#eflkids

My house! A project in primary once more!

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One of my student’s design. Created using deepai.org

I decided to share this idea here because I love how this whole idea happened, from just one little Maths exercise into a fully-blown, multi-media, multi-subject project. It is not a story of careless teacher who did not plan the lesson properly, rather a story of a lesson that, suddenly, blossomed and a teacher who saw the full potential.

Step 1 or I only wanted to make Maths a bit more exciting

The year 2 in Maths has been, so far, quite an adventure. Especially after we survived addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and decimals… After those first six heavy duty months of the academic year, the lighthearted Maths came up. I mean, it is still fun, measurements, statistics and geometry, all of that is amazing and we learn a lot but after everything we did before, it is just easy-peasy.

This project happened when we were in the unit of Area and Perimeter and while working on a task from the coursebook ( ) which was pretty easy and straightfoward: ‘to design a garden of the area of 80 m2 and calculate its perimeter’, I realised that my students were really enjoying the task. Truly, madly, deeply. They started to add flowers, trees, huts, colours and some random animals. Maybe it was because while explaining area and perimeter, I drew my own farm and a pig and a chicken…All in all, they got a lot more into it than I expected. There was definitely a lot more potentatial.

That is precisely why for the following lesson I decided to give them a summer hut to design and to draw and to calculate. The main aim here was to follow very specific directions and information and to put together a house in which all the rooms have specific size but they can be of any shape the little architects wanted. It was amazing to see how, again, they got into it but how, at the same time, they already wanted to do more and get more freedom and to add their rooms. Obviously I had to promise that we would design our proper houses when we will have the freedom to do almost whatever we want.

Our project has properly took off in the third lesson. The task my students got was to design a house they wanted: decide which rooms they want to have apart from the main set (the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom and the veranda), make a decision about the area of each of them, to calculate the total area of the house and not have it exceed the allowed area of 200 m2 and use the remaining part of the lot on the garden, the swimming pool or the garage. The main focus here was the Maths and calculations. The follow up task would have to be calculating the perimeter, too.

In order to make the task easier I looked up 200m2 houses with real designs, to understand how big this house can be, how many bedrooms and rooms can be fit in and how it could be organised. The first thing that came up was a lovely website from New Zealand and that is exactly what we used. I printed one of the plans and colour-coded it for the kids to better understand it and we had a look at it during the preparation for the house.

The description and the photo, already in the notebook.

Step 2 Visualisation or ‘Let’s draw it!’

The design could not be done without the floor plan because that is where the real fun starts. I realised it when I was preparing my house plan. Guess what: design is not easy! Putting together all the rooms in some kind of a reasonable shape, the walls adjacent and location of all the rooms…Because I designed my own house, I could prepare the kids better for the task. The following things had to be taken into consideration:

  • the area of each room and the total maximum area of the house, the calcuations we had to make on the way
  • the colour-coding of the rooms to make the design clear and easy to understand
  • the scrap paper to calculate and to draw on not to destroy the actual design
  • the pencils, the rules and the erasers for all the kids and to tell the students that it might be necessary to fix their desing as you go along because your ideas can change
  • to allow and encourage the kids to check and to compare their projects and to exchange ideas to inspire each other
  • to model and to share ideas about the non-standard rooms like the cinema room, the library, the secret room…

This would have already been great because they really got involved in the task and the houses already became precious. And, of course, we met our Maths aims: calculating and measuring. Somehow, during the lesson, we had a student who had already finished and, automatically almost, it turned into a conversation about the house and the student really enjoyed talking about it. I decided on the spot that there must be more lessons and a proper presentation.

The floor plan.

Step 3 or ‘Tell me about it…’

Truth be told, I am kind of lucky because I have four lessons of Maths a week and four lessons of English so that gives me quite a lot of flexibility and freedom. I have the time that I can devote to the projects. On Thursday, our final day of the week, we usually have English and Maths and I decided to use both lessons on finishing the project.

In the first lesson, we were finishing our designs and preparing for the presentation. I told the children that we are going to rehearse in the classroom and then, in a separate classroom, my amazing T.A. will make making short videos of the presentations.

I prepared a template for the kids to use and it was both on the board and on the handout that they took into the recording room (‘Hello! My name is…and I am an architect. This is my house. The area of my house is…The perimeter of my house is… In my house I’ve got…My biggest room is…and my favourite room is… The task was easy / difficult and it was interesting / boring because…Thank you).

My more independent students rehearsed together and I helped out some of my less independent students. Then, my T.A. was taking the students into a quiet room and recording the little videos.

While I was preparing this stage of the lesson, I realised that I needed some grand finale and a reward for all this hard work.

Step 4 or ‘We need a real illustration’

As you can see from the photos, the drawing of the outside of the house was a part of this project as, initially, I wanted the kids to simply create it themselves. However, they got so involved in the design and creating of the floor plan that asking them to draw another picture would be too repetitive. What is more, it is not so easy to draw the house in the time we had left for this lesson and ‘just drawing’ does not lead to any language production. And using the A.I. certainly does!

Now, I know that there are many disadvantages of using A.I. and there has been a lot of talk in the recent weeks of how it abuses the copyright and how environment-unfriendly it is but it is a perfect solution for the young writers and so I decided to use it again in my lessons*).

I explained for the kids that an A.I. engine would create the images of the outside of the house if we prepare detailed descriptions for it. Everyone got a small handout and they had to make more decisions about their design: the location of the house (country, city, etc), the colour of the house, the surroundings, the garden, the fence etc. I took their notes home and typed them up and then brought the pictures to class. We had a lot of fun looking at all the photos and trying to guess which house was whose. Indeed, this worked very, very well.

The serious details.

Instead of a coda

We had a great time with the project and I am very happy with how it turned out

  • My students drew, calculated, read, wrote and spoke a lot.
  • We managed to include almost all language skills and at least three different subjects.
  • The kids had a chance to express themselves creatively and to make independent decisions but also to be the real scientists, to follow instructions and the rules, to be accurate.
  • It was important to add the last bit, the outside of the house because this was where my students really let themselves be creative. As can be seen in the photographs, the gardens filled with flowers, trees, dugongs, peacocks and dogs and the kids were really specific about the location of their houses, too.
  • I could not watch the videos being made, I only watched the final product and it was a real pleasure to see the kids speak freely and independently, adding some details and getting into a real conversation. I was really proud of them and, in a way, this project was their end-of-year project and I can say they all learned a lot.
  • We shared the videos with the parents so I hope it will also help everyone remember this year and the progress we made.
  • For me, as a teacher, this project will be a memory of how a real, fully-fledged project developed in the making and that the most important thing is to keep my teaching eyes open for new options and for all of the potential that it may hold. Knowing everything from the beginning is not always an advantage. There might always be more that is possible.
  • The basis for the project were very simple handouts that you can see in the photographs. We kept them all in our portfolios (aka the notebooks). The videos were shared with the parents digitally.
  • All of the activities described here took a total of 5 lessons. I am not sure if this is everything that a teacher can set aside for a project but I decided to keep everything in and, as always, we adapt to everything that is possible in a specific context and with a specific timetable and a number of hours a week available.

Happy teaching!

*) Do I feel guilty? No, not really. My A.I. footprint is minimal – all my words come right from my brain, I only use the visual creations and very, very rarely. The total of times I have used A.I. for my projects is still under ten. I think I am fine, for now.

**) Deepai.org can be used for commercial purposes.

Advertising April: Mayakovsky!

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The language

Because of our chosen piece for this day, I wanted to get the kids into the mode of thinking what they really like. For that reason, we revised the question ‘Do you like…?’ and different ways of answering the question (I like, I love, I don’t like, I really don’t like and I am not sure). The kids were interviewing each other using a set of mixed flashcards, with toys, sports, food and activities. We were also justifying our choices.

The artist

Our Artist of the Day in the third week of April was Vladimir Mayakovsky, a poet. We introduced him (powerpoint here) and looked at a few of his works, trying to locate the product advertised. I also showed the kids our main source of inspiration, the poster with Lilia Bryk, Mayakovsky’s muse and we talked a bit about the style and the use of colour and shapes.

The art

Our task was to prepare an advertising poster in the style of Mayakovsky, our own version of it. This time I prepared one model before the lesson, promoting ‘Create’ and I planned to prepare another one with kids during the lesson. Initially, I wanted to use coloured paper and markers, in a collage layered on the photo of Lilia. That is what I did. My students, however, decided that they had a different approach to the task and they opted for a simple drawing. Only then did I realise that, yet, that could have been a great approach, too and a set of good markers and a black and white photo perfectly lend themselves to the task.

We set to work. During the lesson with the older students, I only had two kids. The task was relatively easy, made even easier with the technique that the children suggested (and to be honest, I think that was their main reason – it was a long, very hot day and they wanted to invest as little of their time as possible) and it might be a perfect choice for the older group.

My approach, the collage, was very enjoyable, too and, personally, I had lots of fun preparing my two pictures and now I am happy because I have two cool pictures to put on the walls.

On Monday, I am going to teach this lesson again, this time with the younger group. I am hoping we are going to enjoy it, too!

Happy teaching!

Advertising April: Great Artists at work. Andy Warhol

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The language

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

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

The artist

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

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

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

The Magic Soup

The art

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

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

The Zombie Version of Campbell’s

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

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

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

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

One of my creations
The Darkness Soup
The Garlic Soup

Happy teaching!

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

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

The language

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

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

The artist

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

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

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

The art

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

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

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

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

The teacher watches and ponders…

Oh, this was one wonderful lesson!

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are we going to do it again?’

Happy teaching!

A dice story that wasn’t…Crumbs #80 One more way to write a story

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Ingredients

  • the idea this time was taken from Global English 4, with the unit 5 whole focused on storytelling. There is an activity there with a framework to write a story: you roll the dice and choose one of the options for the time of the story, the setting, the characters and the dilemma. This grid gave me the idea for our lesson and it helped me shape the preparation stage to our writing. It can easily be replaced with a much easier vocabulary set, adapted to the level of the students. And a few die.
  • a template
  • my own story to be used as an example

Procedures

  • We started the lesson in our usual way, with hellos, our hello song and an exercise to practise past tense, our main grammar thing this month.
  • We revised the main parts of a story that we would use mentioned above and the dialogue and why we have it in the story (to help us express emotions in a story better)
  • I showed the kids the template written on the board and I read the story I wrote before the lesson using the dice and the framework from the book
  • We put together a few stories, using the same framework, and a variety of set-ups: everyone rolling and contributing one element at a time, everyone contributing an element each, in turns (i.e. 9 different days, 9 different locations etc), each child contributing their own element, without the support of the book etc.
  • Afterwards, we started to work on our own stories. I kept the coursebooks open for the kids to have some sources of support and ideas but even before I managed to finish giving the instructions, some of my kids were asking ‘Can we use our ideas, please?’
  • Everyone had a handout (see above) and we were going step by step, with me modelling and creating my second story on the board and making sure that everyone was on the ball as we went along.
  • In the end, we added the title and signed the story.
  • When the stories were ready, we had a reading session and all of them were read out loud. With one of my groups, I had to suggest three options: a) the story is read by the child, b) the story is read by the teacher, c) the story is read by the teacher only (for the sake of my shiest student). I introduced all the stories and we had a round of applause at the end, for everyone.
  • We haven’t done it yet but I want to type up and print all of the stories for the following issue of our school journal so next week I am going to ask each student to write a short description of the illustration they want the A.I. to create for their story.

Why we like it

  • The dice story was a perfect introduction to the lesson and an ideal idea-generator. I decided to use the coursebook as it is, in order to expose the students to the real un-graded language.
  • It was an easy thing to write (it was short) but it had enough for funny and entertaining stories which my kids’ work proved.
  • By adding two lines of dialogue to the framework in the coursebook, it became even easier and more fun to write and to read.
  • Initially, I planned it as a one-lesson event but seeing how much they benefited from extended practice and preparation, I extended it into two 45-minute classes.
  • All of the kids got really into writing their stories. One of my students literally dragged me into the classroom, from the break, as, in his opinion, I wasn’t walking fast enough and he wanted to start work as soon as possible.
  • All of the stories that were written are great and I am really proud of my students, but there are four or five that are really way above the average, with the funny dialogue and an unexpected ending, a really good piece of work!
  • I am planning to use the dice framework to prepare a similar but simpler sets for the everyday use, for us to tell little stories in the beginning of every lesson while we are still practising the past tense. I am hoping that now the kids will be able to tell these stories in pairs.

Happy teaching!

Spring in year 2 classroom management. Setting up the routine. A series.

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First a few words of introduction…

It has been quite a while since I wrote in the series (the first episode is here, the most recent here). I was travelling in the beginning of March and I couldn’t write and later I just didn’t feel like putting together a piece, just because the schedule said so. I didn’t, I decided to be nice to myself. However, it also made me think that maybe the time has come to change things here a tiny little bit. Even in January and December, half of the post went along the lines of ‘no changes’ and I realised that we (the class) have changed so much that new solutions have to be put into use.

I will still keep notes here, because some of the things we use might be useful for other teachers and I still need this series as a way of reflecting on my teaching and their learning and progress but I will not be on monthly basis.

The routine et al.

All the new tricks I have added and how they work for us:

  • the nicknames we still use although the question I ask now is ‘Am I writing your name or your nickname?’, just to give the students some freedom and flexibility. Those that feel creative on the day can express themselves (and some do a lot of that, our current record is 8 lines of a nickname) and some just use their names, sometimes written in a different colour or with a heart. The other kids are always curious to see who is choosing what each day and sometimes they add detail, help with translation or correct me when I, accidentally, use the wrong nickname or when I use the name instead of the nickname. Which, really, just shows that they are listening and paying attention. And that’s all I want. Plus, it is definitely something that we do together, a feature of our community. When someone comes late to class or when we exchange groups and Class A comes after Class B, they try to guess who chose what as their name.
  • the improvisation song is still with us (and it has been now a year and three months). Sometimes we sing once, sometimes more than once and I love the kids continue to use it to express themselves in English, to talk about emotions, to experiment with different ways of singing certain words and how we started to use it as call – response song whenever there is a question or whenever they just feel like reacting in their own ways (instead of just repeating the verse). More creativity? Yes, please!
  • give your teacher a grade: admittedly, it is not something I do every week but I try to included it once in a while, more or less twice a month. I am trying to use different techniques like leaving notes and grades on the board or preparing cards with specific questions (Was it difficult? Was it interesting? etc).
  • the grades for the week: I still write notes to summarise the performance of the students over the week only now we have a few more categories, although these vary depending on the week. This week, for example, we had: English, Maths, Behaviour, Notebook (we are working on handwriting and neat notes) and Accuracy (a specific task we did in Maths). The kids usually get to see them on Monday and they are still really curious about them. And they care. Sometimes they want to tell everyone what they got, sometimes they check with me or ask additional questions, they always read.
  • new rules were added, too, based on what we have been going through, emotions and lessons, basically the things that seemed like something that we might use in the future. These include ‘Get it together’ (a nice call to action from a song), ‘My feelings are the message from my brain’ (also from a song) and ‘Wait’ (just because we need it, still and desperately, too!).

Story, Socialising and Creativity

All our English classes have been about stories as the whole unit in our book has been devoted to adventures, superheroes, stories, adjectives to describe heroes and we used that opportunity!

We have already finished but we managed to: introduce and properly practise Past Simple, lots of regular and irregular verbs and questions, talk about our yesterdays, we watched and talked about some clips from ‘How to Tame Your Dragon?, we talked about types of stories and why we have narrative and dialogue, we wrote and talked about our favourite stories, we wrote a short story and we read ‘Splat the Cat. The Name of the Game’ because it seems to be a perfect story for us and all the problems we still deal with while playing.

Our story lesson was particularly memorable because we created a few beautiful pieces, we had a reading session in two language, we praised everyone and I want to type up all the stories and turn them into another issue of our school magazine. I will only have to ask the kids to describe what kind of an illustration they would like to have with their story. We will only have to write some description for the kind A.I. to create them. Next week.

We haven’t done any other creative tasks, not properly, but I noticed that kids expressed a lot of interest in the creations that always dry on the window sill after my Art Explorers and I think it might be a sign that I need to think of something like that.

The teacher

I have been a tired teacher in February. I was busy with all the other project (term break camp, conference and the real life errands) but I have had quite a few good moments like realizing that we have really made progress regarding reading and writing and that we have actually learnt how to understand and use fractions and decimals.

The classroom management and bringing up the kids never stops (never never never) but we have made a lot of progress and I know we are going to be fine. It is great to know that while some of my kids keep repeating ‘I don’t like school’ or ‘I want to go home’, they also add, to each other, mostly, ‘I like English, though’ and ‘I really like Maths in English’ so there is some comfort in it, too.

Things to do in March / April

  • another story
  • going back to the more advanced phonics
  • preparation for the YLE Cambridge
  • more pairwork and speaking
  • our garden

Happy teaching!

January, January…Classroom management in year 2. A diary

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The Routine and al.

I think that, after a year and a half with my kids in the classroom and going to school everyday, I finally arrived at the point where I can say: yes, we’ve got the routine and yes, things work the way I want.

It doesn’t mean, of course, that all that time, until now we have been struggling and failing time after time (so, if you are a less experienced teacher, please do not despair) or that we are not bothered by the everyday issues anymore (of course, we are, that is what primary is about, issues, issues, issues, I don’t think that will ever go away). What I mean is that it took us all that time to arrive at an understanding what life is about: we come here, we speak English (we try!), we learn new things, there are some procedures, some traditions, some rules and both parties are aware of what we are doing here.

Our hello routine has been the same for a year now (I only realised it recently, with the first day of February as this was, last year, when we started to create our own songs), somewhere on the way we added little bits (Hello Master and the other roles, What time is it and counting days to Christmas or, now, spring). We have had our rules and our rewards chart. All this is in place and all this works.

The things that appeared recently, include:

  • the nicknames that some of the students choose for themselves on daily basis. It is not an obligation, you can stick to your name, of course, but I love to see them create and choose these depending on their mood and the day. More language production, always!
  • the rules that they wrote themselves that I turned into a poster (more of that below)
  • the birthdays we added to our months posters on the wall and the holidays and things to be looking forward to that we keep adding to it, too.

I was woried that, on coming back from a long, winter break completely wild and rowdy. They did, true, but the impact was somehow softened by the fact that my students were trickling back into the classroom, instead of arriving all on one day. That meant that we went through ‘September the 1st’ a few times in January ( = kids coming back, being too excited, too talkative, too forgetful about the rules) but, eventually, everyone got back and I got much better at dealing with it.

Story and songs

Last month was a bit lame as regards storytelling and it was my new year’s resolution to make up for that. ‘Splat the Cat and the Cat in the Moon’ came in beautifully as an extension of our communication lessons and we even managed to add a mini-project lesson to it, too. We all loved it and you can read about it in the separate posts.

Our main song is still our improvised Month Song and the kids are getting better and better and coming up with new ideas for our everyday singing. Despite the fact that we’ve been singing it for a year, the kids haven’t got bored with it and it is our way of saying how we are, what is good, what is not and what we want and whose birthday is coming up.

Apart from that we have been singing the Fraction Song from Hopscotch and we are slowly falling in love with the other videos on the channel. It is absolutely amazing that a song can be written about fraction and that it can be catchy, funny and very (very!) beneficial for Maths learning.

Socialising

There hasn’t been much of that, apart from us sharing a room, a lesson and activities so that is definitely something we should be working with in the current month…

Creativity

Here are our projects and mini-projects from January:

  • a role-play with emotions in our communication skills series
  • How do you see the world?, based on the story
  • ‘My favourite desserts’ which was our first project with A.I. Kids had to describe their three favourite desserts and the A.I. created illustrations for us
  • a few Fractions Fun lesson in which we used stickers, craft paper and just regular paper to help us understand fractions
  • coming up with names and nicknames for our lessons, sometimes a name lasts a week, sometimes it lasts a day. My favourite ones include: Crazy Dave, Pablo Picasso, Capybara Leader, Ironman, Air, Earth, Fire and Water.

Teacher

I have been a happy teacher in January. We had our test #2 and kids did really well. They barely needed help with the reading, they all just sat down and read it. My contribution involved only reading and nodding in agreement. I was really proud of them! We were reading!

We have also had a lot of good Maths lessons. To be honest, when I was writing a summary of the term to include in our end-of-term reports, I felt a bit dizzy, there was so much there and so many topics that are not so easy at all. And yet, we did it and we managed and not only that. We did a great job!

We are always having a laugh while coming up with our nicknames and it is lovely to see that some of them really to be creative, some of them choose a nickname just for this day, some – one that is closely connected to their personality, some, on some days, just opt for their own names.

A to-do list for February

  • more pairwork and teamwork (we’ve already started!)
  • a story and a creative project (we’ve already started!)
  • a new song (or songs!)
  • a long-term project (I am thinking)
  • just learn and have fun)

Happy teaching!

Henri Rousseau and a trip to the jungle

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The peacock

The language

January is our jungle month (Jungle January!) and that is why we are talking about everything related. The first lesson can be found is here.

In this lesson we continued working with the verb ‘can’, still only with ‘I can see’ but we changed the focus a little bit. I wanted us to revise and to learn the names of the jungle animals, especially on their distinctive features. That is why we played a guessing game with the wordwall cards. In order to help us guess, I chose not one specific body parts, like in other games we played, but a very distinctive feature for each particular animal.

The tiger

The artist

We invited Henri Rousseu to join us in class again, this time as the main guest. We looked at his paintings (presentation slides 8 – 15), just calling out the names of the things we can see.

I also wanted to show the kids different ways of depicting a tiger, a painting, a drawing, a child’s drawing, a photo, a logo and the Chinese symbol that represents this animal. We looked at how they are different and how they are similar and we tried to outline their distinctive features: black and orange, stripes, four legs and a tail.

I also told the kids that Rousseau never travelled to the jungle or even out of the country and that, still, he decided to paint the jungle because he wanted to do and he did, the best he could. We talked a bit where he could have got his ideas from. I realised that he is a really good role model for us, the budding artists.

The anaconda and the peacock

The art

We started with describing what the task was: to choose one animal and to try to paint it using finger and handprint and our paints, focusing on these distinctive features that we would be able to tell that it is a flamingo, a tiger or whichever animal we choose.

I showed them a few examples of the finished tasks from the internet (see the presentation) as well as my model. Before the lesson, I printed a green hand on a piece of paper (also to check again how much time we will need to wait before drawing on the paint) and I showed it to kids. While they were watching I added the little bits with a marker and ended up with an elephant.

My attempt at an elephant

I also showed them how we would be working, moving from the paints station in one corner of the room, to the tables where I attached the paper for printing, I gave out the tissue paper and the wet tissues to clean our hands, too. I also showed them how we don’t need to smear the paint on the table (covered with paper) but that we can also spread it on the palm of the hand with a paintbrush. I prepared a paintbrush per colour and a few extras for the colours that we would mix.

And then we got down to work. The results, as usual are all over this post…

The tiger
The beaver
The peacock

What I loved about this lesson was:

  • how the kids were discovering the material and the technique, thinking about and developing ideas as we went along
  • how they were learning from each other
  • how they experimented with the colours, mixing them and asking me to try getting new colours for them
  • how they made their decisions about the distinctive features of the animals they chose
  • and how sometimes they asked me to google the animals to check that they were doing a good job with certain body parts
  • how we discovered that even our dirty tissues were pretty and that they could be Art. ‘Miss Anka, can we do some more tissue Art?’
  • how children were making their own decisions. Some decided to choose very un-jungle animals, some loved the fingerpaint so much they they decided to use it in a more traditional way, with paintbrushes for colouring. And, as Pete the cat says, ‘It’s all good!’

Happy teaching!

Erik Bulatov once again. January Jungle!

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Once a teacher, always a teacher. I decided to use this one as an opportunity for all of us to learn some words)

The language

On the spur of the moment, at one point before Christmas, I decided that our January theme will be the jungle. As in: January Jungle! (Or ‘Jungle January!’, we are using both terms interchangeably.

This means only three lessons but it took me about one blink to decide what we are going to be doing and I am not saying it to brag but to share the surprise because, without knowing, I had these three lessons already in my head. They were just waiting for their cue, apparently.

I decied that we are going to practise a lot of ‘I can’ with different verbs to describe sensory experiences and in the classroom that is actually very (very) far away from a real jungle, I hope we can at least manage ‘I can see’ (the easiest one of them), ‘I can hear’ (there are the sounds) and, perhaps, ‘I can smell’, with a fragrance or two, hopefully.

In the first lesson, we focused on the general vocabulary, related to the tropical forest. We learnt and revised the words (those here) and we practised guessing, using ‘I can see’ (using these cards). With the older kids, we also looked at some of the paintings by Henri Rousseau (a preface to the second lesson in the cycle) while describing the pictures and everything we could see in them (presentation from slide 11).

The artist

Our real artist of the day, however, was my beloved (no joke here), Erik Bulatov. I designed a lesson based on his works a few months ago, during the summer camp lessons. You can find it here, it is only of my proudest creations and I really do recommend it, especially that it lends itself to many different topics and age groups.

I knew that Erik Bulatov would be coming back and the jungle month seemed perfect for it.

We looked at only a few of his paintings (presentation, slides 5 and 6) and we talked about the main idea, that is using the words as visuals, or, as I have been putting it, ‘a word is a picture, a picture is a word’. Actually, it is for that reason that I chose those particular pieces by Bulatov, I needed some clear examples.

We also looked at two of my pictures that I created as models, ‘jungle’ in English and in Portuguese. I wanted the children to see that even though we don’t really know the word and ‘selva’ is unsimilar enough, we might be able to guess (or to decode) what it tells us. I also wanted them to see an example of how different letters can be shaped into the jungle animals and plants.

Selva, or ‘jungle’ in Portuguese. But you already knew it, right?
Jungle!

The art

Afterwards, we just got to work. In terms of resources, that was an easy-peasy lesson because it required only pencils, markers and paper. I did prepare a template with the word ‘jungle’, to speed up the process a little bit. Since, however, I am dealing with a very creative and independent bunch, as it turned out, some specifically asked for the permission to opt out of the template. And, as was to be expected, some asked for the permission to opt out of the jungle altogether. Permissions were granted and the photographic evidence confirms that.

These are the pictures by two friends, working together.
Clearly, one inspired the other but the execution is different and ideas, too, vary.

We also used a bit of brainstorming (‘What fruit do we have in the jungle?’) and the internet research. This is a serious word but research it was for sure. We googled the fruit and some specific animals and items because the kids wanted to see them first before deciding which letter they could be incorporated into. I really loved to see the thinking that went into making these decisions. It was a process and they were really involved.

Balinese jungle (yes, that has been confirmed)

‘Jungle’ has only six letters but, still, it was too many for some of the students and, since we only had 45 minutes, they did not manage to finish their pictures, which, I suppose, can be seen as some kind of a failure, bad time management on the part of the student or bad monitoring on the part of the teacher…I’d rather look at it as an opportunity to see how my students were engaged. Those who didn’t finish either promised to complete the picture the next day, during the break or they came up with a pleading ‘Miss Anka, can I please take the paper home and finish there?’ It was important, it mattered!

I have also learnt that a teacher should research the topic a bit further before the lesson, even if only to refresh and to remember that, for example, there are jungles out there which, apart from toucans and piranhas or other tropical fish, might be recognised due to their volcanoes…I was surprised when one of my students started his ‘J’ as a volcano but then he told me that, ‘You know, miss Anka, in Bali…’ I accepted and ate my humble pie. And took notes))

And here are even some indigenous people!
Not the best quality but that is the only thing I managed to snap before the picture went home…

Happy teaching!

Splat the Cat and the Cat in the Moon. Storytelling ideas

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The story

This time we used the story by Rob Scotton published by Harper Collings Publishers in the series Reading With Help. It is one of the stories in the series my kids know already because it has been translated into Russian. I had a copy at home and I really wanted to use it as part of our going back to roots (aka to the procedures from year 1) when we were reading a book every week as part of developing my students’ literacy.

Underneath you can see how we used this particular story, however, these are not the only activities that this book lends itself to. This is how we needed it and how we used it.

The ideas

  • Concepts: this was, probably, the main aim of this book in our lessons. We have done a series of lessons devoted to development of soft skills in our communication lessons. Splat and Plonk differ in their opinions on what the moon looks like and they sort out this disagreement in a slightly agressive way, teasing and pushing and almost hurting each other. This was a perfect story to bring to class at the end of the whole series.
  • Another concept that I did not include or even forsee from the very beginning was the different ways that we see the world. Plonk looks at the moon to see the craters, as a great space fan, whereas Splat looks at the moon to see the cat’s face in she shades and spots on the moon surface. Neither is wrong, they only have a different outlook on the world. Plonk represents a realist (or, as we called him, the scientist) and Splat has a more creative way of perceiving the world (for us he was the artist).
  • Functional language: this was the main aim of the lesson, linguistically, not focused on any specific function or a situation, only a few useful phrases such as ‘These are definitely craters’, ‘I’ll show you’, ‘Are you ok?
  • Grammar: no obvious structure for us to focus on, since nothing stands out, however, we used it as an additional practice of the past tense. Some of the verbs my students already know (saw, didn’t see, looked) and some were completely new (nudged, hit, aimed).
  • Vocabulary: no obvious set of vocabulary items but we had to introdudce/ check such as: a notepad, telescope, craters etc,

The lesson

Here is the overview of the main stages of the lesson

  • the cover page
  • the vocabulary, I have chosen these words and phrases to introduce and to check, we read them and looked for more examples of use
  • ‘your phrase’: I have prepared a few phrases aka quotes from the story on separate cards to give out to students (one per each) to help them focus on listening. We read them out loud and the students were supposed to listen and to raise a hand when they heard their line in the story
  • comprehension task: Did Plank and Splat communicated effectively? Who was right? Who was wrong?
  • reading: I read the story from my copy while changing the visuals on the powerpoint. I created these using A.I. to match the key moments in the story and to boost comprehension
  • discussing the comprehension questions above.
  • personalisation: How do you look at the moon, as an artist or as a scientist?
  • notes: kids read and complete sentences about the story
  • the following lesson: a few chosen words from the story written on the board, the students retell the story (or elements of it)
  • there are few videos of the read aloud on youtube so these can be used in class, too. I am going to use one of them to share with my kids and I hope that, perhaps, they will read it and watch it again at home.

Reflection and more ideas

I absolutely loved the story. We listened and read, we had a little laugh at the end we had a reall nice discussion about communication and the ways of looking at the world. It even went further because one of my students suggested that the moon can also be a pancake and we agreed that this is how a chef would look at it. I also liked all of the ideas they expressed in their notes and they were definitely not anonimous. Most children liked Splat (but not everyone), most appreciated Plank’s realism (but not everyone, ‘Miss Anka, he is a bore!’) and most children liked Seymour’s trick (but not everyone, ‘Miss Anka, he cheated’).

Absolutely everyone loved the last task in which they had to come up with an idea what to put in front of the telescope lens to play a trick on both cats and this is the only sentence that we read out loud, just to compare ideas.

This lesson and this story is actually going to transform into a lot more because first of all, I got hooded on the visuals created by the A.I. and I want to included it in our Art Explorers and I love the idea of the world seen by different people, the scientists and the artists and this is where we are going to go next week.

Happy teaching!