#eflresources

The Unsung Heroes of the YL classroom

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Masking tape aka Painter’s tape

The funny thing is that I cannot remember when I discovered that the painter’s tape existed. Maybe it was Vita, my friend and my colleague who first brought it to school…

What I know is that for the past four years I have always had a roll of two at home and a roll or two at school. Because, right now, there is no classroom without the painter’s tape.

Every single time we do anything in the hallway, any kind of a treasure hunt, any jigsaw puzzle, anything which involves things being put up on the walls, the painters’ tape enters the picture. I prefer it to blutack because I don’t mind just throwing it out (instead of peeling it off carefully from every single scrap of paper) and, even more importantly, my students don’t feel tempted to nick the tiny little bits of the precious resource.

My primary students who are learning to read and write know this resource very very well. We use the tape to write instructions for different activities, especially if they needed to be displayed around the school and all our lessons would start with a fun activity with the little chairs – some of them would have the bits of the tape with funny words on them, for example choosing the place to sit (‘I am sitting on the Happy Octopus’), making sentences with the key word written on the chair (‘dancing’ – ‘Today I am a dancing hippo’) or even writing and creating random combinations of words.

Apart from that, pieces of the tape can be left on each table, one per student. They can be used in any kind of surveys (‘Which game would you like to play?’, ‘What was the most difficult part of the lesson?’) but I also noticed that the students liked to write on them, just to express themselves, to scribble while they were listening or to just to somehow personalise the table where they were sitting.

The tape can also be used to help group and pair the students. There should be a piece of tape on every desk and on these the teacher write the names of different superheroes (a very broad term in my lessons, it can include both Batman and Cheburashka, Harry Potter and Aleksander Sergeevich Pushkin, Lionel Messi and Santa). On entering the classroom at the beginning of the lesson, the students pick out one of the cards with the same name from the teacher and this is how they find out where they are sitting on the day. The same cards can be used later on to mix the students, with the teacher (or one of the students) picking out two cards to decide that in the following activity Superman will be working with Harry Potter and Robinson Cruzoe with Superman etc.

AND, though there are no photos, the painter’s tape was THE LINE on the carpet that helped my little babies sit in a safe and appropriate distance from the big TV on the floor.

Last but not least, we have used it to create a city plan on the floor which we later filled in with flashcards and we used to move around. It is a rather limited use, but, oh what an amazing lesson.

The door

The door is the most underestimated and underloved part of the classroom. And how undeservedly so! Even if you have only the most standard door (not those double door straight from a castle), that is a good two square meters of a notice board, ready to use! It would be recommended to check the material, the surface and the ‘stickability’ and to test different adhesive materials that will not destroy the door itself but there is scotch, there is the painter’s scotch and there is blutack to name at least a few that could be used here.

In my classrooms we have used the door in the following way: putting up the huge posters to use instead of the numbers (The Caterpillar Classroom, The Baby Shark Classroom, The Cookie Monster Classroom), putting up the homework poster (‘Did you do your homework?), putting up the washing line with all the clothes to use during (‘Today I am wearing…’), putting up the classroom rules posters, the library reviews poster (for the kids to leave the reviews after they have read something), the test feedback poster (‘How difficult was the test? 10 – very difficult, 1 – not difficult at all) and any class surveys completed on the way out, the sight words reading practice on the way in, displaying the alphabet poster when we were just starting to read, displaying any of the work that the students produced (when the walls were already taken) and, last but not least, or quite the contrary: the first ever: The Door of Doom aka the poster we created with my FCE students by adding bits and pieces to the poster throughout the course. These bits and pieces were all the things we struggled with: the mean phrasal verbs, the less common suffixes, the collocations that we would always make a mistake with and so on.

Next time you are in the classroom, have a look at the door and at this whole unused space…And what you could do with it. Once you start, you will never stop.

Counting sticks

This entry is perhaps not such a great surprise. After all, all the little people (and their teachers and parents) are very familiar with these colourful plastic sticks. Everything else aside, this should be one reason to be including them in our EFL lessons.

We use them mostly to count, of course, the kids pick two or three or twenty and this helps to make such an abstact idea as numbers a little bit more visual (because three items lying on the table, three sticks, three fingers or three dots on the dice are a better representation of the secret that this symbol ‘3’ stands for) and kinesthetic when we let the kids manipulate the sticks. Luckily, the sticks are cheap and easy to get so having lots and lots of them, enough for everyone, is not a difficult aim to meet.

One of my favourite games to play (perhaps because it is a perfect solution for a lazy teacher) is using these together with the paper plates with numbers. The kids look at the number, count the sticks and add or take them away, in order to make sure that the number matches the number of sticks. Which is also the beginnig of adding and substracting.

By the way, flashcards will do here, too, but the plates have the advantage of having the rim and the sticks do not slide off and you can easily just pile them up on top of each other, put them aside and sort them out after the lesson.

With my ‘adult‘ pre-primary kids, we have used these same counting sticks to help children manage a pair-work activity, to add a visual and kinesthetic element to the verbal exchange. We were practising different varieties of ‘What’s your favourite…’. The kids were sitting in pairs, on the floor, around a set of flashcards that would symbolise the themes (an apple for ‘What’s your favourite fruit?’, a teddy for ‘What’s your favourite toy?’ and so on) and one student in each pair would get a set of five sticks. They were supposed to ask their partner five questions of their choice (we had ten categories) and while doing that, they were supposed to put the stick away, on the relevant card. We used a similiar tool when they were interviewing their partners about things they like (‘Do you like…’ + any words of the kids’ choice) and I guess it can be adopted to pretty much any structure.

Plastic cups

Or any other recycled cups (like those in the photo) which are easily available. They are my favourite resource to sort out materials (pencils, pens, bits and pieces for a craft activity, especially the leftovers, which I hide in the cupboard for later). They also help to organise materials which I give out to the kids, for example we have a set of boxes with crayons organised by the colour, for some, more teacher-centred activities, as here the teacher is the one in charge AND a set of cups organised in sets, one full set per student, which we use in all the SS-centred activities in which the students make decisions which colour to use.

With my older students, I use the plastic cups whenever we use dice in class (and that is OFTEN). The dice given to students (kids and teens) ‘just like that’ have the most amazing ability to fall off the tables about once per minute. Plus they make LOTS and LOTS of noise and if you have a group of then and five dice are rattling and rattling…Well, you can imagine. If you put each dice into a plastic cup, you can still shake it and get a number and everything is more manageable. I think I saw it first in Nataliya T’s class and here are my thankyous for this idea!

Paper plates

Oh the paper plates! They are of course used at parties and in craft lessons to make clocks, spinners, plates for all the ‘fruit salad’ craft activities, snowmen, frogs, chicks, rabbits and what not…But there is so much more!

For me it was this one day when I got an idea for a great lesson for which I really needed the number flashcards. These, however, were left behind in the office, so getting them for the lesson that was the first lesson of the day, early in the morning was out of the question. I rushed to the school cupboard in the house, to go over all the treasures there, with the idea of something that could help me replace the flashcards and there they were – a set of colourful cardboard plates from my local supermarket (which I must have bought for some class party earlier). Creating the flashcards took three minutes and a permanent market and it turned out that these particular plates (many of which I bought later on in the same supermarket) were perfect for it: big, durable, colourful but not too colourful since there was a thick colourful rim but the centre was just white and empty aka perfect for writing!

We normally use the number plates like any other flascards, first and foremost but the different shape adds to the variety and makes the topic of numbers a bit more fun. We also use them together with the counting sticks (see above) or with any other bits. We used the numbers 1 – 12 to create a huge clock on the floor and we played some movement games with it.

The plates became the canvas that helped me create my amazing emotions and adjectives cards (sorry about blowing my own trumpet here but there is a lot of love here) which we have been using for more than two years now.

Not to mention that the plates can be a very useful tool to organise all the bits and pieces while getting ready for a craft activity, hats for the snowman on one plate, scarves for the snowman on another, and they all can be stuck on top of each other. And, as you know, every little helps to make the teacher’s life a bit easier.

What are the unsung heroes of your classroom? Please share!

Happy teaching!

When you suddenly land on Mars: Top 10 Favourite Resources

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It is one of those lines that you deliver, sometimes carelessly: ‘This is my favourite ….’, often followed by a softening line, ‘Oh, well, at least one of the top 10.’ I do it all the time. Carefreely. Until, last week, one of my readers and fellow teachers, commented, ‘Ok, but what are the other nine out of this 10?’

And I thought that it will be a perfect idea for a new post. So here we are.

One: Dice

Definitely, one of my favourites, the one that I always have in my bag and the one that I have managed to use with the little ones and with the older ones. There is already a post on that. You can find it here.

Two: Noughts and crosses grid

Another ‘love of my life’, something that I have been using for ages and adapting and perfecting on the way. Obviously, right now, I cannot simply live without this resource. Nor can my students. Some of the ways of using it, there are a few posts that you can read: here – a post about using noughts and crosses with primary or pre-primary, here – another one on using noughts and crosses in storytelling, here – on using noughts and crosses with visuals.

The super important advantage is that, if needed and there is no template and no handout, it can be easily re-created on the board or even by the students, on a piece of paper and filled up with words, phrases or even pictures for the students to use later.

Three: Wordwall

This is the online tool, (www.wordwall.net) that, for me personally, was the number 1 discovery of the lockdown times. For those of you who are not yet familiar with it, it is an online community that shares online games which can be used to learn English among subjects. There are a great number of templates available such as simple cards, a spinner, a quiz, a wordsearch etc. Anyone can join the community and the community library for free. Those teachers who want to create their own games and to share them with the said community, have to choose a plan. That part might be a bit of a hurdle for some, but $ 2.50 or $3.50 per month is a ridiculously small amount of money to pay for the privilege of creating an unlimited number of activities for the particular texts, coursebooks or videos that you want to use with your students, especially if you teach a few groups of the same level / coursebook or, if, like me, you want to share these activities with all the teachers in your school.

I am using these activities with all levels and age groups, both with my students and my trainee teachers, sometimes in class, sometimes as an additional homework.

Here are a few examples of the templates and the activities that we use them in

  • simple cards, instead of electronic flashcards, here ‘My day‘, just to introduce the vocabulary
  • a similar set of simple cards but used with a specific structure(s). This one here was used with my primary students to share opinions about different activities.
  • boxes used in a speaking game ‘Tell me about it‘: students choose one of the boxes and talk about the object, animal, person. They have to produce a required number of sentences and they get a certain number of points in each round.
  • pelmanism online. Here students have to match a country with a product and we used it as an introduction in a lesson on the passive voice.
  • a quiz to develop the early literacy skills with pre-primary. This one here was used to practise the letters, sounds and the key words for each of there.

Four: Mini-whiteboards / earasable notebooks and markers

In my classroom, we actually have both, three mini-whiteboards and about ten erasable notebooks and we use them with all my groups. With my pre-primary students and the first and second year of primary, they are our main tool in all the literacy-related activities. Holding a big and thick marker is easier than managing a pencil or a pen, writing on the surface which is smooth and almost slipper means that the students do not have to apply so much strength and can produce a line more easily and, last but not least, even if they make a mistake (or if they are not very happy with what they produce), it is very easily to repair a mis-shaped ‘a’ or ‘n’. All these features make these resources especially suitable.

With my younger students we use these in the following activities:

  • doing the lines (rarely, I prefer to set it as homework)
  • copying the words from the board
  • the game of ‘fake scrabble’ – students in pairs, using two markers of different colours, take turns to add more and more words to the initial word set by the teacher, during a set amount of time. The students earn points for each letter in their words. The longer words they add, the more points they earn.
  • the game of ‘scramble, unscramble’ – teacher dictates words, letter by letter, in a random order. Students write these down and try to unscramble the word. This is not a competitive game, no points are awarded.
  • the game of ‘how many words’ – teacher writes on the board a sentence in English ie ‘We love to play games in English‘, students work in pairs and try to make a list of new words that can be put together using some of the letters in the sentences, for example ‘lamp’ because all these letters feature in the sentence. Students can reuse all the letters, for example they can use the letter ‘s’ in quite a few words but the words which contain more than two letters ‘s’ because there are only two of them in the sentence. This is a competitive game and there are points at the end of the game.
  • the game of ‘lazy bingo’ – students simply make a list of seven or ten words from the set that is being practised at the moment ie toys. Teacher then calls out the words in a random order, the student or the team which crosses or erases all their words first, wins the game.
  • depending on the set up in the classroom, I sometimes use the erasable whiteboards to put up the langauge that I want the students to use or the questions to discuss, especially if we are sitting away from the board.

We use the same games with my older students but, apart from that, we also use these in these activities:

  • a variety of quizzes – students write their answers, either full words or simply letters ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’ in multiple answer quizzes
  • short story writing – writing a Flyers or KET story, whole class writing in which the students contribute only a sentence or a word at a time and then exchange the notebooks, etc.
  • the game of ‘A to Z’ – students work in pairs, write the letters of the alphabet in a column. Later on, their main task is to come up with one word for each letter of the alphabet within a certain topic. There is a time limit and the team or pair who can make the longest list, wins the challenge. In the follow up, we reflect on these words discussing the questions such as: What is the strangest word here? What is the best word? Are there any words you don’t know? Which words you don’t approve of? This game works best at the start of a new topic and it helps the teacher to understand whether the new topic is actually new to the group and, consequently, to adapt the classroom procedures.

Understandably, in all of the activities, the mini-whiteboards or the earasable workbooks can be easily replaced with a simple piece of paper and a pencil and the activities would work just as well. Using the whiteboards simply adds to the excitement and it can be a nice way of spicing up the lesson.

Five: Tornadoes aka Points cards

Long, long time ago, at one of the trainings, someone showed us how to play the game of ‘Guns, Bombs and Lives’. I do not remember who it was (but thank you, anonymous benefactor!).

It was a very simple game of gamifying any boring activity such any typical controlled practice exercise. Students were giving their answers and uncovering the boxes in the grid. If they found ‘a gun’, they lost one of their three initial lives, if they found ‘a bomb’, they could steal a life from one of the other teams. If they found ‘a heart’, they did gain an additional life. There was a similar version of the same game, called Tornadoes’.

It worked very well and it helped to encourage the kids to get involved and to stay involved in the controlled practice activities but, even with the older students, I did not like the idea of all the guns, bombs and natural disasters, all the destruction that I personally would be bringing into the classroom. The other contributing factor was the fact that, at the time, I desperately needed a system points that I could also use with my 1-1 students. The regular grid would not work (it was always created by the teacher). Our game of Tornadoes had to transform into something else.

It did. It underwent a proper evolution as with my student, Nick, we did come up with new ideas, cards and tasks and we would play it for a few times, like proper gamers, and then, based on the data collected, we would accept these new rules or reject them.

At the moment, in its 4.0 we have the following cards:

  • the simple: 1, 2, 5 points
  • donate 1, 2, 5 points (you give away some of your points to one of the other teams)
  • lose 1, 2, 5 points (you lose some of your points, no one gets them)
  • add 50% of the number of your points
  • lose 50% of the number of your points
  • multiply your points by 2
  • take away 1, 2, 5 points from one of the other teams
  • shield which you can use to protect yourself agains any bad luck which, if not used, turns into 10 points at the end of the game
  • the crown – whoever picks the crown is the ultimate winner, regardless of the number of points collected. We add this card to the deck only for the final round.

You can see the cards in the photo. I have been using them for about three years now and I have just realised that it is the high time to print and to laminate them…Here is my new resolution for the new academic year.

Six: Magic wand

Well, yes, this particular tool is used only with my pre-schoolers, but it is an absolute staple food with this particular age group.

Magic wands can be found in many different toy shops or kiosks but it is so much fun to be making one! It is actually so easy that it can be turned into a craft activity with preschoolers. At the same time, a magic wand is not even necessary. Kids are amazing and, really, if played properly a simple pencil will do the job just as well. For that reason, when we used to study online with my students, I was using my handmade magic wand and my students were using markers, pencils, whatever was lying nearest!

Magic wands are used in one activity that can have many different variations. Whoever is wielding the wand is responsible for casting ‘the spell’ of their choice. The whole group, including the teacher has to perform the action and to mime. We use a simple rhyme ‘Abracadabra, 1, 2, 3. You are…’ with many different endings:

  • verbs ‘You are dancing’
  • nouns ‘You are a cat’
  • nouns with adjectives ‘You are a happy cat’, ‘You are an angry princess’

Seven: Word picturebooks

If I were to go to Mars and take one set of resources, I would love to take a set of visuals. If, however, I had a limited space in my bag and / or no access to google, I would take the printed version (because I am lucky to have the hard copy) of Cambridge YLE Picture Wordlist, Starters, Movers and Flyers. These are beautifully done picture scenes, especially useful for those of us who prepare kids for YL exams but, at the same time, so lovely and colourful, that I could actually live with them in a teen or adult group.

You can download them from here: Starters, Movers and Flyers, and if only anyone even mildly related to Cambridge University Press is reading this, here is my message: please, print them and sell them! We are going to buy them.

Eight: Small pieces of paper (basically)

Well, this is so basic that it is almost disappointing but, looking at the regular proceedings in my classes, I have to be honest and say that, yes, small pieces of paper (A4 white or coloured cut up into 16 or 32) appear there regularly and frequently.

Sometimes, I prepare them myself, they are typed up, printed and cut up but, since this whole series is devoted to the minimal resources and last-minute solutions, I will not include these here. The main assumption is: no time for any pre-lesson preparations. All of the activities mentioned before start with the teacher giving out a number of cards to each student, pairs or teams.

  • vocabulary: My Words: working with a set of vocabulary (connected by the topic or the text), each student has to choose five favourite words (the best, the worst, the most unusual, the strangest, the most interesting, the most difficult) and write them all on separate cards. Students can explain their choices, ask their partner a question with the word, make riddles with these or exchange their cards and guess their partner’s choices. Afterwards, the students repeat the activity with another partner.
  • vocabulary: write five words from the set of the key vocabulary, work with your partner, take out one of your words, randomly, put it on the table. Compare the two words, either using comparatives (works best with animals, transport, countries etc) or just say if they are similar or different taking into account their meaning, pronunciation, use, the part of speech they are etc.
  • vocabulary / functional langauge: Have you got…?: it is one of my favourite games with all the students, based loosely on Go Fish (or at least this is where it started). There is only one set of words that is necessary and students can help make these. The game is played best in 3 or 4 teams. Each team gets a set of the key words and the students take turns to try to guess what they partners have. As soon as someone guesses the word, the team loses it and puts the card away. The winner is usually the team that managed to keep all their words secret (ro the team that has most cards at the end of the game). Everyone has to listen to everyone else, collecting information and drawing conclusions. With my younger kids, we often play with ‘Have you got’ or even with ‘Blue, please’ during the first lessons of the course. With my older students, we turn it into proper themed mini-roleplays, for instance while practising the airport vocabulary, they have to ask ‘Excuse me, where is the departure lounge?’ and their partners reply with ‘It is next to the souvenir shop’ (if they have the card) or ‘Sorry, I don’t know’ (if they don’t have the card)
  • grammar: write five questions to ask your partner using the key structure (ie Did you go to the cinema yesterday?) or write five time expressions to use in the past to later ask questions with these words etc.

Nine: Puppets

Thinking about my classrooms now, I think there are at least two puppets occupying the shelves there, Angelina and the Flying Cow in the older kids classroom and Teddy and Orange Cat in the pre-primary classroom. If you want to find out how we use them, please pop in here.

Ten: The indispensables

This short (?) will be devoted not to teaching resources per se but to a whole selection of objects that I cannot imagine NOT being in my classroom

  • a clock, a big one, on the wall, right above the desk or behind the students’ back so that I can always be aware of the time and to proceed accordingly
  • a big box of felt-tip pens because we all like a bit of colour and a bit of variety when it comes to writing materials. The students always have a choice between a pen, a pencil or felt-tip pens and very often they choose the latter. Colour rules!
  • a roll of painter’s tape because you can use it to attach things to the walls (treasure hunts), to the floor (the plan of our ideal city), to the tables and chairs (assigning who is sitting there) and clothes (who is who today). The best thing – you can write on it so the teacher does and the kids do, too!
  • a big fat pencil case full of colourful whiteboard markers which we need to make the boardwork more appealing and to write in our erasable notebooks

If I ever went to Mars to teach, these are the things that I would be putting into my Mary Poppins’ rucksack. And you? What would you take?

Don’t forget to look out for the series of posts ‘When you suddenly land on Mars…’ in which I am going to share my ideas for lessons with pre-primary, primary, teenage and adult students, based only (or almost) on what we can find in every classroom: pen and paper! I have already started writing them and I will be sharing shortly!

Happy teaching!