#eflkids

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

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

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

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

Something old…

Well, there is a lot of that!

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

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

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

Something new…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the things that meant for us:

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

Something borrowed, something blue!

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

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

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

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.

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

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Starting the lesson

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

Songs

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

Rules and classroom language

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

Teacher in May: emotional support

Story

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

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

Socialising

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

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

Creativity

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

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

Teacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy teaching!

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

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.

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

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The future!

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

Presentation

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

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

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

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

Practice

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

Happy teaching!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.

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

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Ingredients

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

Procedures

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

Why we like it

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

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.

Don’t eat the materials! Salty dough creations

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The language and the artist…

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

The art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The outcomes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy teaching!

Drying in the sun…

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.

Materials May and Mandalas!

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Mandala, Mandala!

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

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

Sunflower Mandala

The artists

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

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

Rabbit ‘Mandala’

The language

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

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

Goose Mandala

The art

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

Cat Mandala

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

One missing pasta piece Mandala

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

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

Why we loved it?

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

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.

Who are you, dear reader?

by

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.

It is completely anonymous, I am not collecting any data and there are no obligatory questions. I would just like to know who you are, how you have found my blog and why you are reading my posts. Apart from satisfying my curiosity, it will also help me understand which articles and themes are the most interesting or popular for my audience. 

You can find it here.

Thank you so much! 

Happy teaching!

Tiny pictures. Alternative April #4

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‘Anka with fireworks’, my name card by one of my artists

Let’s go alternative in April!

We did! In every possible way.

The size

This was the final lesson in our beautiful and exciting series of the Alternative April series. I really wanted to experiment with the size of the paper. Initially, I wanted us to paint something really big and then something really small in order to really experience the difference first hand. However, based on how the lesson with the older kids was going (in one word: too slow), I changed that for the lesson with the younger kids and opted for the A7 only. We were working well but the creative process, the decisions and the composition, takes time and I didn’t want to rush us and in the second lesson I decided to keep things simple: just the little picture.

The materials

Initially, I had the wild idea of letting the kids choose the medium that they want to work with. It is not a bad idea but, I will be honest, the preparations for its implementation need to be more detailed and organised in a slightly different way to what I did. Next time I will and next time will be better.

In the end, my older students went for the simplest and the most basic, pencils and black markers, and with my younger group I chose for all of us and we worked with watercolours.

The Zebra Heart. Print.

The artist of the day…

didn’t come. The first reason for that was that I did not want to choose one and I felt conflicted about it. On the one hand, I really wanted to stick to the framework that I created for our course and we had always had at least one Master to inspire us. On the other hand, the topic that I chose for the lesson, namely ‘Spring’, is such an open-ended and all-embracing topic, that looking for the one was a task doomed to a failure. Plus, I knew that the format would be enough of a challenge and I wanted to give the children the comfort of working with it. I was worried that I would be limiting them too much, with the artist, the format, the topic and the resource. I decided against it. We sang the song, said hello, brainstormed all the associations with the word ‘spring’ and looked very briefly at a selection of paintings showing spring, without singling anyone out.

And then sat down to work.

How it all went

I know that I sound like a broken record when I say it but I will do it again: This was one of my favourite lessons ever and the reason for that is that, again, we set off on an amazing, 45-minute creative journey.

  • We all had to be very careful with choosing the topic for our work. The A7 format is a very small one and you have to take into account how small certain elements are and how much effort it would take to execute them.
  • All kids had three pieces of the A7 paper, attached to the table with the painter’s scotch (necessary!) so they could experiment with different approaches and they really did. The first pictures were usually the most cautious ones, the easiest ones and the least experimentative. However, since there were more pieces available, I could see how much braver and more confident they became in their following steps. Even today, while looking at the pictures, I can tell the order in which they were painted by particular kids. And it is amazing. For example, the triptych in red by Egorka, who started with a scene from Mars, all in red, then moved on to a superhero’s portrait and finished with what he called ‘a zebra heart’, in black and red that ended up being a print. Why? Because he noticed that the paper towels we had on the tables had an interesting pattern and he decided to experiment. Precious.
  • Three of my students painted only one picture but it is because they decided to make it more detailed and, naturally, these required more time, effort and attention. The other children went for a triptych and, one way or another, these three were connected by a common theme.
  • One of those three is the first in the world case of the Snail Art in which the artist traces the slime trail left on paper by her pet snail. Which, of course, was her own idea. No snails were harm in the production of this piece.
  • It turned out that this kind of art is a perfect exercise for improving focus and concentration. It worked like magic. For that reason it might be an interesting activity to improve in the general English classes, for example. I can easily picture it in our ESL / EFL courses, especially that the topic can be easily adapted to match the curriculum and it does not eat up a large part of your lesson. And if you don’t want to get into the whole watercolour mess, the same can be done with markers or coloured pencils.
  • For the time ever, I had not painted my picture before the lesson to show the kids. I wanted to experience the change of focus myself and I told them about it. This was also something that we did for the first time ever.
  • Having three pieces of paper came in handy with one more thing. As soon as I announced the topic of our lesson, the same question was asked, almost immediately. ‘Can we paint something we want?’ I mean, I always say yes in the end and inside of me there is one happy teacher celebrating the independence and the artistic freedom that my little kids want to exercise. But we did negotiate a tiny little bit, too and, in the end, they agreed that since we have three bits of paper, a lot can be done. Something that the teacher suggests, something that we really, really want to do…

It is beyond fascinating how much impact the A7 format had on our art, composition and work. Five stars, highly recommended. I hope you enjoy visiting our little gallery in this post.

The sun
The sky
The snail letters
The Snail Art

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.

Setting up the routine. Eight months into the course

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Starting the lesson

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

Songs

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

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

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

Rules and classroom language

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

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

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

Story

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

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

Socialising

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

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

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

Creativity

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

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

Teacher

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

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

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

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.

Behind the scenes. The emotional workload of a primary school teacher.

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Our beautiful ‘patchwork’, all 20 pieces together (one was immediately stashed in the bag to be taken home)

Last Thursday

Five lessons on a regular Thursday, English, a double Maths with 1B and a double ESL with 1A, a nice, short day, with the cherry on the cake being the fact that for me it is the last day of the week. Rounding up, in a way.

What did I do at work last Thursday? Here is the list:

  • supported a student and helped him deal with distress related to his inability to deal with a task in a subject that he normally excells at. He got upset, abandoned the task but then he calmed down and he decided to catch up and to finish the task, sacrificing his break and a part of the following lesson but he did complete the task. I told him I was proud of him for not giving up.
  • went through another refusal to deal with the task with another student. We talked about students making decisions and teachers respecting those decisions but also about the fact that if it refers to a test, the teacher will have to grade the test as it is. The student thought about it and decided to take part after all.
  • listened to two students who had a disagreement and helped to deal with anger and tears
  • created opportunities for the students to develop their social skills by sharing resources, waiting for their turn to receive them and to collect them and to learn how to respect the other students’ work, everyone’s right to work in silence and in peace
  • gave the students an opportunity to express themselves through art (see the photo above) and to be proud of their work
  • created opportunities to develop cognitive skills and to see the world through shapes and patterns
  • help to learn to deal with failure during the artistic activity by showing how to solve problems with water, paints, splashes and other artistic disasters
  • cheered on the growth and developement by listening to at least four stories about the milk teeth falling out, shaking, getting lost and found
  • took part in rejoicing the fact that the holidays at the dacha, at the seaside and at gran’s are coming
  • welcomed a child coming back after a long absence (The best entry ever, by the way. No hellos but instead ‘I think I have lost my shoes’) and heard all the stories from the past two weeks.
  • cheered, sympathised and laughed at everything that three Pikachus did over the previous 24 hours
  • gave a chance for the students to lead the lesson
  • witnessed two serious meltdowns that were handled by the children’s personal tutors.
  • taken care of the fast finishers and started a new procedure of ‘I Have Done Everything Book’

A bit much, no? But wait, I haven’t told you yet ANYTHING about the actual learning that we did that day. English and ESL: it was shapes and patterns, in Maths – division using the bus stop method. And it was not even any special day, just a regular Thursday.

Sigh.

The patchwork did it!

I do sigh a lot, actually. I have no idea what it looks like to the outsiders and the passers-by, but, indeed, it is one of the easiest way of letting at least some of the pressure out of the system. Thursday was no different, I was sighing a lot, especially because of the patchwork.

The kids had left already, the classroom was back to normal, I was just organising the finished pictures on the window sill to dry them in the sun and talking to my T.A. I looked at the pictures, the patterns wonderfully chosen, and the colours to match, the paintings looking just amazing separately and together, as a set, too. I thought that they were beautiful and that they are going to make a beautiful photograph and that I am proud of my kids. And then I realised that nobody, looking at the photograph, here on the blog, on the social media or in the parents’ chat, nobody will be able to tell how much effort went into it, how much drama accompanied it and how much it actually took, this photograph. We will file it under ‘pretty’ (where it does belong!) and we will never talk about the emotional cost of this whole adventure, this whole day.

Absolutely the same can be said about any other handout, activity, test, progress made, painting, lesson and sometimes even a sentence. Guess what, dear reader, I have seen it once and I cannot unsee it!

I started to read.

A photo from 10 Incredible Scenes In Pirates Of The Caribbean Movies Fans Still Love (screenrant.com) Clip here. This is how I see myself in the classroom.

The emotional burden of the everday teacher’s life

It turns out that teachers are the professional group among the lowest scorers as regards health and well-being (studies by Johnson et al.). We are in good company, of course, together with ambulance workers, social services, customer services and prison and police officers.

On the one hand, there is a tendency to highlight the levels of stress related to the number of years of experience, drawing attention to the fact that newly qualified teachers are at an especially high risk of falling prey to burnout (Linqvist et al.) which is easy to understand as we all, including the human behind the words here, remember the dread and the stress that came together with taking the first step in a completely uncharted territory of the school on our first official contract.

However, according to the study among the Lithuanian teachers, both primary and other specialists, the levels of stress and the issues with mental or physical health were not related to the years of experiences, the location of the school, the marital status or the length of employment at one school. Still, despite a relatively high motivation to work (‘enthusiasm was above average’) and the low levels of indolence, every third teacher ‘showed signs of of high psychological distress’ and 12% were assessed as being at risk of depression (Emeljanovas et al.).

The reasons? Well, there are many (Stefanou et al.) But, to be honest, I would like to leave all of them behind, apart from one. Away goes the personal well-being and health, motivation and classroom effectiveness. Off the list come also social behaviour, learning and performance or the particular school and how it is functioning. Or the students’ motivation and well-being. In the same vein, those ‘rapid social and technological changes and constant monitoring of society’ (Emeljanovas et al) or the parents’ and students’ expectations which have changed in the 21st century are of no interest to me at the moment.

Not because they are not important, quite the contrary. It is all very interesting and very relevant but there almost seems to be too many factors which have an impact and which the teachers are affected by on daily basis. The number and the volume of the issues might lead to a realisation that it is a hopeless task because, indeed, how can you deal simultaneously with all the requirements of the everyday teaching reality and with the 21st century outside of your window? I won’t.

The Absinthe Drinker, Edouard Manet (1875 / 76) Attention: NOT because of the alcohol in front of her, but because of the emptiness in her heart)))

The lucky ones?

Because, let’s imagine a couple of teachers that are just ‘lucky’, for the lack of a better word. They work in a private institution so their working conditions are better than average. They are experienced so they have already developed an immunity towards the pressure from the system, the regular assessment and the need to develop professionally. Over the years, they have also learnt how to work with paretns and to manage the children in class. They work in a small school, with the helpful admin staff and the kids are in year 1 so there is not so much checking, testing and reporting, although there is some. What is more, these teachers, they teach with and out of passion. They even like their students. All 21 one of them. The children are just a group of kids. They are all amazing, no one suffers from any neglect at home, some of them have some special education needs but it is not anything that cannot be dealt with. These teachers are lucky, the conditions are almost ideal.

Does it mean, then, that these teachers are not affected by the emotional challenges of the everyday life? Of course not! At the end of a Thursday, like the one described above, they look like some of those characters featured in the illustrations I chose for this post. Sitting in the teachers’ room, recovering, as if, gathering the energy to get up and to put the jacket on and to go home. On some days, walking home, thinking of all the other potential professions out there, of becoming a plumber, a librarian, a chef or a pensioner…

That is the reality and, as they say, ‘there is tired and there is teacher tired‘. It is not sadness, it is not depression, it is not burnout, it is not disillusionment, it is not apathy. Only the unbelievable, unmeasurable, undescribable, infinite exhaustion. And not because you have spent the day ploughing the field or hand-digging foundations for a house but because you have spent 5 or 7 academic hours educating, surrounded by tonnes of emotions coming at you from 21 different sources simultaneously and trying to deal with all of them.

tired teacher clipart – Clip Art Library (clipart-library.com)

Please tell me that there is a way out!

Yes, there is and no, there isn’t.

Children are and will be children and dreaming of an ideal lesson, 100% of the time, day in, day out, with everyone listening, following instructions and not getting distracted, not getting into trouble with classmates, and, generally, being ‘little angels’ (or the students that we know from our teachers’ books), that is simply not going to happen. You plan your lesson and then you go into the classroom and life happens.

The good thing is that we learn how to deal with disasters (and ‘disasters’) and with our emotional response to them. The good thing is that, eventually, we get a bit better at it. You can read about it in an earlier post here: The end of the world or Suriviving bad lessons with YL.

The good thing is also that we have lots and lots to look back on, to do the maths and to label the day as ‘good’ and that, frequently, we come home with a joyful ‘Guess what happened at school?’. There are the patchworks that we created and the photos of them that we will share and we will be happy and proud of. And maybe it is the lingering memory of these patchworks that will make us get up the following day and set off to school, one more time, erasing the not-so-good memories of the previous day, in order to try again, to make the children know Math, English or Science and to help them grow and get better and get confident.

The joys and challenges of teaching kids, you know. Which, by the way, and hilariously enough, was the title of one of the first training sessions that I have ever given. The joys and challenges. The patchwork.

tired runner – Clip Art Library (clipart-library.com)

Bibliography

Emeljanovas, A., Sabaliauskas, S., Mežienė, B., Istomina, N. (2023), The relationships between teachers’ emotional health and stress coping, Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1276431

Johnson, S., Cooper, C., Cartwright, S., Donald, I., Taylor, P. & Millet, C. (2005), The experience of work‐related stress across occupation, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 178-187. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940510579803.

Kariou, A., Koutsimani, P., Montgomery, A. & Lainidi, O. (2021), Emotional Labor and Burnout among Teachers: A Systematic Review, Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(23), 12760, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182312760

Lindqvist, H., Weurlander, M., Wernerson, A., & Thornberg, R. (2023). The emotional journey of the beginning teacher: Phases and coping strategies. Research Papers in Education, 38(4), 615–635. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2022.2065518

Stephanou, G. & Oikonomou, A. (2018), Teacher Emotions in Primary and Secondary Education: Effects of Self-Efficacy and Collective-Efficay, and Problem-Solving Appraisal as Moderating Mechanism’, Psychology, 9 (4), https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2018.94053

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

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

Hence the survey.