‘ and they used the wordwall cards to guide them in their discussions.

When I was planning this activity, I prepared 15 cue cards but we barely got through half of them in each pair because the students really wanted to share their experiences and, surprisingly, they did not need any follow-up questions, they were simply talking and talking and talking.

#2 The future us

This activity and the materials were intially created for a group of teens but later I adapted it to the needs of my junior group and to a group of ‘advanced’ primary kids, too in the lessons whose aim was to introduce and to practise ‘will’ and ‘might’ to talk about the future.

Intially, many years ago, when we were still in the classroom I created a handout with all the situations, one per each student in the group because I wanted to do it in the format of a gallery walk. The kids had to move around the room, read the situations and decide who will achieve what. In the end, the students picked up the cards with their names and told of us which of the predictions are most likely to happen in the real life.

Later on this activity had to be adapted to the format of the online classes and I decided to turn it into a simpler speaking activity, again with a set of wordwall cards. The students worked in groups three and they took turns to uncover the cards and to discuss who in the group is most likely to get a new haircut, start wearing glasses, write a book or win an Oscar. They had to justify their answers. During the feedback, we brought back some of their ideas and the students whose names were called out were to comment on these predictions.

Although this is one of the flexible activities (no specific ending, can be stopped at any given point), I abandoned the initially planned timing because the students got really involved into it and I allowed them to go through all the cards. We had a laugh and we produced a lot of language. It is worth mentioning, though, that this activity was done in group that had studied together for a few years and that knew each other very well. This meant that they had enough data in order to be able to make their prediction and, also, there was very little risk that someone will be offended with anyone else’s ideas. Perhaps this kind of an activity would not be a good choice for newly formed groups.

#3 Quiz: How well do we know each other?

I prepared this kind of an activity to practise the target langauge in a personalised way with my primary A1 students and the structure used in this particular game was the combination of ‘How often do you / does X do it?’ and the basic adverbs of frequency (always, often, sometimes, never).

The students were given a set of questions for homework about all the random habits of everyone in the group, such as ‘How often does Sasha play computer games?’. They were supposed to think about them and make their decisions. In class, I was asking the questions and everyone, apart from the student in question was sharing their answers. Afterwards, the student would tell us how often they do it (Sasha: I never play computer games) and sometimes provided some additional information.

#4 Personalised reading

This is a trick (or an activity:-) that I learnt in one of the training sessions about a million years ago (and I do not remember whose it was!) that a text (or a listening task) should be treated in a way that more resembles the real life reading (or listening). That means that we approach the text not to be able to answer all the comprehension questions in the coursebook but to take it very personally. The task is to go through the text, labeling the text with the marks: (+) for all the things that we agree with, (-) for all the things that we do not agree with, (!) for all the things that we find surprising or (?) for all the things that we would like to find out more about and so on and so forth. In the feedback session, students simply compare where they put all the specific marks and discuss why such were their choices. Simple and effective.

There are a few variations of this approach. Students can write their own questions to the text / the listening text and then deal with the text with the focus on these questions. In the feedback session, they share their answers and why they have chosen these particular questions or what their answers would be if the text does not include them, which, actually, is something that happens frequently.

Another way was letting the students decide for themselves which items / parts they want to read and talk about. While we were reading a text on ten different factors to take into consideration while choosing a job (based on Gateway B2, Macmillan). First, the students got only a list and they were asked to choose the five that are most important for them and compare their lists with their friends. Afterwards, they were asked to approach the text, comprising of ten short paragraphs, one per factor, and discuss these. They were instructed to go through all of the items, one by one but they could make decisions as regards the order so that the most important ones were dealt with in the beginning when everyone was at the peak of their focus and involvement. Interestingly enough, some students were choosing to read about the factors that were their priority whereas the others wanted to read more about the factors that they would never take into consideration because they were curious about the other people’s rationale.

#5 The Messy Choir for controlled grammar practice

This is a lovely activity that we are using, with my younger and older kids and sometimes with adults, too. I have already written about it and you can find the original post here.

Today, I would like to share the version of the activity with my B2 teens while we were learning / revising the narrative tenses and the Past Perfect among them. I wanted the students to start using the structure straightaway and in a familiar context. Since the class starts at 18:45, there are plenty of things that everyone would have already done and could talk about.

The boxes with the past participle were appearing one by one and everyone was invited to contribute their sentences, the teacher and the students. Some of the verbs generated more answers, some fewer but, overall, all the students participated and practised the new structured.

We used the same activity in the beginning of a few lessons later on, as a warmer / hello / revision activity.

I hope that you have found something useful here to use with your students or to inspire you to create. I also hope that this post will have its part two. And sooner rather than later!

Happy teaching!

Crumbs # 44. One or many? A vocabulary game for preschoolers.

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Ingredients

  • A set of wordwall cards with the vocabulary such as Christmas words, fruit or animals or the physical cards such as those used here in the unit on farm animals.

Procedures

  • The teacher introduces and practices vocabulary first and make sure the kids are familiar with them.
  • The teacher shows the kids different variants, introduce the idea of ‘one’ and ‘many’ or ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘many’.
  • In the offline classroom, the teacher shuffles the cards, looks at one of them in secret and says: ‘I can see some pens. One pen or many pens?’ with the gestures.
  • The kids are guessing and after a while the teacher shows everyone the card and asks the question again: ‘One pen or many pens?’. The kids answer and if the card shows ‘many’, they also count how many exactly.
  • If the game is played online, there is side A of every card that presents the word and side B with the actual visual with the answer. When the kids have shared their guesses, the teacher flips the card and asks the question again.

Why we like it?

  • It is a simple yet effective activity that helps to practice any vocabulary. We usually use it in the second or third lesson of the new unit.
  • It is a real game as it includes the element of luck and anyone can guess it as well as the element of logic if you try to remember which cards you have seen (there is only one of each).
  • The number of items can be adapted ie only a set of five words, with two (one pencil, many pencils) or with three (one pencil, two pencils, many pencils) variants for each word.
  • We use gestures to clarify the meaning, to support production or, even, to answer, as some kids use words and gestures when they guess. I have used the following gestures: one – the index finger up, two – the index and the middle finger together up, many – all the fingers of one hand, up and moving.
  • It is not competitive as we never count the points for the correct answers and its pace is so fast that the kids do not have the time to focus on the cards that they got wrong or didn’t guess which also helps them to learn to win and to lose.
  • It can help practise singluar and plural forms of all the nouns and structures. So far, I have used it to reinforce the knowledge of the vocabulary only, there is some potential for adding structure here, too, for example is / are.
  • This game can be used to practise the plural form but we have actually learnt and used the singular and plural forms through playing the game. This concept was not introduced separately before.
  • It works well with individual students as well as with groups as all the kids can guess at the same time before the teacher reveals the card. I have been using it with my pre-primary students but, I suppose, the younger primary would enjoy this activity, too.
  • The game is open-ended, it does not have any specific number of rounds that have to be played or a definite end. The teacher can stop it at any given point, before the kids get bored.
  • The physical cards can be easily produced, using the google images and clip art and copying and pasting. To make them more effective, I used to glue them on some coloured paper, in order to make them more durable and to make sure that the kids can’t see through the pictures. It is important that all the cards have the same size and that they have the same colour.
  • Last but not least, my students really like it and this game has become one of our Bread and Butter set. We play it in every unit, with new vocabulary)

Happy teaching!

Material design for beginners: The aim as the source of inspiration

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The Polish shade of ‘November orange’

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 Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

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!

The Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

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.
The Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

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.
The Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

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
The Turkish shade of ‘November orange’

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!

Ed Emberly and Monsters. Teaching English through Art

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I suppose that, on some level, the idea of including the storybook illustrations and their creators into my English through Art curriculum has always been there and it was just waiting for its turn. The first lesson devoted to that happened somewhere in December 2020 with my juniors and you can read about it here. Including it in the series of lessons with my primary kids was just a matter of time. Ed Emberly (and his bestiary of monsters)* is the first one to have a lesson dedicated to. The first of many, I hope!

The artist

The idea to base the whole lesson on Ed Emberly and his art came from the Big Green Monster storybook which has been my go-to resource in all the body parts / monsters lessons for a very long time now. The kids absolutely love the fact that they can control the monster, make it appear or disappear and this way deal with the fear. I used to have students who would sneak into the storybook room before the lesson and ‘read’ the book on their own or run a reading sessions for their friends who also wandered in, both in English and in Russian.

But then, as I started to look through everything that Ed Emberly produced, it turned out that monsters really were his favourite thing and that he wrote a few books on how to create your own illustrations using finger paints and markers. ‘I want one of those!’ was the brain’s initial reaction.

First of all, we introduced Ed as our artist of the day (name, face, country and his favourite thing) and we talked a bit about the monsters which he drew, including the Big Green. The gallery walk was a very brief one this time but that is because Ed was present throughout the lesson, with the story and the craft. It was probably the most consistent and artist-focused lesson of all of those that I have ever taught on this course.

The language

This part was very simple and very straightforward – as much of the body parts practice as possible. It was the first lesson with this topic and we did a variety of exercises related

  • Introduction, repeating, a bit of drilling (I do less and less of that, as a teacher and I have begun to wonder why. The post will be coming soon).
  • Pointing and moving of the said body parts which could perhaps go under the TPR label
  • Introducing the song ‘My teddy bear’ by Super Simple Songs
  • And a selection of the wordwall games such as matching the human body parts and the animal body parts, pelmanism (only in zoom we write the numbers first on all the cards) and describing monsters using ‘my monster has got…’ and similar structures, also with the use of a set of wordwall cards. This last one is the most generative activity and I have high hopes for her in terms of the amount of the language produced in the long run. Usually it takes a few lessons for the kids to get used to it and to become comfortable and this time round was not an exception. With my current group, the Ed Emberly lesson was chronologically the first one and it was only in the Degas lesson, two weeks later that the kids were ready to produce lots of language.
  • Last but not least, we watched and participated in the storytelling and it was, of course, Ed Emberly’s ‘Go Away Big Green Monster’, this time in the video format, although, ideally, we would have used a storybook only I did not have it at home at the time.

The craft

Originally, Ed Emberly monsters (and other creatures) were done with a combination of two techniques – finger paint prints and drawing with markers. For anyone willing to use this approach, his books are full of ready made ideas. However, finger paints are a tricky resource to use in the classroom, especially if you want to finger print and draw, and I just did not want to bother with the logistics of it in the online world, especially that our group is now located in three different countries. Solutions had to be found.

It does help, I suppose, that I am a lazy teacher and I have noticed that with all the obstacles of the online Art class I am blossomig and I end up with the ideas that I like. This was the case here and that’s what we did:

  • The first step – produce own monsters in order to test and trial and to understand how much time is required and how many monsters can be created during the ten minutes that we hae assigned for the craft activity.
  • Write to the parents, to inform them what resources will be necessary: a sheet of A4 paper, a marker, glue, old newspaper and magazine pages OR coloured paper.
  • Show the kids the finished product and describe all the monsters (colour and body parts). I did it holding the picture in front of the camera but it was not as effective as I would have wanted it it to be. Next time, I will keep the paper on the desk and I will move the camera above it, in order to make sure that the kids see only one monster at a time and that it is clear and big enough.
  • The monsters are super easy to make and the one thing that is necessary is a piece of paper (the more recklessly torn off, the better). It is then glued onto the paper and the body parts are drawn. Then the kids describe their own monster, ideally using full sentences but, since it is the first lesson with the new vocabulary, I accepted simple ‘three eyes’, ‘one nose’, ‘two legs’. The number of the monsters produced in class will depend on the age and the skills of the kids.
  • My students are already quite ‘advanced’ when it comes to craft and after they figured out how to make the monsters, they were on producing more and more of them, focused more on the craft than on the speaking (ouch!). For that reason, when I teach this lesson again, I will want to scaffold even more carefully and introduce the following tricks a) ‘dictate’ the colour for the monster, b) promote production by guessing how many legs their monsters will have, hoping that even if I don’t guess, they will want to correct me and c) introduce a punctuation mark between the monsters ie a proper introduction (My name is Polly. I am a happy monster)
  • I personally adore the fact that the monsters are made from newspapers and that they have the most irregular shapes, the more reckless, the better. However, I noticed that some of my parents were reluctant to the idea of letting the kids work with old newspapers and magazings, preferring the regular and pretty craft paper. I have also noticed that some of my students did not quite like the idea of the torn paper and while I was happily tearing the resources for my monsters, they simply picked up their scissors and started to cut out square, circles and triangles. In the offline classroom, I simply wouldn’t have given out scissors, trying to encourage them to work with a new resource. In the online classroom I could not control it but the monsters turned out pretty anyway.

*) I cannot NOT share this amazing article with the funny and weird collective nouns. Enjoy!

Happy teaching!

Yayoi Kusama and Pumpkins. Art and English in Primary

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Yes, the Halloween was approaching and my English+Art lesson was on the day. Yes, I was just googling random things hoping that if I find something interesting, I will have a Halloween-ish lesson and if I don’t find anything, well, we will go in a different direction. At this point we have done colours, we have done leaves and, ideally, I was hoping to find some cool artist, some pumpkins and some technique that we have not tried before yet. Last year, around that time, we went to Ilya Mashkov as we tried to recreate his still-life with the magnificent cucurbita pepo but it was last year (aka we have done it already) and it was offline (aka it was more manageable)…I needed something different.

Surprisingly, googling ‘pumpkin in art’ can get you when you want to be)

Yayoi Kusama – jak sztuka może być terapią przy chorobie psychicznej? (magazif.com)

The artist of the day.

Enter Yayoi Kusama. Until last Monday, I had never heard of her. Since last Monday, I have been a great fan. Her art is exploding with colour and with energy and she makes me feel like being a part of the Wonderland, Alice in the real world, easily available, at hand. And she loves dots and dots are circles aka the best shape ever that can be easily used in class (here is an earlier post about that).

We met Yayoi and found out about her favourite things and we looked at some of her paintings in our gallery as is now our habit. We also talked about the paintings we like and don’t like.

Yayoi Kusama and her favourite things
Our gallery in Miro

The language

In this particular lesson I wanted to focus on practising expressing opinion using ‘I like’ and ‘I don’t like’ and that is exactly what we did. We looked at Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkins and said what we think of them (P.S. We like them!), we looked at a range of creative pumpkins and said what we think of them and we enjoyed the variety in which pumpkins can appear (photos, art, real pumpkins (yes, these were present) and, finally, the Surprise Pumpkin that I have brought. See below)

The craft

The final product here was a compilation or an adaptation of two ideas from the amazing Art for Kids Hub and their pumpkin folding surprise and the most amazing mouse.

  • We looked at all the pumpkins, Kusama’s, the realia, the creative pumpkins
  • I presented the ready made product making sure that the Surprise Pumpkin is a proper surprise (‘Look, this is a pumpkin. But it is also a surprise. Are you ready? 3…2…1….’)
  • We went over the necessary materials with everyone (‘Have you got the paper? Have you got the pencils/markers/crayons?’)
  • I was making one more copy together with the kids. I am drawing on the regular paper, holding it in my hands, on a thick pad. Going step by step, slowly, pausing and waiting for the kids to complete every single step. This is absolutely crucial.
  • We folded the paper, stopping after every stage, showing the page to the camera. There are four essential stages: 1) show the A4 paper 2) fold the paper in half, widthwise 3) press at the crease / fold 4) fold the top flap outwards (show the kids how the edge of the paper touches the crease / fold in the middle 5) press at the crease / fold
  • Draw the pumpkin on the folded paper, that is at the 1/4 flap folded outwards and the 1/2 half at the bottom simultaneously, draw the stem and the leaf as well as three lines for the ribs. Don’t forget to pause at every stop, wait for the kids to complete every step and show you the result.
  • Open the paper and place it flat on the table. Draw the edge of the top half (‘Let’s draw a zigzac’)
  • Draw the edge of the bottom half (‘Let’s draw a zigzac here, too’)
  • Draw the mouse step by step: the oval for the body, two lines for the nose, the ears, the eyes, the whiskers, the tail and the hands.
  • Leave the colouring for after the lesson.
  • Play a bit with the surprise pumpkins that everyone prepared. My students simply recreated the ‘presentation’ that I gave at the beginning of the lesson, of their own accord, just like that.

Some final notes

  • Most of my students deal very well with the folding bit. Only one of us struggled a little bit and we needed mum’s help at the very beginning. It might be a good idea to let the parents know ahead of time and ask them to be at the ready, just in case.
  • As regards the materials, absolutely anything goes: coloured pencils are great, crayons are great, markers work, too. I am at my personal happiest drawing with markers and colouring with crayons or with crayons and markers, for the extra shine and glow.
  • Kids are amazing and they really can recreate the drawings or, rather, they can create their own versions of it. The only thing that is really necessary is the proper staging, going step by step, modelling and pausing, to give everyone time to complete the drawing.
  • It does not matter how big or how small the mouse is. It will all be hidden in the folds of the paper.
  • There are many variations of the craft. You can find some of them online. Below you can see what we have created ad hoc, just because we did everything that we needed and I could extend the lesson a bit. The pumpkin with a cat and the apple with a caterpillar were the result. These are only a few of the options!

Happy teaching!

Levitan and Leaves. Art in Primary

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The teacher’s version

I found the photograph first but then it turned out that it is a whole post with a video tutorial, too. Have a look at the Art Projects for Kids! Which, by the way, is a cool website that I will be visiting in the future!

The language

This is the second module of our course and I decided that I need to start introducing some of the natural world vocabulary, in order to be a little bit better prepared to talk about the artists to come. The first introductory set is rather modest and it includes: the sky, the grass, trees, mountains, houses, the river, flowers and leaves. We have also used this module as an opportunity to revise colours and numbers and to introduce the first two adjectives (big and small). Finally, we started to talk about what ‘I like’ and ‘I don’t like’.

The artist

Our artist of the day who introduced all of that to us was Isaac Illich Levitan, the love of my childhood and my first artist ever. The album of his works is one of the very few books that I remember from my early childhood (apart from the storybooks, of course). It was there, on the shelf and I did spend hours on the carpet, leafing through it, back and forth, making up stories taking place among the birch trees, by the river, in the forests and in some ‘Sokolniki park’ which I found out about long before I set my foot in it. This, by the way, was also one of my first encounters with the foreing languages as the book was in Russian, English, French and German and these were my first exercises in comparative linguistics. At the age of 5 and 6.

Leviatan’s was what you might call a cameo appearance because I did not want to overwhelm the kids. We looked at the four seasons, looked for the new words in the paintings (‘Can you see a house?) and talked about the colours. We also started to sing ‘What’s your favourite season?’. Not a lot, but Isaac is definitely coming back, with the arrival of the winter and then the spring and the summer. With him, there will be Vivaldi, which would have been a perfect companion but I simply forgot about his existence. I am already looking forward to our winter-themed lessons.

Levitan in our ‘gallery’

The craft

  • try to make the leaf at home to figure out how complex it might be and how much time we will require, think about the stages
  • use the leaves throughout the lesson ie while revising colours and numbers or practising ‘I like / I don’t like’
  • check that the kids have all the materials necessary: a piece of paper, crayons, watercolours and water
  • draw the outline of the leaf veins, and patterns with crayons. It is ok to use the same colour but the final product is more interesting if different colours are used. I was considering introducing different patterns to make it more structured but, in the end, decided not to. We will introduce them on some other occasion, with Kandinsky, for example. If possible, I would use special paper for watercolours but in the online world it is not quite possible. Regular photocopying paper works well, too.
  • colour the leaf with the watercolours. It might be a good idea to start with the brighter colours and, for the sake of staging, ‘dictate’ which colour to use, leaving the kids a decision which section of the leaf to colour. The lines drawn with crayons will not be covered by the paint and they will be still visible and it is not really necessary to be too careful with painting. Not staying within the lines or even letting the colours seep or even leak into each other create a much more interesting effect. I haven’t really encouraged my kids to create a very ‘messy-on-purpose’ picture (not yet, anyway) but I am very reckless with how I use my paints, to show the kids that it’s ok.
  • finish with showing the leaves, call out the colours, talk about whose leaves we like.
  • I have cut out my leaves to be able to use them more easily and I was planning on telling the parents that the kids can do it after the lesson, when the paints dry completely. If I still had my classroom, I would put them up on the window.

Happy teaching!

I am easy to prepare and very necessary in the classroom. What am I? A riddle!

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Dedicated to Monsieur Alexander (6 y.o.) and Mademoiselle Victoria (3 y.o.) with big thanks for reminding me how important riddles are even if you speak the language very well.

Why? Because you simply must!

  • Riddles are an opportunity to develop focus and listening skills: you are required to listen until the very end as all the elements of the riddle are important and they can help you figure out what the answer is.
  • Riddles help to develop cognitive skills while you are guessing as you are required to put together different pieces of information, to understand, to synthesise and to analyse.
  • Riddles help to develop cognitive skills even more when you are creating your own riddle as you are required to apply and to evaluate the information you providing to make the riddle challenging and achievable at the same time.
  • Riddles are something that we use and enjoy in our L1, from the early childhood and it is only natural that we will try to bring them into our EFL lessons, with kids and with adults.
  • Riddles help develop creativity.
  • Riddles are fun and they create plenty of opportunities for bonding, in a pair or a group.
  • Riddles, in L1, help the kids develop the awareness about how the language works, how the hidden meanings, the homophones, the collocations and this can also be transferred, at least partially, into the EFL or the ESL
  • It is obvious that the context of the EFL and the ESL does not always allow for the riddles and their benefits to be used fully and completely even if only due to the limitations of the language level which, in case of some of the young learners, might be as low as A1. This does not mean that they cannot be used. On the contrary, they can be introduced from early on.
  • Riddles, regardless of the context, are an opportunity for the students to speak and to produce a mini-discourse.
  • In the EFL/ESL classes, it is relatively easy to choose the vocabulary range and the structures for the students, depending on the level and the topic. This range can be easily extended.

How to? Riddles in the EFL classroom

  • The simplest version of the game can be played with preschoolers and we usually start simply with guessing ‘the secret word’ which is the card that the teacher and then the students choose and hold close to their chest and the class are guessing. This version is used to introduce the very idea of the riddles. When the kids have become more familiar with the format, the level of challange can be raised and the production maximised by asking the kids to describe the card they are holding in the simplest of way i.e. with the colour, operating within the colours of the objects on the flashcards used (‘It is green‘ or ‘It is green and red‘). With time, more adjectives can be added (‘It is big’, ‘It is small’), the categories (‘It is a toy’, ‘It is a pet’) or even opinions (‘I like it’, ‘I don’t like it’). There is a post devoted to one of the ways of dealing with riddles with the youngest learners. You can find it here.
  • The primary (or the more advanced pre-primary) students can start adding simple categories in their discourse (‘It’s a toy’, ‘It’s an animal’, ‘It’s in the schoolbag’) and start describing the word using the relevant structures. For example, with food, we use the following four: ‘It is cold’, ‘It is hot’, ‘You eat it’, ‘You drink it’) and these are the structures that the students know and will need anyway and these particular four can be supported by a relevant gesture. The same goes for the animal riddles set: ‘It is big’, ‘It is small’, ‘It can run’, ‘It can fly’, ‘It can swim’. I also like to add ‘I like it’ and ‘I don’t like it’ even though it does not quite provide enough information for the children to guess the object as the class may simply not know what one of us thinks about it, it gives the student making a riddle an opportunity to express opinion and to make it all more personalised. With the youngest students the teacher can assist production in the beginning by asking questions such as ‘Is it hot or cold?’ or ‘Can it swim, fly or run?’. This set of structures can be developed and extended depending on the students’ age and level.
  • As regards the more advanced and older students, the riddles can be made more extensive and more resembling the riddles that the adults and kids play in English as their L1 or the riddles they play with their L1 with the use of simple homonimes or homophones, a wider range of vocabulary or structures or complexity for example by making a list of words not to use when to describe a certain word, describing it with associations (i.e. kids, fun, outside to describe the word ‘playground’), with metaphors (i.e. ‘It is the brain of the computer’ for ‘hard drive’ or ‘It is the opposite of a mountain’ for ‘a cave’) or, even, by a mixture of these (‘Tell me what it is and tell me what it’s not’)
  • As regards the material and the support for the teacher one of the following can be used: flashcards, mini-flashcards, a page from the book with words and words and images, a poster, a set of wordwall cards, a list of words.

Happy teaching!

Material design for beginners: The resource as the source of inspiration

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(From the series: Try something new today!)

Today I am going to share these idea for YL lessons that started with the teacher (aka yours truly) finding a material that she really (but really) wanted to use in class.

Some of them have already been published here, on this blog, some of them are brand new, right out of the box, right off the production line.

Oh, also, please make sure you have a look at the introduction to the series here!

Oldies but goodies

Silly pictures are a perfect example here because I found them while I was looking for something else entirely and these just popped up. Until then, I hadn’t even known of their existance. Now, we love using them. Make sure you have a look at the original post)

Wordwall activities are all based on the templates provided by the website but they can be used in a variety different ways. The material is there but there is a lot that can be done with that.

Let’s look for pairs is a game that actually started with a visual that included a rather random set of jungle animals and, initially, were not an activity at all. I loved the animals, though, I started to think how I could use it in class. And an activity was created. I cannot find the original source but it was not very much different from this one here.

Dice is also a resource and a tool that was a starting point to a wide range of activities and I have been passionate about using it in the classroom for ages. Some of the ideas can be found here.

And, last but not least, songs can also become games and here some ideas how to do it.

And some latest finds

Two videos

There is very little that can be said about using videos in class because this is one of the hot topics in the EFL. Kieran Donaghy’s website is a great place to start if you are looking for inspiration and ideas. I have already committed a post on this blog here but today I would like to share one more idea and the mechanics of it and the journey that a video took to become an activity and a lesson.

I love running and over the years I have developed a passion and an obsession related to all the amazing people who managed to achieve something amazing in the area. No wonder that my superhero for many years has been Tom Denniss, the Australian who ran around the world. Literally. In 3 years and about 60 marathons. For many years, one of Tom’s photographs taken during that run, was pinned on the door of my fridge. And no metaphors here.

Naturally, that meant that I read and watched everything that was available on the subject, including this video, and from the moment I saw it, I knew that I would use it in class. I have used it many times since, on its own, in the lessons devoted to unusual journeys, special achievements and numbers as there are some impressive statistics related to Tom’s feat but this September I decided to take it to another level, paired up with that of another adventurer, Helen Skelton, who crossed the Amazon in her kayak. Here are the main stages of this lesson:

  • photographs of both heroes and their adventures
  • a discussion on the challenges and dangers of both achievements, choosing the more difficult one
  • a discussion on the first impressions, whether they are important or not, about our personal experience in that area, the misleading first impressions, the correct ones
  • watching the first minute of the interview with Tom and the first minute of the interview with Helen and discussing the impression they made on us
  • watching the rest of both videos to find out more about their adventures and to decide whose was the more impressive and the more dangerous one
  • a comprehension debate together
  • a discussion in groups to compare opinions regarding the challenges
  • the final debate regarding the first impression and the second impression, a discussion on whether the professions of the interviewees (Tom – a scientist and an entrepreneur, Helen – a TV journalist) might have had an impact on the impressions they made on us
  • feedback, error correction and round-up

Speaking YLE

Cambridge Young Learners Exams is definitely one of those topics that have been waiting for its own post here simply forever and I know that its day will eventually come.

Today I would only like to focus on the Movers speaking part 1 and Flyers speaking part 2 resources that have inspired me to come up with an idea for an acitivty for my primary and pre-primary kids.

The resource here is a set of two pictures which have some small differences between them. You can find the samples in the Sample Tests published by Cambridge. I had been preparing my students for YLE for a few years and I had known the visuals very well and there is no other way of putting me: it was bugging me that I could not use these beautiful visuals with my pre-schoolers because this was the material produced for A2 speakers and my students were only pre-A1 and five. Or so I thought until I realised that I can still keep the resource and keep the general idea of the activity (‘looking for differences’) but the thing that needed adaptation was the aim, especially the linguistic one. The set of complex structures had to be replaced with a simple ‘I can see…’. In order to make the task more achievable for my youngest students, I also decided to change the resources, too and to replace them, initially at least, with a much simpler set, limiting the set of vocabulary items to only one topic (ie only toys, only farm animals) and lowering the level of complexity but abandoning, for a while, the almost identical visuals and choosing simpler two pictures of a farm.

These are the two images that were used in a YLE-inpsired ‘Find the difference’ task with a 6 y.o. primary student, in the lesson on toys and with a group of 5-6 y.o. level 3 pre-primary students. The teacher and the students took turns to compare the two pictures using a simple structure (I can see…). The teacher was initially describing the toys in picture 1, the students – in picture 2.

But this idea was developed further by adding two more visuals, a toy room in the kindergarten, and the activity was adapted too. Using the four pictures, the students were looking for the same toys featuring in one, two, three or perhaps even all four rooms, for example: I can see a teddy in picture 1, picture 2 and picture 4. The most fascinating thing about it was that after a very short while we had one student describing the pictures and producing the language but the whole group were listening in order to check that no pictures were ommitted by mistake. And to support their friend, too.

One-sentence phonics stories

This particular one was created on the basis of the short phonics stories that feature in our coursebooks for primary, in this case the Superminds series by Herbert Puchta and Gunter Gerngross published by CUP.

The original material consisted of an illustration, a one-sentence story and an audio track, like the one in unit 1 of level one, focusing on the /a/ phoneme and practising in a story ‘A fat rat in a black back’ (SB p. 15, sample page 6).

Together with the PostIt notes on the MiroBoard, it gave me the idea to put together a game in which the kids could really practise reading the story in a fun way and to practise the key phonics words as well as all the words the kids have learnt so far.

This is a very simple game in which the kids have to read the original sentence, close their eyes and during that time, the teacher replaces one of the cards. The kids open the eyes and read the slightly adapted sentence. Then, step by step, during the following rounds, the original sentence keeps changing and the kids continue reading it out loud. The number of rounds can be adapted to the needs and abilities of the group and the kids can also be involved in adding the words. In the regular classroom, the same game can be played with even less preparation as the only thing you need is a whiteboard and a marker.

The original sentence, based on the task from Superminds 1
One new element
All the variants in this game

I hope you have found something useful here. If so, please come back. There will be two more episodes in this series.

Happy teaching!

Over to me: presentations, interviews, lessons

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I have decided to put all my recordings in one place, mostly for myself, so that I could easily find all of them and access all of them. But, I am also hoping that they might come in handy for some of you so here we go:

In English

In Russian

Crumbs #41 Let’s look for pairs! A vocabulary game for kids

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All the pairs. Somehow the penguin, the gorilla and the mouse got left out.

Ingredients

  • A set of pictures of animals, flashcards or on Miro. That’s it.

Procedures

  • Revise the vocabulary and ensure that all the cards are displayed at the same time for the kids to be aware of all the options
  • Model by choosing a pair of animals and putting these cards aside and justifying your choice. With my pre-primary kids, I like to use the first person statements (I’ve got 4 legs etc) as this is what we do with the younger kids (to enable the kids to talk about themselves and the animals without having to introduce the additional structures and to keep it coherent with the songs that we use ie Little bird or As quiet as a mouse). I also tend to vocalise the language ie I’ve got 4 legs (for the cat), I’ve got 4 legs (for the elephant).
  • Invite the kids to take turns to make their own pairs and to describe the rationale behind it.
This is what our Miro board looked like before we started

Why we like it

  • An opportunity for the kids to use and to develop the higher order thinking skills in the EFL context
  • The students are in charge of what they want to talk about and what they can talk about. It is appropriate for mixed-ability groups.
  • Little or no preparation as the flashcards are already there, the physical cards in the offline classroom or the set of pictures on Miro which, once prepared, can be doubled easily and used only for that activity.
  • A great variety of structures that can be revised and some opportunity to learn the new ones as the kids might have the ideas that they cannot express in English yet and this game can be the springboard which will help to introduce these. If the teacher speaks the kids’ L1.
  • Lots of opportunities for adaptation and using them with different sets of words such as toys, fruit, food, transport and, naturally, the relevant structures. I like to start this game with animals because of the range of easy structures that even the very young beginner students can use in order to complete task and because of the variety of topics that can be included (the colours, the number of legs, what animals can do, what they eat, where they live etc)
  • The level of challege can also be easily adapted, for example, the set of cards can include only 8 items or the teacher can focus on putting the animals into pairs basen only on the colours or the size which are probably the two most achievable categories, both cognitively and linguistically.
  • This is a neverending activity because the cards and the animals can be grouped and re-grouped over and over again to let the students create new and less obvious links between the items. Conversly, it can be shortend as needs be.
  • As regards the interaction patterns, this activity can be used with groups, with kids working together, at least in the beginning, or in pairs if we have the appropriate number of sets of cards as well as with 1-1 students, both online and offline.
  • There is also some potential for adaptation in the area of materials. The most obvious choice are the flashcards, the mini-flashcards or the Miro board. The teacher can also create a handout with the animals pictures and/or names which the students can colour-code as they are putting them in pairs. This might be a good solution for the kids to work in pairs in the offline classroom.
  • Last but not least, this activity is an opportunity for the kids to develop the listening skills (as they want to find out the justification for their peers’ choices) and the speaking skills (as they want to present their own reasoning, too). I simply love to observe how my students start with the simplest and most obvious connections and how they venture out into more and more creative ones.

Happy teaching!