#eflideas

Upside down and inside out. How to dismantle a traditional EFL curriculum and how to spend a year disregarding the CEFR

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(Or an English teacher reflects on the academic year that has just finished.)

This is the third of the posts in the series of the Reflective Teacher that I promised myself to celebrate the end of the school year. Here you can find me reminiscing on the life of an Art teacher. Here you will find the unexpected memoirs of a Maths teacher and here (because they also secretly belong in the series) – a whole set of notes of a teacher trying to introduce law and order in Year 1.

But, first and foremost, I am a teacher of English, working hard to give the students in my classroom the tools, the imagination and the courage to speak a language. And from that point of view, this year has been a very interesting experience for an English teacher, too.

Something old…

Well, there is a lot of that!

I have been teaching English to primary for many, many years now. I know how to do it and I love doing it, really. Vocabulary, grammar, communication skills, functional language, reading, writing, a is for apple (a a apple), learning how to be a student, learning how to be a member of a community, routine, pairwork, all of that, all at once. It makes your head spin, a little bit, of coure, but then, all of a sudden, it all starts coming together and it feels great.

Introducing all the letters of the alphabet, staring our handwriting booklet, phonics stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, the first song, the first test, the first spontaneous production case, the first storybook. I have jumped through all these hoops with many generations of my students and successfully so and this year we have done it together once more.

The only thing that was different was the fact that I had a lot more time in a week and we could set aside a lot more time for practice. And that, apart from English and the ESL classes, my kids were getting a lot more exposure and practice from the History lessons, from Maths, Science, PE, Art and the break times, too. Every little helps!

Something new…

Do you still remember the title of this post? If not, please scroll up to refresh. Why? Because this is the image that I have in my head when I think of English in this academic year, here goes:

a beautifully constructed framework of the CEFR, with all the levels and their detailed descriptions, skills, grammar and vocabulary, in a sequence, neat and tidy, like a set of puzzles forming one beautiful picture, now scattered on the floor, all over the place and it is not even possible to understand what it was that they showed in the first place…

That is exactly what happened this year and that is all due to the context in which I was teaching, namely my bilingual primary school, with a group of students who were in their year 1 of education but according to the curriculum and age, in their year 3 of the BNC. And who, naturally, were a very mixed bunch as regards their L2 language skills. A very mixed bunch indeed.

Because of that we made a decision to adapt the programme and the plan and divide the children into level-appropriate ESL groups so that they all could learn and take their English to another level and, alongside that, we would teach the English and develop the skills according to the BNC. All in all, it has worked well. The kids were tested throughout the year, both as regards the reading and writing skills (milestone tests) and speaking (Cambridge YLE) and they all made progress. Hooray.

However, all of that meant that I had to forget about what the basics, the CEFR. First of all, because, from the very beginning I had pre-A1, A1, A2 and A2+ and everyone in-between sitting in my classroom. Outcomes: forget about using one single set of materials.

Second of all, we were to follow the curriculum of the year 3 of the BNC and even if we made amendments (as we did), this was nothing in any way related to the CEFR, as regards the structures or the vocabulary and we had to at least make an attempt at combining the English curriculum with our ESL curriculum. Outcomes: adapt, adjust and do your job, feeling just a little bit anxious, with the safety blanket gone.

Last but not least, I had my bunch in the classroom and in the school, for many hours a day and it was my task to make the most of it and to give them a chance and the tools to communicate in English as much as possible and that means (or it might mean) not going nicely from one level of CEFR to the other. I have already written about it earlier, in my storytelling campaign posts here, and this year I definitely had a chance to research it more and to gain even more experience.

Some of the things that meant for us:

  • introducing lots and lots of verbs, the everyday verbs (to talk about what we do in the classroom), the story verbs (in order to read and to tell stories), the hobby verbs (to talk about what we like to do)
  • introducing lots and lots of adjectives, to describe emotions and feelings (to talk about ourselves and to talk about the emotions in stories), to describe objects (all the Maths, History, Science lessons because of the comparatives and superlatives used in all of the subjects)
  • introducing structures when we needed them: Present Continuous (to describe what we are doing in the classroom, to manage the kids, to tell stories and to describe pictures), comparatives and superlatives (the BNC)
  • introducing some elements of the word formation (some negative prefixes, gerund, er for jobs) because of the requirements of the BNC
  • introducing the elements of the three basic tenses (the Present Simple, the Past Simple and will) to give the kids a chance to express themselves, to talk about the weekend on Monday and to talk about the things to do on holiday
  • learn a huge pile of words from way beyond our A2 level and not in some topical sets but because we either needed them in our phonics practice and it was ok to learn them because they were all 7-year-old-friendly words (with such treasures as: feather, together, trophy, sloth, gate, cube, arrow, pillow among them) or because we needed them for our English, History or Science lessons.
  • introduce a pile of useful phrases, way beyond our A2 level, through stories, just because we needed them in the everyday. ‘It’s impossible!’, ‘Let’s try!’, ‘You’re too loud!’, ‘Just a little bit more!’, ‘I’ve got an idea!’…

Something borrowed, something blue!

Two things that it led to is that we have actually learnt and we have made huge progress over the year, despite this being the first year of learning English for some of my kids and it meant learning some complicated vocabulary and grammar at the age of seven. The other thing it meant for me only was staying somewhat shell-shocked and puzzled at the fact that I have turned the CEFR upside down and inside out and I lived to tell the story…

I am not sure if, with this post, I really want to promote getting rid of the CEFR. Quite the contrary, I appreciate it being a part of our life, as a teacher and an assessor or an examiner. But it is not the only thing that matters and, sometimes, experimenting and playing with it or just blatantly going around it, that is the best idea EVER! Especially that the CEFR itself is one thing and the way the structures or vocabulary items are included and organised in our coursebooks, that is a completely diferent thing.

It’s been years now since I started to introduce lots of verbs, lots of adjectives and the Present Continuous in my VYL classes. This year was the first one in which I brought some elements of the Past Simple and the future will to my young beginners, just so we could talk about the everyday in a meaningful and natural way. And I am very happy with the results. Hooray to that!

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

Setting up the routine. Nine months into the course aka The end of Year 1!

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Starting the lesson

We have had the same routine for a few months now and it’s been going pretty well. The kids just loved sharing everything about their new toys and things related (lipsticks, brushes, water bottles, notebooks, candy and what not). Some of them also started to tell me about all the presents the parents would buy them. The more language, the better!

Songs

In May we did a lot of singing of our Seasons Song because this was the song we chose for our presentation for the end of the year show. The kids really liked and they loved singing it, without any help from me. We also continued to sing our ‘May May’ improvisation song. Which was mostly about how tired we are, how much we are looking forward to the summer, holidays and birthdays. We also did a few summer songs, What do you like to do in the summer? and the song from the last unit of Superminds 1 (Let’s go to the sea).

Rules and classroom language

After a very rough April, the kids calmed down and everything fell into place, more or less. We worked hard, we were focused (most of the time), we wrote all the tests but we also had a lot of fun because the really difficult and challenging topics finished and the fun units started, for example measurement in Maths and our body in English and ESL. These are the topics that lend themselves to hands-on learning and I think that also had an impact on the way the kids reacted. In a way, having survived multiplication and division, we could finally relax a bit and have some more educational fun.

Teacher in May: emotional support

Story

In May we did a great story from our coursebook, a traditional story from Turkey, ‘A fair solution’ and we really enjoyed it. We also watched a short story as part of our lessons ‘At the doctor’s’. The one I really like is the one from New Tiger 2.

Now I am looking at the story summary of the month and it looks just very disappointing, only two stories, barely 2. I think I am going to comfort myself with the fact that we have made up for it with our project activities…

Socialising

We have been doing our best as regards social skills. There were times when we had to deal with different issues, still, but we are trying.

  • We did lots and lots of pairwork in the role-plays (At the doctor’s)
  • We took part in quite a few whole class projects and I was really happy to see that the kids were working together and thinking of the whole team, like, for instance, in our ‘I can smell’ project in which we were testing our noses and recognising the smell of mint, lavender, some fruit etc and in which the success of the activity depended on the individual team members’ efforts (‘Please smell but don’t say it out loud yet!’). It worked!
  • Both of my groups tried to play a competitive game (‘But you know that one team is going to lose, yes?’) and one of the groups even asked for the more competitive version. They won, in the end, but I was so proud of them because they were willing to take a risk. It was a good first time and they really were a proper team)
  • One of the acid tests of the strength of the group was a day and a week with some trial students. I was really curious how the class would react and after the initial five minutes of rolling the eyes, they just got over it and welcomed the new kids and we all worked together.
  • It also helped that we all worked together to prepare the end-of-year show. The kids did their whole performance in Russian, a dance routine and we also prepared our song. That was a nice opportunity for bonding.
22 presents

Creativity

May was definitely an Above Standard as regards creativity and I am very happy with it. Just as well we had something to balance the heavy duty test and test preparation lessons!

  • We experimented with different codes in history and we tried to write our names and silly messages in the Julius Cesar’s code, the Morse code and the number code.
  • We worked a lot with our bodies and experimented with different senses. We played the game of I can see (guessing what might be in the pictures), we tested our noses with a variety of smells. We made a fruit salad and guessed the fruit while eating the salad with our eyes closes. We also learned how to measure a pulse and we tested how our heart behaves when we sit, walk and jump. And this last bit was my excuse to play Song 2 by Blur in class.
  • We made the X-ray photos of different organs. I mean, not the real photos but a cool craft that I designed. I really need to write about it, eventually!
  • We learned about healt problems and illnesses and we had LOTS of fun role-playing it! The secret? A set of basic structures on the board AND a pile of post-it notes for the kids to write notes and prescriptions. Nothing like the notes scribbled on the small pieces of paper, followed by a signature and the card peeled off in a quick movement to give to the ‘patient’…
  • In Maths we did all types of measurement, size, weight, volume…That meant a series of lessons that involved estimate and measurement and checking and us walking around the room with a meter, looking for the information about the volume on the packaging of different things, trying to guess how heavy our possessions are and measuring random volumes of water in the bathroom.

Teacher

I have been a tired teacher in May, a very tired teacher, in fact. All the testing, preparation, end-of-year festivities, reports, presents, good-bye letters, that was A LOT. Especially that, as an Art teacher, I also took it upon myself to have the craziest month in a year with a wide range of materials for my mandalas, salt dough creations, dreamcatchers and stone painting…Rarely was there a day in May when I would walk to school with just a schoolbag…No. There always had to be bag, too, with all the precious junk.

I managed to test everyone again according to the YLE Cambridge standards and everyone (everyone!!!) made progress. Hooray to that!

And then the kids wrote the tests, I did tear up now and again while checking them (because yes, they did great), I prepared 22 goodbye letters and small presents, I clapped a lot during both shows and then they just left. Some of them are still at school, taking part in our summer programme but many left and I know that some of them are moving, changing schools and what not and not coming back. And I had to say good-bye.

  • ‘I am not coming back, miss Anka’.
  • ‘I know. You are fantastic. Don’t forget that!’
  • ‘Я постараюсь. (I’ll try)’

Did I tear up on the spot? No, I am 100. I can, most of the time, control the emotions. Did it ruin my mood for about a week? Yes, it did. It most certainly did.

But we have had a great year, autumn, winter, spring and summer. We started the year with ‘Aa is for apple’ and ‘I can count to 20!’ and now my kids read and write and do multiplication and fractions and they ALL speak much better English than they did in September. I am proud and I will be keeping my fingers crossed for all of them. And, of course, I hope to see them again, in my classroom or just somewhere, in the city.

Happy teaching!

P.S. Please make sure you have a look at our development since September!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

The things we will do! Teaching the future form to kids

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The future!

Well, that was bound to happen! We have done the past simple and now we start every Monday’s lesson with talking about our weekends and it was just a matter of time for the future to enter our lives.

Presentation

For the context of the presentation I chose our classroom and ourselves. We already know Present Continuous to describe current events.

We started with talking about what everyone is doing and since my year 1 are creative it is never just a limited set of boring sentences, for examples, ‘I am sitting’ or ‘I am looking at the board’. There is at least one person who is doing something out of the ordinary and memorable. Sigh.

While the kids were talking, I was taking notes on the board, using their names and the 3rd singular. After the exercise was completed, we read all the sentences together.

Then I wrote the word next and a sentence about myself, for example: ‘Miss Anka is talking to her students now. Next, she will have lunch.’ The kids know the school timetable and it is obvious what will happen next, at least some things and that is what makes the context obvious and clear to everyone.

Practice

  • What will they do next? We were in the middle of the insects unit and that is why I decided to choose this particular context for our first focused task in the lesson. It followed the pattern of the previous activity in the presentation stage, only this time with bugs.
  • What will happen next? A very simple, visuals-based activity, in which the students make simple sentences trying to predict what will happen next. The only trick and the challenge is to look for appropriate, funny or intriguing pictures.
  • Dice games. Based on the success of these activities in the past tense lessons, I decided to repeat them here, with the future tense context. We did the dice game #1 with kids rolling the dice to produce their own sentences and to ask their partner (‘I will eat pasta. And you?’) and the other one, the dice #2 to ask the questions (“Will you go to school tomorrow?’). Depending on the day of the week, we adapted the context, choosing either ‘later today’, ‘tomorrow’ or ‘at the weekend’.
  • What will you do at the weekend? This is another activity that was introduced to mirror the activities we do for the past tense. This one we usually do on the last day of the week, which for me is Thursday, and we play a ball game to talk about the near future. I write the starter sentence, for example ‘I will go to…’ and throw the ball to kids encouraging them to produce a sentence. We play a few rounds, depending on the time and the focus. The ball is always in the classroom so it is very easy to add this activity to all of our activities of the day, regardless of the subject.
  • ‘What’s the missing word?’ is another one of our favourite games that we have used before, reading and choosing the missing word. This particular activity also includes the ‘What about you?’ bit which also encourages the children to react to what one of the students is saying.
  • Prediction. It is not one specific activity but something that can be used with every story we do or even in an experiment done in class and we have already had a chance to put it to practice a few times already. I still have to write the target structure on the board, to encourage production but will is slowly becoming a part of our everyday conversations.
  • I haven’t done it yet but this very topic is begging for another Dr Seuss, ‘Oh, the places you’ll go!’…

Happy teaching!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

Crumbs #79 15 words. One more way to stage a storytelling lesson

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Ingredients

  • A story that you are supposed to teach, anything from the Movers (Reading and Writing, part 5) and up, just to highlight the length. I prepared it for a story, ‘A fair solution’, from Global English 3 by CUP.
  • A set of the key words and phrases, a mix of the new vocabulary that needs to be pretaught and the phrases or words that are important for the story. Here are the cards I used.
  • A set of pictures that accompany the story. They will be available with any YLE Cambridge materials. I had three in my coursebook, too.

Procedures

  • We started with going over the vocabulary and phrases, checking understanding, drilling a bit, asking extension questions (for example: When Miss Anka says ‘Oh, we have a big test today!’, what can you say?’ (‘It’s not fair!) etc. Some of these phrases were completely new, some of them we had learnt already. I tried to include both because 15 new items would be too much. I tried to also include not only single words but phrases that feature (or might feature) in the story and that were important for it.
  • We started with the title of the story. I wrote it on the board and made sure that all the elements were clear. I tried to encourage the kids to guess what the story might be about, a story of this title and a story with all these words and phrases. This part was done in both langauges, L1 and L2.
  • In the meantime, I prepared a visual representation of all the words on the board, with 15 numbers and a symbol for each phrase or word. We went through them before the next step and a few more times during the entire storytelling lesson. I have a double English and having these on the board was a perfect solution for a quick revision activity after the break.
  • The next step was the pictures. I showed them one by one, on different slides of the powerpoint and we answered two questions. While we were looking at the slides, one by one, the kids were asked to look and answer the same question: Can you see our new words?, encouraging the kids to call out the words and phrases that might be associated with the visuals. When we finished, I repeated the question from the previous stage: What do you think the story is about?
  • The next step was reading the story. This is the story from our coursebook but since the majority of my students are still not quite able to read a longer text all by themselves, I read it out loud, adding voices, emotions and intonation. With one of the groups, we did this in the circle on the carpet, with the other we sat at the tables and the kids were looking again at the pictures at the screen. In the past I also experimented with kids following the text in their own books. At this point, I like to experiment and mix and match with this stage of the process, for the sake of variety and to find out what is most effective with developing readers.
  • At the end, we had a quick round of the general comprehension questions. We used a set of questions that are quite generic and can be repeated with any and all the stories in the world: Why did X do that? Why did the X say that? (here we can go back to some of the phrases from the set introduced / revised in the beginning), Was X clever / silly / funny / happy / sad? Why is the story called: XXX? Did you like it? Why? Who is your favourite character?
  • We went back to our tables to do the proper comprehension task and the reading / writing task. I put together a summary of the story in seven sentences which the students had to reorder and a simple writing task, expressing opinion and personalisation. You can find the task here.
  • To finish, we looked again at the words – symbols that were still on the board. I asked the kids to take turns to retell the story using these words, asking the same question: ‘Why was this in the story?’. The kids were coming up to the board, making a sentence about a story and erase the word/phrase, until we ran out of them.

Why we like it

  • The main aim of the story was the development of the literacy skills and to get the kids better prepared for dealing with a longer text. As I mentioned before, my students (the majority of them) are not ready yet to be given a text of that length (around 3 pages) to ‘just read’, hence all the adaptations. The short text that was our comprehension task was something that everyone could deal with so this is when my kids got to work individually on their reading skills.
  • My other aim was the development of the speaking skills and we did a lot of that, especially with the final activity and with the prediction tasks. The kids still used some L1 as they simply don’t have all the vocabulary and structures to express their ideas, especially when they start fantasising what the story could be about but they produced a lot of L2, talking about emotions and qualities and making simple sentences in the past simple.
  • There weren’t many opportunities to turn this particular story into a real experience but we tried. The sound of the coins is an important part of it so I took out my wallet to shake it and to make some noise (‘I can hear it’) and when the story talked about different smells of food, I also encouraged the kids to come up with different ideas for their favourite smells. In one of the groups, the kids also got involved into a debate about the silly things that we shouldn’t pay at school, like the water or the smile of the teacher etc, which gave me an idea that this could be a fun and interesting way of taking the story moral out of the story and into the real life. Next time:-)
  • I am especially happy with the set of words (and the title of this post) that created a lovely framework for the whole lesson and gave us lots of opportunity to produce the language, before, while and after the story itself. We are definitely going to use that one again.

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

Don’t eat the materials! Salty dough creations

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The language and the artist…

…were completely given up on in this particular lesson. I was considering looking for someone who created something that we would be creating but I quickly realised that the process will be the more important part of the lesson and, again, because of the materials and of the many stages, we will need time. I just wanted to make things out of the salty dough.

The art

While I was preparing for the lesson, I considered different scenarios, also the one in which we make our little things and leave them to dry for a week and decorating them during the following lesson. There are microwaves at the school but I did not want to use them. I wanted to keep everything as simple as possible and after experimenting at home at the weekend and testing the drying and colouring and I had a solution. I also tried to paint my dough while still wet and that went well, too.

I made the dough at the school, just before the lesson. I didn’t have any bowls there but I used one of the big plastic boxes and even though though it did get stuck to the box and dried up a bit, I washed it easily after the lesson. There are many recipes out there but I used this one here.

I prepared the working stations for my kids (a double spread of the newspaper scotched to the table) and got changed into our aprons.

I showed the children the dough, I explained the ingredients I used and I repeated my basic health and safety drill that is the title of this post. I showed them the tools that we had at our disposal (cookie cutters of random shapes and two small bottles to be used as rolling pins) and paintbrushes that were to be used in lieu of the little knives to shape up our creations.

I also showed the children the photos of different things that I made at home while trialling and testing: a letter A, a snail made out of one piece of rolled string of dough, a flower made out of blobs etc. I wanted the kids to get at least a vague idea of the opportunities that the dough presented.

On the board I wrote out the main stages of the lesson and they went as follows: 1. Look (at the model), 2. Make, 3. Paint, 4. Transfer to the window sill, 5. Dry. I wanted to make sure we are all on the same page and that we all finish in time.

I told the kids that since we are experimenting with a brand new material and technique, everyone can make whatever they want. ‘Anything?’, they asked, incredulously. ‘Anything! Go on, experiment and have a go!’ And they did!

The outcomes

It is possible to go through the whole process in 45 minutes, from instructions, through creation to painting and cleaning. Some of the students did finish early but we made sure everyone waited for everyone else to finish before moving on to the following stage.

The paint was dry within minutes but the cookies (that’s what the kids started to call them) were still to fragile to be transported so they were left on the window sill until the following day, when we packed them into plastic zip lock bags.

Once the creations were ready, we transfered them onto A5 pieces of cardboard, for painting, drying and safe travelling later on.

For colouring we used acrylic paints, with a pearl shine and that made them look even prettier. I was really proud of all my students because we took all the necessary precautions and there were no splatters or spatters. Our clothes, tables and chairs were safe.

The kids’ creations simply blow my mind. As usual, my amazing artists looked, thought and then went on creating in their own style. Most of them are simple cookies, cut out with a cookie cutter and painted. Some are decorative pieces, like the three hearts made for mum. One of my students thought of making a necklace and she even made a whole for the ribbon. Some students decided to create 3-D figures of their favourite things, some of them very elaborate. And of course they snatched them even before I could take a photo…

Guess, we are definitely doing this again! I am not sure when but we definitely are! Maybe they will be Christmas decorations, maybe little pumpkins for Halloween, maybe Easter egs! The salty dough will be back!

Even more things that can be done with salt dough (updated 18 August 2024)

I happen to have a 1-1 lesson with one of my students and, knowing that he loves making and creating, I decided to spend this time with craft and salty dough. Somehow, this was a very creative lesson as we could make, try and experiment and the ideas were bouncing off, back and forth. We have tried:

  • using shells and beads as decoration
  • applying beads onto an already painted surface (good idea!)
  • applying beads and shells, then painting with acrylic paint and wiping the surface gently with a wet tissue (good idea!)
  • constructing a piggy bank on a frame of a glass jar. Not sure what I can say about it, the shaping went well, but the piggy bank is still drying. The success of this one will be determined later)

Happy teaching!

Drying in the sun…

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

Materials May and Mandalas!

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Mandala, Mandala!

I was looking for the inspration for our final month of Art. I did not start this year with a curriculum for all nine months, although probably, that would have been the recommended and adult course of action. Instead, I spent all these months just getting a theme for September, October, November…

Then came May and I needed something different, something interesting and something that starts with the letter M, just like this month.

Sunflower Mandala

The artists

This was an important part of the lesson to give the kids a chance to understand what a mandala is and many different techniques there are to create it. I focused on the simplest and the most basic and straighforward meaning of a mandala representing the Earth.

We looked at three different artists who are famous for their mandalas and the materials they used because I also wanted to have a representation of a variety of tools. That is why we looked at Jamie Locke who carves her mandalas, Damien Hirst who composes his out of butterflies (I still cannot get over the fact that these are real butterflies) and Stephen Meakin who painted his.

Rabbit ‘Mandala’

The language

Only after we looked at the artists, did we go through the language for the day, namely all of the materials to be used in class and, as usual, we used the wordwall cards. The cards and the vocabulary have been consistent with what I found at home and in my local supermarket and consistent with all the materials that I wanted to use. That is why have here beautifully green mungo beans and orange lentils.

I am aware of the fact that these are not the most commonly used words, especially by beginners but I did not want to extend the langauge slot because making a mandala takes time and we have only 45 minutes at our disposal.

Goose Mandala

The art

Mandalas are beyond beautiful and, esentially, very easy to make, albeit time-consuming. As regards materials, you only need a lot of PVA kids glue (I tried to use the regular glue stick but it is not that effective), cardboard (as the regular paper will not be able to keep up with the large amount of glue) and the seeds of your choice.

Cat Mandala

As usual, we prepared the working stations on kids’ separate desks and all of the materials were placed in boxes and in bags on the table at the front of the classroom. I also had a few separated containters (deep lids from plastic boxes). The students were told to come up, choose their material, one at a time, and either take the chosen box to their table or to take some of the material into a separate lid to move them around the room. We put on our aprons and I gave our small paintbrushes in order to move the pieces around to avoid touching the glue, as much as possible. I also gave a long, serious and boring speech in both languages about not eating anything on the table. ‘This is not food, these are materials right now. We don’t eat the materials’ could be the summary.

One missing pasta piece Mandala

The actual making of the mandala is super easy and, apart from showing the children the one I made at home, I also started another one in the classroom. There are three easy steps: attaching the paper to the table with painter’s scotch, squeezing out a large blob of glue and smearing it in a circle and starting the mandala from the centre, going out and around. If necessary, another layer of glue might be added as it dries out and another layer might be added at the end of the of the process, especially for the big bits, such as the pasta pieces. The PVA glue dries beautifully and it becomes transparent, without destroying the picture.

We left ours to dry on the window sill and on the following day, I put them up in the polly pockets and kids took them home.

Why we loved it?

  • Just like the tiny pictures, this activity does wonders for developing focus and concentration. Everyone stayed focused, everyone stayed silent and they were just working beautifully.
  • It is also a lovely task to develop cooperation skills because even though we had a selection of materials and boxes, the kids still had to wait, to share, to negotiate and I am very happy to say it went well.
  • The task involves a lot of self-control as, despite the fact that all of these were hard, raw and not very tasty grains, some of my students were still asking for the permission to eat them, just to try. One of the boys even left the room because he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist but then he came back and worked well, only talking about eating our materials. I am trying to say that I was happy that I waited with such a task until the end of the year, when we had already our routines and rules developed and in place. I would not recommend doing it in September or until the group is ready for it.
  • The kids loved the work, too and, as you can see in the photos, the majority of them went for a traditional mandala, some decided to create chaos which is also beautifully represented in the world. Some of my Super Artistic Stars went for their signature items such as the rabbit and the goose or the cat which Alex, laboriously, constructed out of the buckwheat pieces. We had a few flowers, too.
  • This was one of the rare cases when I did not plan on displaying the art on the wall and all kids took their pieces home. I was worried that on the wall, unsupervised, the pieces might be picked up by some of the students and consumed. I really didn’t want to risk that and we do not have closed cases in our school in which the mandalas could be safely displayed. Plus, of course, everyone wanted to take their creations home, as soon as possible.
  • I was thinking of the ESL / EFL classes in which this kind of craft could be used and here are some of the ideas (although I feel obliged to mention that I have not used them in class myself, not in that format): a lesson on the natural world, a space lesson craft, with everyone creating their own planet, a lesson on big numbers in which we could count all the pieces used and, in a Science lesson – on grains and seeds.
The realistic representation of the world in a mandala

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

Setting up the routine. Eight months into the course

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Starting the lesson

This is the part of the lesson that is still the same: hello, how do you feel today, have we got any new students. It is great to see that they are more in charge of it right now and they are able to answer more fully, without my consecutive questions. If I forget (and that happens), they remind me to bring it back. Right now, it is more common for the kids to ask if we are going to include some other of their favourite elements or games and my stronger writers ask for the permission to put the lesson plan on the board. That is just sweet and it makes my heart melt to see that I can just dictate a very simple plan and they are able to write it down.

Songs

In April we started the lesson with one of two songs.

It was either the absolutel hit from Super Simple Song, The Seasons Song. The kids still really like it and, right now, they are really good at singing. We can properly sing for the pleasure of it.

We still continue singing our month song but in April it has completely turned into ‘I am going to sing about how I feel today’ and we had a few amazing days when it turned into proper comments on the weather (‘What is this? Where is the sun?’ on the rainy days) or an expression of our wishes and hopes (‘Tomorrow I am sleeping, All day’ one day before the May holidays or ‘Where is the summer?’ since we are a few weeks before the end of the academic year). This has been the absolute hit of this academic year!

Rules and classroom language

It is obvious that, on the one hand, the rules are in place and, finally, we almost sit through the lesson, without wandering aimlessly (that was one of our objective in January!) but it is also obvious that the kids are already very tired with the pace and the length and April has not been very easy. The overall attention span has shortened and we have dealt with more issues and outbursts of my kinds.

While planning the lesson, I am more careful with putting the activities in order and with ensuring that the serious tasks that require more of their attention are in the first half of the lesson. It is also more common now to put all the games at the end of the plan and with a question mark. We only play them if we manage to go through everything else. I also caught myself announcing that ‘we are going to do a task’, referring from calling it a game, to signal that we are not doing it ‘just for fun’. Danny Go, our hero from the previous few months had to go, too, because he stirred the kids too much and it was very difficult to bring them back to do some real exercises.

At the same time, I also introduced a new tool for the fast finishers, the ‘I have done everything’ book, with additional tasks from different areas (Maths, logic, drawing, English). The students who have finished their obligatory task can take their booklet and continue working on their tasks. We have had only one week of that so it is too early to evaluate it at this point. We’ll see how it all goes.

Story

April was a bit shorted, due to the term break and my trip, but we still managed to squeeze in a few stories. We read the second part of Marvin, ‘Marvin Wanted More’ by Joseph Theobald and it was cool to read it as it is, with only one or two verbs changed. We also learnt the phrase ‘Just a little bit more!’ and the kids recited it during the reading, when Marvin was getting hungry, which is, basically, every other page.

We also had a fantastic lesson with ‘Wacky Wednesday‘ by Dr Seuss and, last week, with ‘I can read with my eyes shut‘, which we used in a shared reading activity.

Socialising

If anyone dared to think that our eight months in the classroom might potentially mean that everyone is now everyone’s friends, they would be seriously mistaken.

Yes, we get on better with each other than we used to and it is much easier to sort out the issues that come up, admittedly. However, we still have a few issues that bother me a lot. In one of the groups I had to announce that we stop playing games because they are not ready to play. I have one student who is accutely allergic to any competitive activities and recently it turned out that even when we play together, to collect points for the group, the kids start judging each other based on how many points they bring to the kitty. And if someone brings fewer, here you are, the group is ready to troll…

I decided to put the games on hold and I annouced it, officially, but I have a cunning plan. In the time that we have left until the end of the year, we are going to work hard on building a team. Basically you can address me as ‘coach’ for now…I have a few ideas ready and I will look for more. The post will be written, eventually.

Creativity

April would get a strong ‘To Standard’ for the creative element in our lessons:

  • our patchwork project, a part of the lesson devoted to patterns and shapes, not very generative in terms of langauge but, I will be honest, I really wanted to include something like that in our regular ESL classes
  • our amazing dinosaur project that was divided into three lessons and consisted of drawing a dinosaur, filling in a fact file for it and interviewing a friend about it
  • a mini-project in our Wacky Wednesday lesson. The kids had to write only three sentences of their choice about their Wacky Wednesday and draw pictures to accompany them, so simple and so precious. We had a lot of fun.
  • April was also the month of our story (based on Flyers visuals) that we turned into a real book. I loved the fact that they enjoyed writing it and then reading it, too. We are definitely going to do it again.
An excerpt from the story
‘I ate pasta upside down’ (Wacky Wednesday)
Pure brilliance, from the point of view of illustration

Teacher

It has been a very tiring month, although it was a shorter one. I was tired (and busy with the non-school tasks) and the kids were also very tired (and already looking forward to the summer, the last bit of the marathon, before you see the finishing line and find the last scraps to speed up and cross the line in style).

But the good things happened, too. We have done huge progress in Maths and in reading. The kids are really creative and now, I can say, we read. We have had a few amazing Art classes. But I am like my students, I am looking forward to the end of the academic year.

Please make sure you have a look at our development since September!

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

‘The dot that went for a walk’ and Shantell Martin. Art Explorers

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‘Sleepy House’

The language

We continue the topic of body parts. It might not be the first topic that comes to mind when you think about the alternative art or our artist of the week but I body vocabulary is exactly what we need now. This is why we continue practising body parts in songs and in our favourite game with the body action verbs that I described before here. All in all, the language was not our main focus in this lesson and only one of the sub-plots. But it will come in handy in the following month when we are going to concentrate on the human body in art.

‘Oooooo’ (A confused one)

The artist

I have decided that this month will be our Alternative April. I would like to take the Monochrome March a little bit further and after experimenting with the colour, we are going to play with the formats and approaches and this was our first lesson in the series.

Shantell Martin is the artist that I have found only recently because she popped up on my social media but it feels like I have known her for ages. I might have. After all, her prints and patterns are everywhere and it is quite likely that I saw her on t-shirts or walls. Now I got to put a name and a face to it.

I was very curious how my students would react to her and they did not disappoint. They were curious, they looked at all the works with interest trying to interpret them and to find the words (a bonus task for reading in English!) and they really liked the fact that she is so young and that she is still alive and active. I think it is a signal for me to try to include more contemporary artists that we can connect with on one more level.

We looked at a variety of her works and talked about them a little bit, about these that we liked or really liked. We looked at different formats and modes she creates in and about her many interests that have an impact on the visual art.

However, our lessons last week had one more guest who made a cameo appearance and that was Paul Klee since he was the author of one of my favourite art quotes, namely, ‘A line is a dot that went for a walk’. I brought this up, together with the Bird and the Cat (that we re-created as a stained glass and that still makes our windows prettier). I also put a on display a lot of different types of lines as a source of inspiration.

‘A cat’

The art

Last week we worked on the A4 paper because I wanted to make sure that children have enough time to fill in the entire page. We also got a new tool – a black permanent marker, with two ends, a thick and a thin one for better results. The children were told to choose their own subject, their own types of lines and that they could combine words and lines, too.

As usual, I also showed the children how I experimented with Shantell’s style as I brought three small pieces of mine. Afterwards, we got down to work.

I know that it is easy for my readers to perhaps get an idea that I get excited for no reason or that I make everything look picture perfect for every post. I don’t. I get excited because my kids are so responsive and every lesson is a hit. It is not for everyone in the same way, it is not for everyone to the same extent but I sew and I reap.

The most interesting thing is that the basic materials did not hinder my students’ creativity. We only had the black pen and the white paper but everyone got very creative and some of my students managed to create a few different pieces. We worked on ours, moved around the room a bit to look at what other students created and once something was ready, we would give it a title. You can see the amazing pieces all around the post here. The lesson took place about a while ago but only now could I take photos of everything. I am revisiting this lesson after three weeks, I am looking at their pieces and, again, I am amazed and I am proud.

Shantell’s lesson was one of those days when I ‘lose’ most of the artwork. Not because I am forgetful or clumsy but because my students behave like real artists and they find it hard to part with their precious creations. It is easy to spot when it is about to happen because they carry them around everywhere and then, when I ask ‘Can I put it on display?’, the answer is short and simple: ‘No!’. On a good day I get to photograph what they have created and I am head over heels that I can do that, at least.

What I like about this particular artist and activity is that it could be easily adapted to any of the topics in a regular EFL kids lessons and now I have a lot of evidence to prove that from my students since they created their pieces on the topic of emotions, places in the city, fairy tales, animals and transport. And the materials are very easy to get)))

Here are some pieces created by my students:

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

Things we did! Kids and the Past Simple.

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The context at hand

If you have read this (relatively new) series before, you know that this year I am teaching in a slightly different context and that, beginning September, I said goodbye to the traditional EFL curriculum and the CEFR. On some days, it really does make my head spin, for example when I catch myself suddenly in the lesson on the prefixes im- and un- (but we really need ‘It’s impossible!’) or teaching the infinitive of purpose (but, it is a lovely and generative structure and the kids love using it and making silly sentences with it). On some other days, I gasp and I am in awe at my kids producing the language.

This was exactly the case with the Past Simple. I just wanted my kids to have it at their disposal, even if only for understanding. The Past Simple accounts for only (‘only’) 20% of the everyday use but it features heavily in our coursebook and in many of the stories we read or watch and, with time, there will be even more of it. So we started.

Wacky Wednesday Project

Presentation

First and foremost, I needed a proper context, something that definitely did belong in the past and something that we would want to talk about. My first attempt was the New Year’s break but somehow, when we got back, there was too much to share and too much to focus on. I decided to try again after a random weekend and then reinforced it right after the winter term break.

The presentation was very simple. I chose ten basic and most frequently used verbs, both regular and irregular such as: I went, I ate, I drank, I played, I rode, I listened, I watched, I liked, I played, I got. I prepared a very simple poster, in colour, with the pairs of verbs and we just tried to make some sentences to describe our weekend. The clarification was rididulously basic ‘I drink coffee’ – we do it everyday and ‘I drank coffee yesterday, on Sunday’. I also added an example in Russian, to show that we do the same in their first language, we change the verb form to signal that something has happened. We read the verbs, drilled a little bit and that’s it. I decided not to burden the kids with the differentiation between the regular or irregular verbs.

Since then, during the first lesson of the week, we have started to use these to talk about our Saturday and Sunday as we do until this day. I write a set of verbs on the board, usually up to 7, and everyone has to choose at least 4 to talk about the things they did at the weekend. About two or three weeks ago to all these ‘I went, I ate, I drank, I liked’, I added ‘I didn’t’ to broaden the scope for the kids. This way we get a chance to share the stories of our weekends and in the appropriate verb forms. Some of my students choose only the required four but some start their stories with ‘Can I talk about everything?’ and yes, of course, they can!

It was only this week that we started the topic ‘properly’. I added more verbs to the list and we started practising in a more focused way. See below for the activities that we have done so far.

Our story based on the Flyers materials

Practice

  • Matching the verbs forms using the wordwall game
  • Reading the crazy sentences on wordwall. It is fun to give the correct answer but we are also having lots of fun with reading all the incorrect versions, with the easier version (choosing the correct verb) and the more challenging one (choosing between the present simple and past simple).
  • Mr Milk and his day. We use Mr Milk and all his friends, Mr Banana, Mr Apple, Miss Umbrella, Mr Juice and many more, to tell simple stories. Children take turns to make simple sentences with the verb forms that I show and this is how we tell the whole story. In the end, we decide if it was a good day or a bad day. I have made cards, double-sided, with the basic form and a symbol to help the kids remember the meaning and the past tense form on the back but the electronic cards can be used, too.
  • The idea of Mr Milk was also used in the boardgame that I put together. Every student could talk about Mr Milk or they could choose their own character. We played the game and talked about their days using the verbs on the board.
  • Tell me about yesterday, a simple dice game. The kids played in pairs, they had to roll the dice, choose one of the two verbs (I wanted include as many as possible, hence the double set) and make a sentence, crazy or not crazy, and address their partner, for example ‘I ate a pizza. And you?’ and compare their days this way, If there is time, the kids can change partners once or twice and to continue the game.
  • A song ‘Oh what a week‘, from Superminds / Quickminds 3 by CUP. We looked at the pictures and described the actions, we listend to the song for fun and afterwards, we listen again to number the pictures and we found all the past verb forms in the lyrics, to practise reading and to facilitate the singing / reading in the future. We have been singing the song since and, in a few days, we will also write our own version.
  • Storytelling #1, based on the Flyers materials. I have used the Charlie story before and I have written about it here but this time Charlie was just a warmer for us. I pointed at the pictures on the screen and gave the kids sentence starters with the verbs for them to complete.
  • Storytelling #2, based on another set of Flyers materials. We looked at the pictures and prepared a list of words that we can see in the pictures. Kids were brainstoriming the ideas and I was writing them down on the board, in groups: people, places, emotions, objects and actions. Every word got its own number for the future reference. When kids need a word and ask for it, for example ‘Miss Anka, where is ‘students’?’, I can simply reply ‘It’s number 4’ and everything gets much easier. I printed the materials (see above), cut them up, stapled them together in booklets and gave them out, one per student. They we got down to writing our own versions of the story.
  • Storytelling #3 and the amazing Wacky Wednesday by Dr Seuss. It was a perfect choice for our classes because it includes some past tense, my kids love the idea of ‘wacky’ (or ‘crazy’) days, stories and ideas and we could actually do it on a Thursday which was a nice coincidence. We read the story because we have it in our library, I was reading and the kids were pointing at the wacky things in the pictures and we also tried to talk about these. The story is available also in a video format. In the end, we made notes in our notebooks about own own Wacky Wednesdays, writing only about three things: I saw, I went to, I ate.
  • What did you do at the weekend? This is how we start our everyday Monday lessons. I write on the board a few verbs in the past tense (I went to, I ate, I drank, I bought, I played, I saw, I rode, I watched, I made, I didn’t) and each child has to choose four things to tell us about their weekend, at least 4. We also added ‘Me, too!’ to react to whatever the kids are retelling and to involve the rest of the class. Our most recent addition is one question. I initially planned it as my question to the person who is talking but the kids suggested taking it further so right now I ask one question to the speaker AND the speaker asks me one question, too.

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

Setting up the routine. Seven months into the course

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Starting the lesson

This is the part of the lesson that is always the same: we say hello, we talk about how we are and we introduce the new students aka all the new toys that the kids have brought to school that day. It is a lot of fun to see how they are getting better at it and how much smoother it is now, compared to what it used to be a few months ago.

Songs

Our song writing at the beginning of the lesson is getting better and better. We started with the official versions of the song, ‘March, March’, but it went on for only a week or two and then it took a new direction. Nowadays, we sing two versions of it. The first one could be labelled as ‘my favourite month’ and some kids sing a verse about Christmas and Santa coming (presents, presents!) or about their favourite month. The second one is just a long and musical answer to a question ‘How do you feel today?’ and everyone is becoming more and more creative. This is definitely one of my favourite parts of the lesson these days and we usually have six or seven variations. And the language that is coming out of it! I am over the moon!

Another song that we started to sing in March is another hit from Super Simple Song, The Seasons Song. It is not a very new song, it was published a year ago but I have just found it while I was looking for something about spring. I love it. The lyrics are great and not so easy and the music is uplifting, a perfect song for the morning. We have been singing it for about a week now but soon I would like us to write our own versions of the song. I am hoping there will be different things that we can sing and love about the spring, not only the flowers…

Rules and classroom language

I have come up across an interesting problem related to rules and classroom management and I am now in the middle of considering all the implications and the steps I will have to take to sort it out.

I have realised that for some of my students our interactive lessons, so different to their ‘typical’ national curriculum classes and the approach of their national curriculum teachers have given an idea that the English lessons are not serious and that, for example, they don’t need to think about the rules that much or that they can simply op out of the activities as they would opt out of a game…I am not sure what it means yet but I know that I need to do something and introduce some changes. More on that later.

Story

We did a lot of storytelling in March. We were practising jobs and that is why we watched an episode of Steve and Maggie and turned it into a role-play. We also read and listened to our first story in verse from our coursebook, Lenny, Jenny and the Jumperoo. The story was quite long but the kids were really involved and with all the illustrations and proper staging, we made it into a good lesson.

And, after the success of the Wocket in the Pocket (which we also read again in a shared reading session), I decided that we are ready for the Green Eggs and Ham. We read it together, properly and it was a lot of fun. Our copy is a collection of five or six Dr Seuss’ stories and once my kids saw the other ones, they immediately made a plan for the next few weeks and the order in which we will read them all. I think we can say that Dr Seuss will be a frequent guest in our lessons!

Socialising

We kept working on our class friendships. We have done a lot of pairwork (surveys with different partners), we have played bamboozle, ‘Tell me’ and Wordwall Quiz, as one big team, collecting the points for our class. We have done a few ball games and we have even tried some Maths multiplication boardgames. The kids also had a chance to cooperate with each other during the treasure hunt activities as they could choose to work in pairs or small teams.

Creativity

Since our February was not the most creative on months, I tried to make up for it in March:

  • we wrote a lot of songs and this way we produced a lot of langauge
  • we read a poem and we wrote our first poem in English
  • one of the topics in March was ‘Inventions’ and we created our own inventions
  • we had a great lesson about Alfonso Pomodoro, a ghost and we used his interview with Miss Viola as a model for our own interviews with characters and we role-played these later.
  • we acted out our versions of the Steve and Maggie conversation from the video

Teacher

It has been a good month. We did our third milestones test in Maths and English and it was just great to see that so many of my students got excellent results. Although, all of them worked hard and I am proud of every single one of them! It is really a pleasure to look at how they work and get better and I even had to write a whole post about it!

A few months ago we started our dear diary project and some of the kids still continue writing and I get so much pleasure from reading them and replying. Especially when they give the notebook to me, then pester me to read it straight away and keep asking whether I have already replied or not and then they get their answer, read it as soon as possible and try to reply within the same day. We ARE communicating!

We have just started division in Maths and we are about to start unit 6 on Dinosaurs in English! Exciting!

Also, I bumped into Santa and managed to get out of him a pile of handwriting erasable notebooks and this is why I could give my kids the most amazing present that, within minutes, they started to use to write, in English and in Russian, to draw, to create stories, to take notes, to calculate Maths…

Happy teaching!