Work with the vocabulary and structures of the unit, here the weather and the clothes
Introduce or revise all the weather accessories and all the other key words (i.e. umbrella, hat, warm milk etc)
Watch the video, with pauses to ask short questions about the video and the story. These will depend on the level of the children and their ability to produce. In the beginning we often talk about the emotions of the characters and about everything that we can see. As soon as students can use some elements of the Present Continuous or to evaluate the behaviour and the actions of the characters, the conversation really takes off.
We follow-up with a speaking activity. The yes / no quiz is an easy version and it is based on the students comprehension and the listening skills. They listen to the teacher and react with a simple yes or no, but, with time they will be also better able to produce simple sentences. The other activity, the reordering, was created for a more advanced pre-school student and we retold the story together, with the teacher reorganising the cards and helping the student produce the sentence. Sometimes it was a full sentence (‘It is raining”), sometimes, the teacher started a sentence and the student finished (‘Dr Brown Bear it talking…’ ‘to George’)
The activity can be repeated in the following lesson to give the students an opportunity to participate with more confidence and, hopefully, more language produced.
Why we like it
Kids already know and watch Peppa and it is fun to bring her into the English lessons, too.
The episodes are relatively short (around 5 min) and it is an amount of time that will not be a challenge for the students and it can be relatively easily included in a typical lesson for pre-schoolers
Although the language of the cartoon is not graded and it is possible to find the episodes that will be easy to understand also for the very young students who have just started to learn English as the foreign language.
The videos can be shared with parents and watched again at home.
In my classes, we use the videos in the final stages of the unit, as one more source of the target language and of the target langauge in context and to create some opportunities for production.
Usually, I don’t watch the videos twice in the same lesson. It might have been beneficial for the general comprehension but I am not sure about the effectiveness of such an approach. Ten minutes is a large chunk of a lesson with pre-schoolers and I doubt the kids would be still interested and focused. I prefer to pause and to chat getting the kids ready for a more communicative video-watching. In the beginning, our conversations are quite simple, very often limited to calling out the words we can see in the video or discussing ‘Is that a good idea?’, a phrase that we frequently use in our classes anyway but it helps kids reflect on the story and perhaps predict the events to follow.
a group of A2 or A2+ kids preparing for the Cambridge Flyers or the Cambridge KET exam
a set of the storytelling pictures from the exam writing materials
a piece of paper and a pen
Procedure
The teacher displays the visuals on the screen and tells the kids that they will be used to tell a story.
The teacher asks the kids to look at the visuals and decide what their character is going to be called. Everyone writes the name down on their piece of paper.
The teacher tells the kids to write down ten numbers, 1 – 10, and, when everyone is ready, to write ten things that they can see in all the pictures. These can be only nouns or a selection of nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.
The teacher asks the kids to decide what kind of a story they are going to tell: a happy story, a sad story or a scary story. Everyone decides and draws a relevant smiley at the bottom of their list.
The teacher divides the kids into pairs and sends them into breakout rooms to tell their stories. They have to use the name, all ten words and they have to make sure that their story has the mood they have chosen for it.
Back in the common room, the kids give the group a summary of their story (‘It is a story about a boy who…’)
Why we like it
The main aim for me in this particular lesson was to show the kids that even such uninspiring illustrations as the ones we used (and sadly, they were really boring this time) can be a start of a fun storytelling activity and that the final product’s quality depends only on the writers that is us.
We are preparing for a progress test and a mock test and I am hoping that an activity of that kind will get the students ready for the independent work during the test itself. Looking at the visuals and making the list helped the students think of the words that they see and it helped to assure that they will be closer to getting to the required wordcount (35 words). If they have ten on their list already 30% of the way there. It also gave them the time necessary to really look at the pictures and to start thinking of what might be happening.
From the word ‘Go’ the stories became personalised because the character got a name and became six different boys instantly, Fred, Bob, Tom and Vyacheslav among them. (‘Anka, but why Vyacheslav?‘ ‘I am not sure. I looked at him and I just thought he looks like a Vyacheslav‘).
Deciding how the story will end in the beginning also helped to shape it. It was the first time we did it and for that reason I only offered three options: a happy story, a sad story and a scary story but that list can be easily extended. We shared how we were planning to tell the story before we went into the breakout rooms and among our six stories there were three happy stories, one sad story, one scary story (mine) and one ‘ill story’ because one of my students decided that his character is going to catch a cold in the end. Anyway, from the very beginning the kids knew where they were taking their Fred and their Bob. They also knew that their partner’s story will be a bit different so, hopefully, they were more interested in listening to it. There was some variety in the group so I could put them up in a pair whose angle was different.
It can be easily done in the classroom but it works amazingly well in the online classes and this is how it came to be. I wanted to avoid sharing the visuals and wasting time on opening them.
It is easy and it can be a speaking activity in its own right or it can work as a story-writing preparation task as it was in our case. Consequently, a set of three pictures can be used (Flyers and KET writing tasks) or a set of five pictures (Flyers speaking tasks).
As a potential follow-up, the kids can write the story for homework.
Next time (and there will defnitely be another round of this activity), I am going to add a more communicative element that will give them a proper listening task and that will give them an opportunity to interact with their partner’s story such as retelling the story they have heard in the breakout rooms, creating a title for their partner’s story or continuing it (‘The next day…’). I know that choosing the best story is sometimes suggested with this kind of an activity but, to be honest, I am not a fan. Not everything needs to be a competition.
Two weeks ago I was invited to present at the monthly meeting of the Teacher – Mentor Learning Community which was founded by Anna Kashcheeva who, over the years, has been my fellow teacher, ADOS, trainer, my trainee and my trainer and supervisor. Oh, what a lovely list))
I prepared a session on laziness, one of my professional passions. The session went well, the audience were amazing and I got a lot of positive feedback. We were not recording but the presentation was followed up by a post on the community’s blog and you can find it here. Once you get there, don’t forget to have a look at all the other posts and materials.
It is actually funny that this particular post makes an appearance as only the third one in the series, although it should definitely be the Number One as I do it with my youngest students and with the lowest levels. That is the Beginning of Discourse.
Ingredients
A set of cards with some opinions or statements. These are some of those that I put together for this exercise: 4 Magic words (used with my A2 primary kids), I can speak (prepared for my A2+ juniors) or just a set of topics (used with my B2 teens and adults).
With my offline groups we also use a dice with a linker assigned to each number (i.e. 1 = but, 2 = because, 3 = for example, 4 = and, 5 = so, 6 = or)
A model sentence for presentation, i.e. It is raining.
Procedure
Presentation starts with the model sentence on the board or on the screen and the teacher introducing different linkers with different follow-up sentences, for instance ‘It is raining…’ ‘…because it is November’, ‘…but I am going to the park’, ‘…so I am not going to the park’, ‘…and it is cold’ and so on, for the kids to understand the meaning of the linkers and the differences between them. Depending on the age, the number of linkers can be limited to the most basic ones i.e. because, and, but. The others will be added later.
Controlled practice: kids try to come up with their onw follow-up ideas, still working with the same model sentence and different linkers. This is done together, as a whole class, for the teacher to be able to monitor closely.
A slightly freer controlled practice activity can go towards students using a selection of other simple sentences.
Freer practice is the first activity that is done in pairs or small groups. If this is an online class, one of the students opens the cards, reads one of the sentences. The other student chooses the linker to use and only then the first student continues the sentence. Afterwards they swap. If this is an offline class, the kids work with pairs and with a pile of cards with these sentences and they use the dice to decide which linker to use. The dice is also an opportunity to award points as the number is not only the linker they should use but also the number of points they get in this round.
Why we like it
It is definitely one of the activities (or topics) that, for me, personally, are the breakthrough and the first step in the transition from the baby English, pre-A and A1 level towards more linguistic freedom and fluency. Instead of ‘I like apples’, we get ‘I like apples because they are yummy’ or ‘I like apples but I don’t like pears’ or, even the simplest ‘I like apples and bananas’.
First of all, it leads to more production since the students are producing two sentences instead of one in the form of a complex sentence and they get more power as regards the profile and the angle of the message. It is not only ‘I like apples’ and it can develop this into ‘I like apples but only fruit. I don’t like the apple pie or the juice’, ‘I like apples so I buy them every week’, ‘I like apples but I didn’t like them when I was a child’ and ‘I like apples but my brother likes watermelon’ taking the entire conversation towards providing details, comparing the present and the past or including other subjects in it.
Naturally, sometimes these basic and more complex linkers are included in the coursebooks and they do include great practice activities. However, I like to introduce it early in the game, when the students are ready, regardless of the curriculum. This set of activities allows for a lot of flexibility and it is easy to use with a variety of levels, age groups and topics.
I have started including all the key words in the name of the activity for the sake of my online kids working in the breakout rooms, only partially supervised. When we practice in the common room, I leave the key words on the side of the screen or in the chat, for the kids to remember. It is a little bit more challenging in the breakout rooms. But, with the key words in the name, the kids can still see it even in the breakout room. The teacher only need to work a bit on developing the habit on remembering about them and on paying attention to them.
The student or the dice making decisions about the linking word to use makes it a bit more challenging but also a bit more fun. It is also a guarantee that a wider range of linkers will be used, rather than ‘but’ or ‘and’ in every single round.
The main sentence can be further extended if we ask students to produce not one but two or three sentences or if the other student is required to comment on what they have heard.
This is one more of those activities that is not ‘a real grammar / vocabulary topic’ that is introduced in the coursebook with all the follow-up activities. It is not. It is closer to an activitiy that helps to broaden the horizons and let the students look in a slightly different way at the language they are producing while speaking. It is not only a set of words that you blurt out because you understand the question that was asked and that you have an opinion you want to share. Instead, you take a moment (a very, very short one), one breath and organise the words that are the come out. One of the activities has already been published here on the blog, about One-minute essays. This is the second one in this mini-series.
Ingredients
A list of sentence adverbs
A story to create a context, any story will do. Once I used the short Alternative Math, once I used the stories of Tom Denniss and Helen Skelton. Once I simply referred to Harry Potter. It can also be any text or any listening that is included in the coursebooks.
Some practice exercises or simply, things to talk about. I normally use either these wordwall cards What would you rather do? or a set of opinions that I use in a variety of different activities.
Procedures
Introduce the idea: I normally use a set of sentences, related to the topic, i.e. Harry went to Hogwarts, Harry grew up in the house of his uncle Vernon, Harry was given the Marauders’ Map. Afterwards we add to these a few different sentence adverbs and we discuss how it changes the meaning of the sentence and how much more of weight they add to the original sentence. ‘Harry grew up in the house of his uncle Vernon’ is just a simple sentence, without any emotional gravity but once we start adding the adverbs, each of these sentence becomes a story, for example ‘Sadly, Harry grew up in the house of his uncle Vernon’ or ‘Fortunately, Harry grew up in the house of his uncle Vernon’ which can lead to a discussion on why Dumbledore made this kind of a decision.
We practise in the same way with all the other model sentences.
Practice activity number 1: a freer discussion, in pairs or in teams, about the context of the story in which students try to make their own sentences, with the sentence adverbs of their choice.
Practice activity number 2: a follow-up exercise. In the What would you rather do in which the students choose their own option, they provide justification for it and do a lot of speaking. However, it is necessary to start their discourse with the sentence adverb of their choice.
Later on, in all the other lessons, the students are encouraged to use these whenever appripriate and, hopefully, in a more natural way.
Why we like it
This whole idea and the series started in my teenage classroom (of course!) but I have also smuggled it into my lessons with adults. Successfully smuggled, it had to be added. It is probably more necessary with the exam classes but it can (and it should) be used in the general English classes.
Regarding the levels, as usual, I am experimenting on my teens who are now in their B2 but I have also been using it with my A2+ onwards students, even with some of my C1 adults who have been struggling with the spoken discourse organisation.
It worked well in class on the day but I have also noticed a long-term impact, like with the other activities of this kind. It has worked as a switch in the way of thinking. And now, when we are starting some other activities, in regular lessons or before the progress tests or exams, it only takes a quick reminder that these tools we already have at our disposal.
It was great to see how the students’ contributions became more beautiful and better organised. It was also great to see the change in their attitude and how, with this little and silly exercise, they becamore more aware of the opportunities that this particular tool gives them. They have become more aware and more powerful speakers. They have become more organised speakers.
This is the second part of the post first published in November 2021 with my Top 10 Favourite Wordwall activities. Don’t forget to check it out here! Lots of ideas there!
One or many?
Materials: A set of cards, specifically prepared for this game. This is the one we were using in our Christmas lessons.
Activities: You can read more about it in one of the earlier posts.
Works well with: pre-primary, online and offline, individuals and groups
Song follow-up exercises
Materials: As part of our Christmas lessons, we were practising the basic prepositions and singing Santa, Where are you? from Super Simple Songs. The following set of cards was used in a follow-up activity.
Activities: Teacher sings or asks the question ‘Santa, Santa, where are you?’, with every card. The kids answer, either chorally or individually, taking turns. There is also an option of extending it further, by adding how Santa is feeling or what exactly he is doing.
Works well with: pre-primary, online and offline, individual and groups
Story follow-up exercises
Materials: This particular set of cards was used as a follow-up activity to a video lesson with Peppa Pig in which George catches a cold. It is a great episode to practise the weather words, the emotions and some present continuous, if the kids are familiar with it. I have used the ‘rank the order’ template, with very simple sentences to describe the actions of the story. Here you can find the final version and another one with ‘answers’.
Activities: In lesson 1, the kids watch the video with the pauses, and the teacher encourages them to produce simple sentences about the story. In lesson 2, the student watch the video again and try to retell it by choosing the order of the pictures and describing them. If the kids are not ready, the teacher can support them by choosing the pictures and giving the students all the sentence starters.
Works well with: pre-primary and primary, online and offline, probably easier with individual students or with students taking turns, in a group.
Early reading exercises
Materials: A variety of cards for different activities. The first one was used as a part of the Christmas lessons with my ‘advanced’ pre-primary. The other two, Yes or No and Usborne rhymes were used as part of a series of lessons with Usborne’s Ted in a Red Bed and Fox on a Box.
Activities: In the first activity, the teacher is introducing the kids to the written form of the words. The teacher reads the first sound or the first syllable and asks the kids to continue. Afterwards, the card is flipped. The other two activiites use the target language and the rhymes from the two Usborne stories. The kids are encouraged to see the sentences themselves and say whether they match the illustrations (Yes or No). The other activity is a revision game for the main rhymes from both stories.
Works well with: primary and some of the older pre-primary students who are learning to read.
Draw it!
Materials: This particular set here was used as a follow up of the Usborne Phonics Story mentioned above, Ted in a Red Bed. We were also practising furniture and colours.
Activities: The students need a piece of paper, A4 or A5 and a set of pencils or markers. The teacher demonstrates the cards on the screen, starting from the first one (START: I can see a room, which unfortunately is not always the first one in the deck, I set it up before the lesson and then we go through all the cards anyway, to check that we have included everything). The kids take turns to read the simple sentences and to draw elements of their room. In the online lessons, it is a good idea to ask them to show the card to the camera after each step. It is a great activity that encourages the kids to read and to create. It can be made more complex for those of the students who know prepositions (The lamp is on the table). The same kind of a game was used to practise the school vocabulary, toys and colours (starting with a shelf), things in the park etc. The activity can be stopped whenever necessary, after 5 or 8 cards, depending on how focused and interested the kids are.
Works well with: primary, online or offline, I have only done it with individual students but I suppose that it could be adapted to the needs of a group of primary kids, too. I would start with cutting down on the number of pictures, during the first few games.
Teaching English through Art
Materials: I have found wordwall extremely useful in creating materials for my Art Explorers lessons. They can be simple flashards that use traditional photographs and paintings to introduce a new set of vocabulary for example Animals in Art. It is also easy to find beautiful materials such as these Pumpkins which we use to express opinion.
Activities: Pumpkins are displayed on the screen, one by one, with the teacher or one of the students asking ‘Do you like this pumpkin?’ and the group answering. It is also possible to include some other elements ie the colours, the basic adjectives, the numbers to encourage kids to produce even more language. I would like to encourage everyone to use paintings to introduce and practise vocabulary even if you are not teaching English through Art. And not only paintings! There is such a beautiful variety of visuals that can be used – photographs, drawings, clip art, paintings, symbols and so on. This will help develop symbolic representation and the general visual intelligence. And it is fun!
Works well with: pre-primary and primary, both online and offline, individual students and groups.
Pairs
Materials: We used this set in the unit devoted to weather, with the aim to extend it beyond the single words or even simple sentences, for example to talk about the things we do when it is sunny, when it is raining etc.
Activities:
Works well with: pre-primary, online or offline, individual and groups.
Only 7 new entries here but worry not! I am still working, I am still creating and I will be adding things here. I am sure. Until then!
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!
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)
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.
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
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.
