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Colourful Semantics in EFL?

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Have you got something that you could file under ‘professional interests‘ (or, more to the point in some cases, ‘professional obsessions’)? Mine is language production.

That is why I am always on the lookout for new ideas on how to trick my students into producing more and more. And more. Some of these ideas can be found on this blog, in the posts on the discourse clock, pairwork for pre-schoolers, using songs or cognitive skills-based activities to develop speaking. Today – a new post in the series.

It was probably one of those free-falling searches on Instagram, with no rhyme and reason, that got me to Saffira Mattfield’s (@onlinespeechie) Instagram post on Colourful Semantics. A very special moment, like when you stumble upon a proper toolbox with the screwdrivers and bolts and saws and monkey wrenches…Or, when in the supermarket, you wander into the baking aisle and, all of a sudden, all the professional decorations and ingredients right within your arm’s reach…This amazing and a very powerful feeling of: ‘I could do so much with it!’

Colourful Semantics

The approach was created in the 90s by a UK-based speech therapist Alison Bryan in order to help children develop their speaking skills especially as regards the use of full sentences, storytelling and so on.

The main idea behind colourful semantics is the colour-coding of parts of speech and the parts of the sentence and developing the habit of including all the necessary ‘ingredients’ in the simpler or more complex sentences. This is done with the use of the cards, like those in the photograph below. Subject (who?) is orange, verb (what doing) – yellow, object (what?) – green and, location (where?) – blue.

Colourful Semantics cards from @onlinespeechie Saffira Mattfield

Children start with building simple sentences by using only two cards, for example ‘The girl’ (an orange card) and ‘is painting’ (a yellow card) and putting them next to each other on the template. Later on they move to constructing sentences made of three elements, for example ‘The girl’ (an orange card), ‘is painting’ (a yellow card) and ‘a balloon’ (a green card) or even four, by adding the blue card with the location, for example ‘in the park’. They not only learn to remember to include all the elements but they can also manipulate them physically. The sentence itself becomes less abstract since it all its key elements are represented visually.

If you are interested in all the details, please have a look at the bibliography.

Colourful Semantics cards from @onlinespeechie Saffira Mattfield

Colourful Semantics in EFL? Yes, please!

Colourful semantics perfectly resonates with everything that I have been doing in my lessons. Grammar structures and the format of the sentence are an abstract concept, beyond the grasp of pre-schoolers especially those who live in their own country, surrounded mostly by their mother tongue and not exposed to a sufficient amount of the target language. By using some kind of a visual representation of the parts of speech or the parts of the sentence, we make it more accessible to them and we enable production.

This visual representation can be realised through:

  • using gestures such as ‘pointing at yourself and sliding the hand along your body to draw attention to your clothes’ for ‘I am wearing’
  • using symbols such as ‘a heart’ for ‘I like’ and ‘a crossed heart’ for ‘I don’t like’
  • using flashcards such as ‘big’ and ‘cat’ to elicit a chunk ‘a big cat’

And…colours!

While making the sentences, students will be required to use all the required colours, ‘to tick all the boxes’, this way building a full sentence or a phrase. Of course, they might require more support from the teacher who will have to ensure that they did not skip any of the elements, but, the hope is that with time, including all the elements will become a habit.

Colourful semantics in the EFL classroom: how to get started

Step one: very easy

Get in touch with Saffira (@onlinespeechie) in order to get your own set of the ready-made cards. It is a perfect way of familiarising yourself with the colourful semantics in practice and to understand how it can be adapted to our EFL context. Although, of course, these cards can be used in the EFL classroom as they are, depending on the level of your students.

Step two: adapting the idea to your groups’ needs

The materials presented below were used with a group of the second level of four- and five-year-olds. Since they were still learning online, they were not using any real cards but only the visuals created with the Miro board. The unit was built around the topic of the house and included some furniture vocabulary, the prepositional phrases ‘the cat is on the sofa’ and some of the Present Continuous based on a story as well as a song.

The boards were used to practise these phrases were used later in the unit, when the student had become familiar with all the basic components. The main structure ‘The mice are having fun’ was introduced through a song. The first time the cards were used, the teacher was a very active participant, taking turns with all the kids to make sentences. In the following lessons, the teacher only modelled the activity and was responsible for moving the pictures around in accordance with the sentences the kids were producing.

The first set was designed to support the production of the sentences with the preposition ‘on’ which were later practised in a freer practise activity (‘My room’) whereas the second one focused on Present Continuous which was later reinforced in a storybook activity.

For the time being, a decision was made not to adapt the original colour-coding system and instead, a set of colours was assigned freely to each structure, to help the children associate them with each particular components of different structures, rather than with the whole system.

Reflection time

I have just started experimenting with this approach in my classes but the first steps in the world of Colourful Semantics have been more than exciting. This is definitely not the end of that adventure. Right now I am working on a set of cards that I could share with the parents of my students so that they could be printed, cut up and used at home.

Want to find out more? Start here:

Bryan, A. (1997) Colourful Semantics: thematic role therapy. In Chiat, S., Law, J. and Marshall, J. (Eds) Language Disorders in Children and Adults: Psycholinguistic approaches to therapy. London

Bolderson et al in (2011) Colourful Semantics: A Clinical Investigation. Child Language Teaching and Therapy October 2011 vol. 27 no. 3 344-353

Saffira Mattfiled @onlinespeechie

Colourful Semantics from London Speech Therapy

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.

Crumbs #4 Sheppard Software

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Are you thinking what I am thinking?

Does the name in the title look to you like the most uninspiring name and something that in no way could be related to teaching English to children or to children in general? Yes, same here.

Sheppard Software is a perfect example of how a random name can be a perfect cover up for a treasure chest, full of amazing tools that will make a VYL and a YL teacher happy.

www.sheppardsoftware.com

Instructions

Go to https://www.sheppardsoftware.com/ but first make sure that you have at least an hour to kill. There is so much there that even an adult (who is definitely NOT a fan of computer games) gets glued to the screen and wants to try out and play and play and play. Now that you have been warned, you are ready.

The VYL teachers: start with the preschool section https://www.sheppardsoftware.com/preschool/preschool.htm and start discovering. You can find here some games to practice colours, numbers, alphabet, shapes and animals.

The primary EFL teachers: you can start anywhere. It will all depend on what topic you are planning to teach. The website has a lot to offer to anyone who is teaching CLIL, for example Maths, Science, Art, Geography, Chemistry, Seasons, History… If you don’t have any specific idea in mind, you may as well start where I started at the Food Chain Game https://www.sheppardsoftware.com/science/animals/games/food-chain/ and think of all its potential while having fun playing. Then, slowly, bit by bit start browsing through the other gems

All the teachers: do yourself a favour and start with the sound off. It is great that practically everything on the page has got the audio added on, instructions, noises for animals and so but I can tell you that even a tiny little movement of the mouse/ cursor on the screen can lead to a lot maddening noise, so beware and tread lightly.

We loved it because

  • It it is beautiful
  • It has a lot of potential for speaking activities.
  • It can be used to teach a great range of CLIL topics but it can also be used to supplement any vocabulary / structure lessons with primary and pre-primary, online and offline.
  • the games can be shared with parents after the lesson and the students can play all of them at home again (and again and again)

The Unthinkable or About choosing to stay online with VYLs.

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To online or not to online, that is the question?

No, not really. That, for sure was never a question!

Not for me, that is. I am a dinosaur teacher and I had always been against teaching pre-schoolers online. Or, actually, teaching online in general. If, before the 15th of March 2020, you had asked me what I thought about it, my answer would have been as short as it would have been decisive. No.

No. No. No.

I love my beautiful classroom, all the puppets, the flashcards…My rucksack that makes me look and feel like a proper Mary Poppins, the box with all the precious junk. How we sit in a circle to read a story and how we make stuff or play with a Magic Bag…

But, then, hey-ho, the pandemic happened and I and we just moved online. Just like that. Just to prove that the EFL teachers are the most amazing species. Just to see whether one can, in fact, develop professionally, at a head-spinning pace, learning about new approaches, techqniues, platforms, games, tools, tricks, websites, solutions…and about their effective use in the online EFL lesson.

Yes, indeed, one can. In March many of us (including myself) had very little or no idea about the online classes but look at us now. Superheroes!

But guess what? The Universe had other surprises in store for us (I mean, of course, it is 2020, the year of surprises), like this idea, here…

‘Can we just stay online?’

I don’t know about you but I have spent the last 100+ days dreaming and daydreaming of going back offline. But while I was doing this, the other stakeholders had their own ideas and this is how we (the parents, the admin and the Mary Poppins here) found ourselves discussing the options and, actually, willingly, considering choosing to stay online with the youngest children, regardless of the situation in the city.

Well, that was a bit unexpected, to put it mildly. However, once I got past the stage of the initial shock, I was able to look at it all in a more objective way (as in: not blinded by my own old age and stubbornness:-) and actually see some of the benefits, for all of us.

So here goes, in no particular order

Pre-primary online is better because…

  • We can do it! A good quality online classes for pre-schoolers are not a marketing spin. Impossible is nothing! We learn, we are engaged, we have fun, we produce, we develop, we bond. We are loving it and we are looking forward to the next one. You only need to want to make it work and just like with the regular classes, everyone needs time to get used to each other, the routine and the rules of the game.

  • It’s virus-free. Covid 19 aside, little children get ill more frequently. That’s just the way it is. It does happen that they might not be entirely healthy when they come to their afternoon English lesson or that, being ill, they miss a lesson here and a lesson there and they do not make as much progress as they could have. The online classroom is a perfect solution here: we can all participate, even if we sneeze and cough and the school and the teacher do not lose money over the classes that would have to be cancelled.

  • It lowers the affective filter. There were a few students in my groups this year who definitely benefitted from moving online. In the classroom, they were amazing and a pleasure to teach. They participated but at the same time struggled, now and again, with being separated from mum. They simply flourished in the online classroom. I can see how much more confident and at ease they are, sitting in their own chairs, in their bedrooms, with cats, toys and, most importantly, with Mum at an arm’s reach. What’s not to like here?

  • It is less stressful for the teacher. It is a little know fact that VYL teachers, in the course of their career, develop a set of eyes around their heads and can produce a pair of additional arms, on request. They are ready for everything that is happening, for everything that is to happen and for everything that might potentially happen, too. Why? Because acting in loco parentis is a huge responsibility. And a lot of stress, even for those experienced teachers. The online classroom comes with an army of the best teaching assistants there are: mums, dads, grandmas, sisters, brothers and nannies. The kids are safe, every single one of them.

  • Parents like being in the classroom. So far, the classroom has been this galaxy far-away which the parents had no or very little access to. Of course, teachers talk to parents, they explain the homework, they give feedback. They share songs and send out the invitations to the open lesson, twice a year. Now, however, the whole course is one big open lesson and the parents are a part of it. More even, they are having fun. Not because they want to interrupt or tell the teacher off, not to take over and not because they do not trust the teacher and would rather keep an eye on things. It’s because they can finally see how their children operate in the world of the foreign language, how they become more independent and how they are learning new things and making progress.

  • Parents can get properly involved now. The parents are there, they learn our songs, they play our games and they see exactly what we practise and how. If there is time and willingness, they can easily extend the English lesson time, take it ‘out of the classroom’, this way contributing to their children’s progress. During the lesson time, they can be involved in too, helping the teacher model the activity but also helping their child understand that, yes, you can sometimes speak to your mum in English, too.

  • Flexibility and frequency. 45 minutes in the real classroom is just enough for the little people. 45 minutes in front of the computer screen might be a challenge, especially if they audience is only 3 or 4 years old. For that reason, we decided to experiment and chop the lesson time into smaller bites. Now we meet for thirty or even fifteen minutes at a time but more often. The students are involved throughout and stay focused, the financial expenses or profits are the same, and such lessons are very easy to plan. The most important thing, however, for me as a teacher, are the benefits for the learning process. When you are 5, you learn quickly but you also forget quickly, so by increasing the frequency of the lessons, we create better conditions for learning and can expect better results. It is already happening!

  • The lesson time = the speaking time. The ‘time constraints’ mentioned above as well as the online format had an impact on the lesson structure and routines. The students have the coursebooks but it is used only at home, for revision and for homework. When we meet in our online classroom, it is to learn new things, to listen, to sing and to speak and speak and speak. And I really like that way.

Much to my amazement, I am a happy online teacher but that doesn’t mean that I have stopped dreaming about the offline world or that any decisions have been made. It’s too early, anyway, so I am still on the fence, just ‘sitting, waiting, wishing’, like in a song.

What about you? Has this been your experience, too? Have you noticed any other benefits of the pre-primary EFL online classes? I would love to hear from you.

Happy teaching (online or off:-)

About a caterpillar, sometimes hungry, sometimes not. An ideal EFL craft activity?

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Despite the fact that there are piles and piles of amazingly beautiful craft ideas for the caterpillar – butterfly lessons, such as https://www.k4craft.com/paper-caterpillar-craft-for-kids/, https://www.firstpalette.com/craft/cupcake-liner-butterflies.html or https://www.craftymorning.com/cupcake-liner-clothespin-butterfly-craft/, I have decided to design my own in order to comply with W.O.R.L.D principles aka my own acronym for craft activities (you can find it here)

W is for ‘Why?’

With this particular craft, the making of is only the introductory stage, namely the activity in which we are use the final product to generate even more language.

O is ‘On their own?’

I wanted something that my little students will be able to work on and complete on their own, with as little of my involvement as possible. Partially it is connected to the fact that we are developing learner autonomy, also in the EFL classroom, partially due to the fact that with six or eight children in the group, a craft activity can quickly turn into a nightmare experience if the teacher is required to help make eight caterpillars at the same time. The caterpillar still looks very caterpillary and sweet even if the folds are not very neat or even. The butterfly can be squeezed into the peg by even very young hands without much damage to its beauty.


R for ‘Recycle’

Most caterpillars and butterflies will most likely be taken home because it is not always easy to convince the little kids to leave their precious creations behind, in the classroom, at night, all by themselves, but as long as there is at least one caterpillar and one butterfly left (teacher’s), they can be invited to participate in all the class activities over and over again, with different topics, vocabulary and structures. Not all of us have the luxury of having a teacher assistant in the classroom but the caterpillar and the butterfly can play the part – model the activity, get involved in classroom management, give instructions and so on.

L is for ‘Language‘

No matter how much fun we have making something in class, first and foremost, a craft activity is an opportunity to use the target language, either while producing something or while playing with it.

This particular buttefly and this particular caterpillar were used in different lessons. We used it to retell the story of the most renown hungry caterillar from Eric Carle’s story, we used it to talk about a lesser known caterpillar sleeping through different weather days only to wake up as a butterfly (Playway to English 1 by CUP, Activity Book, page 37) as well as six caterpillars wreaking havoc in Mr Smith’s garden (Playway to English 3 by CUP, Student’s Book, page 54 – 55). The same duo accompanied me in a few spring lessons, accompanied by the great song from Kids TV 123 ‘In the garden‘ while we were practising the structure ‘I can see’ as well as the Science lessons on the butterfly life cycle.

D is for DURATION

I have used the same craft activity with my three year-olds and with my six year-olds and with everyone in-between, with only slight adaptations. This particular caterpillar and this particular butterfly are expected to take about 7 minutes of the lesson time and are made on two separate occasions in order to facilitate staging and classroom management.

The tissue paper version is more 3-year-old friendly and it does not involve any folding or careful handling. The older kids can be prepare a more intricate butterfly, by colouring a rectangle of regular white or colourful photocopier paper, coloured paper or tissue and decorating them with leftover stickers. As for the caterpillars, they can be pre-folded for the younger children, the teacher can also draw the lines where the folds should be and glue the heads on before the lesson.

Butterflies made using a cupcake case (front and back), decorated paper, paper napkins, coloured paper, a magazine (featuring: a raspberry cheesecake:-)

Step-by-step staging

Caterpillar

  • Show the final product
  • Demonstrate how to fold it, use simple instructions (‘fold’, ‘press’)
  • Hand out the strips of paper
  • Fold the caterpillar, making another one together with the kids, step by step, pause if necessary, to let the kids catch up
  • Glue on the head
  • Draw the eyes and a smile

Butterfly

  • Show the final product
  • Give out the paper you are going to use for the wings, decorate it (markers, crayons, leftover stickers)
  • Make another one together with the kids
  • Take a peg, open it, show the kids how you squeeze the wings inside (with the wings made of paper, it will be necessary to demonstrate how to gently gather the wings in the middle and how to crumple the paper), close the peg.
  • Give out the pieces of pipe cleaners
  • Bend them in half
  • Open the peg, put the antennas in

Happy teaching!

DIY Rulez! Listening homework tasks.

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DIY is the answer, in most cases. Especially in the VYL world.

All those missing, lost or non-existent flashcards, magic wands, puppets, handouts, balls, hats, masks, storybooks that we just nevermind-gonna-make-my-own-then (it really should be a verb).

DIY was the answer, an obvious answer and, yet, an answer that, on this particular occasion, took quite ages to land on the table and to become obvious.

The equation? A group of very young learners, studying online, helpful parents (but no printers at home so no customized handouts), a coursebook (but with tasks that I could make work only in the classroom), no ready-made material (and two steps away from regretting the decision to use the book altogether).

The first fifteen minutes went by peacefully, filled with sighing and staring blankly at the page in the coursebook. The next fifteen minutes were similar, only the sighs became more desperate and angrier.

Not happy at all. Until…Nevermind, gonna make my own then.

This time: Listening homework tasks! It’s been only a month but I am absolutely loving it!

How to?

  • Minimal requirements, your phone recording app will do.
  • Usually two takes are enough to record (although, suspiciously enough, as soon as I start, there is always a police car or a fire engine whee-yoo-ing just outside my window)
  • After a first few exercises, I started to type up ‘the script’ and it made everything much smoother.

Why?

  • An opportunity to take English out of the classroom and a recording that the kids can listen to as many times as they want to
  • Extended exposure to English, especially in the area of the functional language that the teacher can create, shape and enlarge as the course progresses
  • A great support for the parents, to help them work at home with the child and to structure it properly
  • Any picture, any illustration or any photograph in the coursebook (or online) can be used as the basis for it.
  • Widens the range of homework activities (see the ideas below)
  • Amazingly, it is also a great tool to practise scaffolding for teachers because you have to dissect an activity and verbalize all the procedures in simple English and only then you start think of all the micro-stages and you can hear what your students might hear.

Some of the activities we have done so far

  • Identifying pictures (pre-primary): It is a simple riddles game, based on an illustration with the key vocabulary. Most coursebooks for pre-primary include a page which introduces all the new words. In the example that I am sharing with you, I also managed to incorporate a verse from song ‘Are you hungry?’ by Super Simple Songs.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onlENphATDQ

  • Dictation (pre-primary) It is better to use a black and white picture, perhaps from the workbook
  • Any illustration can be used for this kind of an activity. A chapter usually starts with an illustration of all the key woIt’s a teddy. Brown (children circle the bear brown)
  • Identifying differences (primary). Additional listening and speaking practice in the format inspired by the YLE. You can use set of pictures from Movers or Flyers, a set of illustrations for Movers or Flyers story or your own set prepared using the miro board (my example uses a picture from classroomclipart.com and the miro icons). Students listen and describe how their picture is different. The same activity can be prepared using only one picture. In that case, the students are listen to the sentences about the picture and correct the mistakes, for example: In my picture, the white cat is sitting on the chair.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTBhq4TkE_M

  • Find a mistake (primary). The audio is a follow-up to the story / text done in class, record a summary of the story with some mistakes (and with pauses between sentences). Children listen and correct the mistakes. This is also an opportunity to expose them to a lot of past tense.The following task was prepared to follow-up a cartoon lesson from Superminds 1 by Cambridge University Press. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbwiidV_i7Y

  • Ask your mum! (pre-primary) Here, the audio is only used to set up a conversation between the child and the mum. A set of pictures (for example a picture dictionary at the back of the book) can be used as the worksheet for the kids to mark the answers they get from the parents, for example: ask ‘Mummy, do you like carrot?’ (and circle / cross the fruit that mum likes and doesn’t like, these symbols have been used in class before, the kids are familiar with them). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onlENphATDQ

Happy teaching!

Pairwork for pre-schoolers: Where the angels don’t fear to tread*

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Ha! It was working!

Again, I made it happen. They were sitting in pairs, facing each other, making riddles, answering, all by themselves. I was sitting in the corner, just keeping an eye.

First reaction? To run out of the classroom, shout it from the rooftops or, since they were just in the hallway, tell me students’ parents. But then, just then, I hesitated because, in my mind’s eye, I saw their reaction. What if I really did rush out, with a victorious ‘Your kids can play in pairs!!!!’

What would they do? They’d just look at me with an eyebrow raised. They do know that their 4 and 5-year-old sons and daughters can play in pairs. They did see it, a million times, in playgroups, in the playgrounds, in kindergartens, at home…what’s the big news here?

Indeed. If you at the types of play and the age slots when kids normally are capable of engaging, then yes, for a long time, children are only taking part in unoccupied play (0 – 2), solitary play (2-3), onlooker play (2.5 – 3.5) and parallel play (2.5 – 3.5) but even the children aged about 3- 4 do engage in associative play and, a bit later, from the age of 4, in cooperative play. And that means, that for most of the EFL students (with some exceptions as there are school which admit 2 and 3-year-olds), there is nothing, from the point of view of child development, that should prevent children from interacting with each other and working together towards a common goal, without the adult, or rather, with the adult being involved only marginally.

Consequently, they should be able to take part in a pairwork activity in an English class because why not?

Naturally, some provisions related to the age of the participants will have to be made and the whole definition of what a pair-work activity is, adapted. And things such as the inability to read and write, the level of English, the duration of the activity, the ability to stay on the task…but these are the things that we work on anyway so…

Personally, I think I became obsessed with pairwork in the early years about five years ago. The group I was teaching was big, nine or even ten students at a time. They were absolutely amazing, some of them I still teach today, but there were ten of them and I felt really unhappy. They did not produce as much as they could have as we had to focus on whole class activities. Until, one day, I had enough of that, and out of this desperation, I started taking my first steps towards pairwork. From that group on, nothing was the same, pairwork was there on the table, for this and for all the other groups. There is no way back.

This year, with my new level 1 group and with the BKC Conference approaching, I decided to run an experiment, a small case study, just to put the pairwork with pre-schoolers on a timeline, out of curiosity and for the other teachers, too.

The group

There were seven kids in that group, two boys and five girls. The youngest of my students was around three, the two oldest ones – five years old.

The course

The group studied once a week, for sixty minutes. We had a pacing schedule and we did use the coursebook. In many ways, this was a typical level 1 group. We did things in the way that I normally did them with a level one group, the only real difference was that I kept my eyes open and I kept the journal of the whole experiment. Throughout the whole project, I did plan to go through it in the most organic of ways, without speeding the process, observing the kids and moving on to the next stage when they were ready.

Stage one: weeks 1 – 12: the start of the course

During these first twelve weeks of the course, we did absolutely everything that we do when we start with a new group, including:

  • The first vocabulary sets: colours, numbers, school things, toys
  • The first functional language phrases: hello, goodbye, blue, please, thank you, who’s next, are you ready, it’s big, it’s small etc.
  • Establishing and working on the routine
  • The first everything: the first lesson with the coursebook, the first story, the first craft, the first video, the first holiday
  • Developing social skills, building the class community

Stage two: a new game: week 13

Since the kids already knew the toys vocabulary and we had played some simple flashcards games, I decided to introduce a more complex game and the basis for the whole project: the guessing game ‘Is it?’

In week 13, we played the game for the first time, ever, with the kids sitting in a circle, with the teacher leading the game. I did have to play it up a little bit, in the beginning, pretending to be student A and student B but they got the idea of the game very quickly. I did accept the one-word production but some of the older children started to ask full questions from the very beginning.

Stage three: students take over: week 14 – 18

At the time I was not sure when this particular stage would happen, I wanted to wait for the kids to be ready and I was getting ready to wait. But, surprise surprise, they were ready, already in the following lesson.

I did play a few rounds, with me in the lead and then, invited a few of them to lead the game. They did need my help with holding the cards and keeping the game going but that’s really it. It was all natural and they were more taken aback by the fact that, out of all eight of them, not everyone did have a go.

Stage four: team vs team: the stage that did not happen

When I was staging the whole process, I did plan the stage in which the kids divided into teams would be playing the game, with one set of cards.

The idea was that would be slightly more independent, at the same time not being exposed and supporting each other in the game and the teacher could still supervise them effectively.

However, when we were sitting down to play the game, one of the pairs, grabbed the cards that were lying on the side, took them and, without any further ado, started to play the game, with the child sitting nearest, using full sentences.

This is when I realized that we were ready for the next stage so we proceeded.

Stage five: pairs: lesson 19 – 24 and onwards

It just happened and it was a success, despite the fact that between the whole Christmas break took place between lesson 18 and 19 and the fact that a student came back after a longer trip. As soon as the kids saw the materials, they knew what was to come (I knew because they were commentating in Russian) and to reinforce the whole idea, I prepared another set of seats, in another part of the classroom.

Stage six: the follow-up: interrupted by the pandemic

Here, again, I can only tell you about everything that I was planning to do, and everything that I could not do because we are chased out of the classroom by the coronavirus.

The first step was to be switching the vocabulary, to push the boundaries of the familiar and the unknown a bit, and play the same guessing game with school objects and colours.

The second step was to switch the game and, hopefully, swish through a few stages and use a game to play in pairs, Abracadabra, Pelmanism or One or many.

Reflection

All in all, it was very easy and pretty straightforward despite the fact that the kids were quite young and despite the fact that we only did meet once a week. I would imagine that, if we had classes more regularly, for example twice a week, even less time would have been required and we would have met our aims even faster.

If you haven’t tried pairwork with pre-primary, then use the first opportunity and go for it!

The contributing factors

  • Seating arrangements: very important, especially for the first few times with pair-work. It does make it a bit more complicated for the teacher, to put together mini-stations with two stools facing each other or, even better, two stools at a small table, in a reasonable distance from the other mini-stations but it really does contribute to the whole project. Kids can only see their partner; they have a small working space in front of them and the other pairs are automatically excluded. Out of sight, out of mind.
  • Material arrangement: very important. Colourful flashcards are great and beautiful to look at but they proved to be too big to manipulate for some of the little hands. It was too much of a challenge to shuffle them, one of twice they did spill onto the carpet and if the kids really wanted to keep them a secret, they did press them tight to their chests and the flashcards got folded and creased. This is how the black and white mini-flashcards appeared. Even if they got torn, lost, destroyed, it was super easy to replace them. To make sure that they were not see-through and they don’t fly out of the little hands, the colourful envelopes appeared. The students very quickly learnt to associate these envelopes with this particular game
  • Material coherence: This is in order to ensure that they students will be using the full structures and that they will be using the grammatically correct language. Naturally, it will depend on the activity and the vocabulary set. In our case, we started using pairwork with toys but I decided to eliminate ‘puzzles’, ‘crayons’ ‘blocks’ from this particular game. I did not want my students to overgeneralize and use ‘Is it?’ with a noun in plural and, at this point in the game, they had not learnt the plural form ‘Are they?’ and I did not want to overcomplicate things.
  • Voices to show interest: especially in the beginning, while modelling, when the teachers themselves are their own student B and student A. A little bit of theatre goes a loooong way here.
  • Decision making: or in other words, teaching kids to be independent. In a regular lesson, there are plenty of opportunities for the students to make decisions about the lesson – choosing the colour of the stool to sit on, choosing which song to sing, which game to play, the order in which they join the circle, or who is the next one to lead the game. This way, step by step, the little people learn that the teacher is always the hub and not the only hub in this little community and it all comes in handy later on, during the pairwork tasks.
  • Leading the game: as soon as the kids become familiar with the activity, they can be given the opportunity to ‘be the teacher’ and lead the game. This way they will be producing more language but, from the point of view of pair-work, they will be also better prepared to take a bit more responsibility for the game.
  • S-S interaction: as with leading the previous point, the students should be given many opportunities to interact with other students, without the teacher. Obviously, with the little ones, these exchanges will be limited to saying hello and goodbye to each other, not only to the teacher, to students asking each other ‘How are you?’, to students giving out pencils, asking for them and saying thank you etc.
  • Pairing-up aka Clever teacher: Ideally, of course, everyone should be able to work with each other and be on good terms with everyone in the group and building these relations is one of the general aims of the course. However, getting to that place is a process and work in progress and it will take time. For that reason, it might be a good idea, to consider pairing children up in a way that will be contributing to pairwork, with the hope that the benefits for the community spirit will be secondary here. There might be two factors to take into consideration, on the one hand pairing up the children that work well together, on the other pairing up the younger with the older, creating perfect conditions for this pairwork ZPD, with one student the expert, the other the novice.
  • Functional language: We started with the key language necessary for this particular game (Is it…? Yes, it is. No, it isn’t) and only later, when the time came, we added ‘I give up!’ which turned up to be necessary. When we were about to start the proper pairwork, I added chants to give it a proper framework, ‘Are you ready? 3…2…1…Let’s play!’ to start the activity and ‘Let’s finish. 10.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1. Well done!’

If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on Colourful Semantics, discourse clock, using songs and activities based on developing cognitive skills.

References

*) This is the presentation I gave at the BKC IH Conference: Exprience, Excellence, Expertise, Moscow February 2020

How to un-sing a song.

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Can you imagine a VYL or YL lesson without a song? I really hope you can’t😊 I should probably make a list of all the reasons why we need songs in EFL/ESL and see how many there are. Some other time.

The most important one for me is that a song, any song, is a plethora of words and structures sprinkled with some music. When, after a while you take away the music, your students, even the little ones are left with a discourse. Almost.

So while we listen to songs for pleasure and while we include them in our lessons just because they are fun, for me, the teacher, there is the secret agenda, the master plan, what the Tiggers do best…But before all that happens, a song needs to make an appearance. Or an entrance…

There are many ways of introducing a song.

When I was a little teacher, I always went through the same routine of introducing and practicing vocabulary and structures first and only when the kids were ready, I would ‘summarise’ it all with a song.

Not anymore.

Sometimes I start with the song because it already includes absolutely everything I need for a successful language presentation – lots of repetition, colours, gestures, even the written form. A good example here is ‘Do you like broccoli ice-cream?’.

Starting with a video is another solution. When I first found ‘What do you like to do?’, I wasn’t sure how to go about it because it included all these amazing verbs but there were so many of them that I would need a separate lesson to go through all of them and to prepare the kids for singing. I opted for the lazy teacher approach and we just watched the video first to simply enjoy the story the song is telling. I introduced the main structure then and verbs, in batches, as it were. The kids joined in singing with the verbs they had already known and slowly we filled in the gaps.

It is entirely up to you. This year, when this song was introduced, my students already knew ‘I can see’ from the previous units and all the verbs because we had used them in different games. I had to focus only on the names of the animals.

They can be introduced, with (electronic) flashcards, gestures or plastic animals, if you have them and this stage can be done (or in some cases even: should be done) in a separate lesson, to give the students a chance to become familiar and comfortable with them.

Then comes the song itself. You can simply just watch the video and listen to the song but there are certain advantages of playing the video with the sound off. This way, the kids can focus on the plot and the concept and the teacher can slowly introduce the lyrics, pausing and asking the students to repeat or to reply, again, depending on the group. Don’t forget about the gestures, too.

Afterwards comes the real proper song, this time, hopefully, with more students participating via gestures, humming or maybe even singing.

A song is never just for a lesson. It is a real waste not to reuse the old hits because the more we sing them, the better we know them and the more we can just enjoy them!

But this post is about the follow-up activities

These activities will be an opportunity for further language practice contributing to the song becoming ‘ours’ but they will also build the road to the world in which these verbs, animal names and ‘Can you…’ questions are just the language that the kids use, freely and creatively…

Here are some examples of the games and activities that can help achieve that.

One: Pelmanism game

In the classroom, we use small cards, colour-coded. In the online classroom, it takes only a moment to prepare a set of cards in your powerpoint or on the miro board.

In the beginning it might be a good idea to play teacher vs kids. The teacher picks one blue card and the students, in turns, choose one of the pink cards to be uncovered. The numbers make the game a little bit less challenging and in the online classroom they help the students make decisions and say which card they want. Once both cards are uncovered, the teacher starts singing ‘Little bird, little bird, can you swim?’ and the kids reply ‘No, I can’t’

When the kids are ready, they take over and choose both cards, still singing and practicing the key structure and vocabulary.

When my students got to the point when they were completely comfortable with the structure, we used the verb cards to interview all the other animals that we know, using flashcards or toy animals.

This can be easily done in the online classroom, too, because the teacher can use the google images, the finger puppets or just any toys that the kids have in their rooms.

Two: Handouts, homework or classwork.

To reinforce the knowledge of the lyrics of the song and also to check the kids knowledge of certain animals, I prepared a set of handouts. These can be set as homework, if the parents have the way of printing them, or they can become and activity that you do on the screen with the whole class.

Handout a focuses on the animals from the song, handout b takes the song out and uses the other animals that the kids know. Handout c can be done with the kids suggesting the animals and asking and answering questions about them. All three include people, too (I can, my mum can, my teacher can).

We normally circle the things that each animal can do but the same handout can be used to make affirmative (circle) and negative (cross) sentences about each animal, too.

Three: Dice game

This is a TPR game that can be used during the movement stage of the lesson, from the very beginning. It uses the same visuals as the handouts. The teacher rolls the dice and ask the kids the question ‘Can you clap?’ Kids answer ‘Yes, we can’ and mime the activity. After the first few rounds, the students take turns to roll the dice and ask the question. If the kids know more verbs, the original seven verbs can be replaced with some other activities.

Singing it or saying it?

During one of my first classroom research projects at university, I did look at the scaffolding techniques that a teacher (myself) uses at the different stages of using a song with little kids and it was only because of that research and the fact that I had to record my lessons and analyse them in detail that I could look at that issue and to find the exact answers.

It turned out that during the first lesson, all eight children were using the structures from the song in a creative communicative game but because it was a new song, all of them resorted to singing the question and the answer. A few lessons later, when everything was familiar, only one still preferred to sing. The other seven were already comfortable enough with asking the questions and answering them without the support of the music. This might be an indication for the teacher to start with singing but slowly move towards spoken language, allowing the students to transition whenever they are ready.

P.S. There is craft, too but this is a post for a different day😊

Happy teaching!

Links

Yes, I can. Super Simple Songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ir0Mc6Qilo

Do you like broccoli ice-cream? Super Simple Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frN3nvhIHUk

What do you like to do? Super Simple Songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nddRGDEKxA0

www.supersimple.com/song/yes-i-can Check out their websites for lots more handouts.

And here are the links to my handouts: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GywvxbJohMINsDV9jOymZwc7ZLC4WPB_

If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on pairwork in pre-school, discourse clock, activities based on developing cognitive skills and Colourful Semantics in EFL.

Crumbs (#3): SwitchZoo Online!

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Instructions

Go to www.switchzoo.com/zoo.htm.

Demonstrate for the students how you create an animal: choose the habitat, choose the head, the body and the tail.

Divide the students into teams, let them create their own animals and then present their animals.

The kids who are listening can also be involved by asking more questions, ‘interviewing’ the creators and the animal, depending on their level of English.

Print screen and save the animals. They can be used later in a bigger project – creating a zoo, describing the animals, writing the stories about them.

Make your own using MiroBoard!

Set it as homework, ask the kids to ‘compose’ their own animals and introduce them in the following lesson.

We loved it because…

First and foremost, it is a lot of fun.

It is a great follow-up activity to any language lessons on animals, habitats, body parts of even mythical creatures.

It makes kids want to talk and write about their creations.

The website is also a great tool to learn about animals, biology and geography, climate, habitats. You can build your own biome, listen to animal sounds or feed different animals.

Happy teaching!

10 ways in which you can use gesture in your pre-primary classroom.

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The Gesture is King!

How can you tell a VYL teacher?

It could be the Mary Poppins’ bag full of markers, stickers, a storybook and random treasures that they carry. It could be because you can catch them hum ‘Baby Shark’ or ‘Broccoli Ice-Cream’ while they think no one’s listening. It could be also that it is difficult to catch them in pretty tights and dresses because many an outfit was destroyed by clumsy little hands. By accident but irreversibly, too.

Look at the hands, too, a lot more expressive than those of an average teacher, hands that constantly gesture and motion, a habit that is difficult to drop even outside the classroom.

It is true that Total Physical Response stopped being the new black a few decades ago and nowadays referring to learning styles is looked down on or even mocked. Nonetheless, the gesture is one of the vital components of the pre-primary classroom, simply because it works and it helps the teacher and the students to communicate more effectively, especially if the students are 5-year-old beginners.

One: participation

Throughout their pre-primary adventure with English, the students will always be pre-A level but as the course progresses, their vocabulary range will grow. But in the first few weeks of the course those kids really are a clean slate. Thanks to gestures, however, they can participate and be involved in class activities.

They can for example wave ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ to the teacher or other children, silently, they can participate in ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes’, touching or pointing at the correct body parts because they will be mimicking the teacher’s gestures and not because they know exactly which part of the body is the head and which ones are toes.

That is why including gestures will be important in the beginning of year although they can be used to the same effect at the start of each unit. Students, still not familiar with the new vocabulary, will react to it by miming ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘princess’, ‘sheriff’, ‘book’ etc. Before they are ready to produce the words orally.

Two: clarification

Little students cannot use a dictionary or translation into L1 because sometimes the teacher does not speak it. In that case, the teacher has limited resources to clarify the meaning of the new words. The visuals and the realia will help, of course, but adding gestures is definitely going to reinforce the meaning. Two hands together with palms touching and moving apart (a book), fingers of one hand scratching the air (a cat), the arm touching the nose and waving (an elephant and its trunk), a hand cupped around the nose (a clown), two hands touching above the head (a house) and so on…

Three: memorising

Almost automatically, adding these gestures will help to ensure that the kids will remember the words better. There is evidence that suggest that sign language and gestures in general active additional neurons and the information can be stored and retrieved more effectively.

Four: support for production

Once the gestures have been introduced and become a part of the classroom reality, they can be used by the teacher to support the language production by the students. While they are trying to answer a question or to make a sentence and if they experience any difficulty retrieving the word or the structure, instead of whispering the word or giving the L1 equivalent, the teacher can hint at the word by producing the familiar gesture, assisting the student but not actually saying the word.

Five: asking for clarification or support

Similarly, their use can also be extended to asking for clarification or support by the students themselves. Chances are that after the children have become familiar with the gestures used in class on daily basis, they will be using them actively, too.

This was one of the surprising discoveries I made during a classroom research for my MA degree. When a communication breakdown occurred, my five-year olds did resort to familiar gestures to ask for a word they wanted to use but forgot. They still remembered that the word ‘long’ was accompanied by two hands flying apart or that the word ‘sandwich’ was demonstrated by pressing two hands together, one on top of the other, even though the words themselves had not stuck in memory. The produced the gestures asking for my assistance and then, provided with the word, went on with the sentence.

Six: imagination, creativity and symbolic representation

The development of symbolic representation in pre-primary children is an important stage of their growth as human beings (Bruce 2004, p. 170) and introducing and using gestures is one of the ways in which a teacher of English can also contribute to it.

It is fascinating to observe how, at first, very young learners only imitate the teacher and reproduce the gestures exactly, as they are introduced and how, later, they move on to creating their own ways of representing certain words or phrases. And how the teacher can actually learn from the students here because their 5-year-old ways of miming a clock, a flower, a pumpkin or a melted ice-cream are much better and much more interesting!

Seven: instructions

This is, probably the most straightforward way, used from the very first minute of the course. The students, entering the classroom don’t know any English and can’t react to all the teacher’s instructions if they are not accompanied by some gestures: one or both hands being lowered for ‘sit down’, hands palms up being raised for ‘stand up’, waving the hand towards the chest for ‘come here’.

Eight: classroom management

Naturally, gestures can be used to praise the students or to show disapproval for any unwanted behaviour. Both thumbs up or a high five (or a double high five for really special occasions) show the teacher’s approval, both palms crossed at wrists might signal ‘stop’, the index finger put across the lips will work as ‘silence please’.

The gestures may vary, from class to class or even from culture to culture. What matters is that the teacher is consistent with the gestures they use with a specific group. Examples? For my youngest students the small waving hand (something similar to the way the Queen would wave hello) became a sign of warning, although I seriously doubt that anyone else would ever read it this way. For my group, however, it was closely related to our rewards chart, kids’ names on it and stars or smileys drawn next to them. Sometimes, during the lesson, I would indeed wave my hand slightly, to remind them that if they don’t stop misbehaving, I might erase one of their stars. And it worked, for us.

Nine: emotions

Knowing how your students are feeling is very important in general, but especially with the pre-primary children as their reactions and participation will be closely connected to whether they are happy, sad, angry or scared. The teacher should be able to read those emotions but children will also be taught to recognise and to express them, in English.

The first lessons will start from the the basic adjectives accompanied by gestures (a big smile and arms up in the air for ‘I’m happy’, a sad face and fingers drawing the tears rolling down the cheeks for ‘I’m sad’, a frown and stomping for ‘I’m angry’, eyes covered with both hands for ‘I’m scared’) but then more and more of them can be added. These emotions can help the teacher, too, for example to signal that they are happy with students’ achievements or sad when they are misbehaving…

Ten: bonding and creating a community in the classroom

Last but not least, everything that we do together in class, helps the children to bond and to create a community in the classroom, with its own rules and ‘traditions’. Not only songs or stories can be used that way but also all the miming games. They are easy, everyone can participate and they are a great stirrer, too.

After the teacher’s modelling and after everyone becomes familiar with the game, the kids, one at a time, are allowed to lead the game and to suggest what you all could mime. And this is when the real fun begins.

It doesn’t have to be very complicated, only the emotion adjectives and fruit, pets, school objects, anything you are studying at the moment. Have you ever tried to mime a cat? Probably yes. Have you ever tried to mime a happy cat, a sad cat, a sleepy cat? Yes? Then you should definitely try to mime an angry pencil then!

I wonder if I have managed to convince you, dear reader, that the gesture is the absolute king of the VYL world…

Happy teaching!

T.Bruce (2004), Using symblos,in: T. Bruce, Developing Learning in Early Childhood, London: Paul Chapman Publishing, pp 170 – 195