#eflteacher

How to make your own songs for the YL classroom

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The amazing staircase in the tenement house by Max Berg in Wroclaw

Looking for songs

We have lots and lots of sources of amazing songs that can be used in the YL and VYL classroom. The first and the easiest one of them is your coursebook and the main advantage of it is the availability and the close connection to the curriculum. The songs often combine the vocabulary and the structure of the unit and both the teacher and the students have an easy access to it. The songs’ lyrics are in the kids’ coursebooks, they are often built around the characters from the coursebook or the stories in the coursebook. As a teacher, I have been using the songs from Superminds and Playway to English by CUP and Discover with Dex by Macmillan and I am a huge fan to the extent that I would recommend them as a supplementary material to accompany another coursebook, too.

Another amazing resource is youtube and the brilliant channels such as Super Simple Songs, Dream English Kids, Fun Kids English or Mother Goose Club, full of amazing, kids-friendly, visually beautiful productions that can be used in our EFL classes even if the content does not match the curriculum 100% accurately. After all, this can be an opportunity to learn some more vocabulary or structures.

Sometimes, however, it happens that, no matter how hard you try and how long you look here and there, the song or the chant that you really need is nowhere to be found. There is a way out, too, because you can create your own songs! From scratch!

Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw

Creating your own songs: Starting from the rhythm.

This is more of a jazz chant than a song and I took the general idea from Carolyn Graham. The thing you need is a set of words to practise, divided into groups based on the number of syllables: 1-syllable words (cat, dog, frog, duck), 2-syllable words (hamster, snake, lizard), 3-syllable words (elephant, guinea pig, ladybird) and 4-syllable words (chameleon). You arrange them, in any way you want, following the pattern, for example: 2, 2, 2 – 2, 2, 2 – 2, 2, 2 – 4, 1 OR 3, 3, 1 – 3, 3, 1 – 3, 1 – 3, 1 – 3, 3, 1.

Hamster, lizard, snake

Hamster, lizard, snake

Hamster, lizard, snake

Chameleon, cat!

OR

Elephant, ladybird, cat

Elephant, ladybird, cat

Elephant, cat

Ladybird, cat

Elephant, ladybird, cat.

Practically any rhythm will do, especially if you start clapping your hands and stomping your find and chanting.

A similar technique can also be applied to any repeated sentences. I really like mixing affirmative and negative sentences connected with ‘but’ and ‘and’, for example

I like cats but I don’t like dogs.

I like ducks but I don’t like frogs

I like lizards but I don’t like snakes

What about you? What about you?

Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw

If you are looking for more ideas of this kind, please check out the book by Carolyn Graham (see below).

Creating your own songs: Starting from the melody

This, by far, is my favourite way of creating the songs I want and the songs I really really need. The only thing that it takes is a melody that the teacher is familiar with and filling it up with the lyrics that match the lesson’s theme and aim.

During the YL course sessions, I was visiting one of the breakout rooms while the trainees were discussing the ways of adapting a certain material and, together, within a couple of minutes, we came up with a simple song that could be sung in the lesson on pets, with to the melody of The London Bridge is falling down. It went more or less like that:

Little dolphins cannot dance, cannot dance, cannot dance.

Little dolphins cannot dance but they can swim!

Naturally, this little verse can be replicated with all the other animals and verbs, according to the vocabulary content of the lesson.

Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw

Creating your own song: Starting from the language

This one is probably the most challenging one because there is no basis here, like in the previous two. However, at the same time, since you are not bound by the rhythm or the melody, you can put together any text you need. I have used this approach while creating a chant for one of the groups with whom I had a double lesson, with a break in-between. This is the song that I put together to signal the beginning and the end of the break. The melody for this song was completely made up.

Let’s take a break.

Let’s run and play.

Five minutes. Five minutes

Let’s take a break.

Let’s drink some water.

Five minutes. Five minutes.

Let’s take a break.

Let’s go to the toilet.

Five minutes. Five minutes.

In one of the Science lessons for my pre-schoolers we were doing the food chains and I really wanted to make it more interactive and fun and this is how we ended up with a play with an alge, a fish, a squid, a dolphin and a shark. The story was built around all the creatures noticing their predator in the ocean and hiding. While taking turns to sing the song

I am a little, little alge

And I am happy

At the bottom of the ocean

Where I live

Oh, no! Look! What’s that? It’s a fish!

Let’s hide.

In this particular lesson we made the finger puppets for all the characters, practised the song a few times and then we all participated in the game aka the performance. It was definitely a success.

The only trick with writing a song like that would be coming up with the message to convey, verbalising it and sticking to the appropriate number of syllables in each line. As can be seen in the examples above, the verses don’t rhyme and they don’t need to. As for the melody, it can be anything and, once you’ve got it, it is a good idea to record it, for memory, even if only on the smartphone recorder.

Max Berg Cafe, Wroclaw

Here you can find my other posts about using songs in the VYL and YL classroom

  • Where to start if you have never sung before (here)
  • How to un-sing a song (here)
  • All the reasons to use a song in the classroom (here)
  • Five songs that have become games (here)

Here you can find some more interesting resources to read

J is for Jazz Chants by Carol Read

How to creat a jazz chant by Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto

Creating chants and songs by Carolyn Graham (Oxford University Press)

I am begging you, please! Introducing pairwork in YL groups

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Introduction

Can you hear some desperation, dear reader, in the title of this post? Rightly so. I started to write this post after one of the sessions of the summer camp that I took part in. My kids were amazing, of course, clever and eager to learn and, really, we did have a lot of fun. At the same time, looking at how they interact with each other, I could not believe my eyes and my ears. Despite the fact that many of them were already eight and nine, their social skills were on a disastrously low level. Practically anything that involved taking the other humans in the classroom into equation was a huge challenge for way too many of them. I did sigh with desperation, once and twice, and then I rolled up my sleeves and started to introduce pairwork, even though these were not my permanent students.

You may wonder why it shook me so much and why I decided to fix it. One reason is, naturally, my professional obsession with maximising production in kids and, really, I cannot imagine teaching a group of primary school children with the teacher at the centre, all the time. It is a waste of time and a waste of opportunities because kids of that age are capable of working in pairs without constant supervision. And if they do, they automatically produce more language.

However, there is more to it, of course because kids who work in pairs are more independent and more autonomous as learners and they have an opportunity to work with a variety of partners and to make friends and to bond with the group. This, in turns, is a better prognosis for the general classroom and behaviour management because you are less likely to get into trouble and to disrespect someone that you actually like and respect. If only you had a chance to get to know them and to like something about them.

Pairwork, yes or no? YES. One, big, decisive YES.

Where the angels don’t fear to tread. Pair-work in pre-school?

Yes, absolutely yes! I have been introducing pairwork in my pre-school groups first intuitively, simply because I had a very big group of children and we never got to produce any language apart from choral, whole class production and that simply was annoying for me, as the teacher. My students had a lot of potential and I did not want to waste an opportunity. Not quite knowing what to do and how to do it, I started to move towards working in pairs. It worked and by the end of the second year of pre-school, my group was ready and I was able to do what I do with my teens or adults: ‘Together, together, together’ while pointing at pairs of students. By the time we got to primary, this was a natural part of our lessons and some of the children were not even seven at this point. It is possible.

Then, naturally, I decided to do it again, with a new year 1 group, but this time, in a more conscious way, in order to be able to share it with my teachers. We started the course in September, we started to shape the group and the routine and we started to introduce pair-work. I kept my eyes open, I kept our class journal and we did it. It took 13 weeks of a course, with classes that took place only once a week. I presented the results of this research at our BKC Conference in 2020. and you can read more about it in a post here.

How to do it: The choice of the activity

The choice of the activity is one of the most important elements contributing to the success of the whole process. I got a heads-up here only because I have been teaching for many years and I had a chance to bump into one of the older coursebooks for kids which, although it had a few disadvantage and which does not even come close to the level of the currently used coursebooks for children, it did include a few ingenious solutions and, among them, the one I am going to describe below.

The one that featured in every unit of the coursebook was the maze the example of which you can see below. Initially, it was a simple but effective listening game, to practise the target language, especially vocabulary. Kids would listen to a robot dictating the path through the maze, for example: START: red…blue…yellow…brown…grey…etc until one of the exits, A, B or C. The words were separated by a funny sound, something that I would describe as ‘stomping by a robot, marching’ that the kids absolutely LOVED but it also gave them a great advantage of getting enough time to prepare for the following step. In every activity there were about 6 or 7 rounds of the game.

This game can be easily turned into a speaking – listening game and, eventually, into a pairwork.

It starts with the teacher NOT using the audio and dictating the route through the maze, with the kids following it and reaching the final destination. Naturally, the following step is the teacher nominating the students to decide on the following step, one word per child. This stage can go on for as long as it is necessary for the kids to become familiar with the format.

Afterwards, either still in the same unit and with the same maze or in the following unit with the new vocabulary, kids are put into small teams and they lead each other, in teams, through the maze. Eventually, they are put into pairs and they do it with only one partner, with one student speaking and the other student listening and following from the start to the exits.

In order to make it more monitorable, for the teacher and for the students and, also, to make it more achievable, we started to trace the route with coloured pencils or markers, each round with a different colour. This way, the children could always go back in case they got lost and the children can also monitor each other, the student dictating could potentially see where their friends were going.

This way, in a relatively short period of time, the kids got used to the new format, to working together, with only a partial monitoring and support from the teacher. It definitely helped that the vocabulary range in each case was quite limited, namely, only single words, from the obligatory set of words introduced and practised before. The students were not overwhelmed and could focus only on the format of the game. At the same time, however, in the later units of level 2, there were also more complex mazes, for example one in which the kids had to listen to a brief description of an animal for example: it has got stripes, it is big, it can run (zebra). Obviously, that means that the level of challenge can be raised when the children are ready for it.

Julie Ashworth and John Clarke, I Spy 1, SB, p. 23, OUP

It is very easy to recreate the idea using only the black and white clipart visuals and a grid of the required size. Here you see a maze that I created for my preschoolers (rooms).

Below you can see one more type of an activity that features almost in every unit of the coursebook and this one is specifically designed for pairwork for the young students. It was always some kind of a guessing game, with the two spies (the theme of the book, duh:-) trying to guess what the other one is thinking about. I really liked it for the visuals specifically designed for that purpose and the target langauge beautifully displayed on the page to support the students’ production. Using these was a lot of fun and it was effective but I still think that the previous one, the maze, worked better as regards the first steps in working in pairs.

Julie Ashworth and John Clarke, I Spy 1, SB, p. 45, OUP

Contributing factors

There is a whole lot of things that a teacher can do in class in order to facilitate the whole process. They can be implemented throughout the course, little by little, bit by bit.

  • Seating: make sure that the kids are sitting in a way that faciliates pair-work, in some sort of separation from the other pairs, for example by pairing up the tables and chairs, putting the chairs and kids facing each other.
  • Resources: these need to be prepared with a lot of care and attention. Apart from the example based on the activity that features in the I Spy coursebooks, described above, the teacher can also use a set of mini-flashcards, as described in my post about pair-work for preschoolers. These cards are used in a game of simple riddles but the cards themselves are small (eight or six or four that fit on an A4 piece of paper) in order for the kids to be able to manipulate them with ease. What is more, a set comprises of an envelope, too that holds all the cards. This way, there is no danger of kids dropping the cards (or if they do, these will fall back into the envelope) and the secret, very necessary in that game, is easily kept throughout the game. Even if the cards are printed on a regular photocopying paper, they are not see-through, being in the envelope.
  • Roles and turn-taking: Another thing is that the teacher only needs one envelope per pair. This helps a lot with assigning the role. It is crystal clear to the kids who is speaking (the child with the envelope) and who is listening (the child without the envelope). Turn-taking is also more obvious since the kids are literally passing the baton here, the envelope or whatever is the set of materials.
  • Signals: Introducing the pairwork is a part of the routine and, naturally, it will take some time. To facilitate it, like with the other elements of the class routine in primary and pre-primary, it would be good to include some visual representation of the pairwork, such as gestures or chants, anything that will signal to the students what is about to be the following stage of the lesson. It can be for example a simple flashcard. I love to use a flashcard with a pair of socks for the younger kids and a two pears for the older kids who can get this pronunciation joke but a picture of two kids talking will do, too. Some more modern coursebooks have started to introduce those and that is great). Another solution can be a simple chant, for example ‘Let’s play together! Let’s play in pairs! 3…2…1’. As with all the chants, this will introduce the next stage and it will give the kids a chance to get ready or maybe even to organise themselves. The same applies to the end of the pairwork stage.
  • Pairing-up: In the early stages, I would recommend a teacher-led pairing up. It is perfectly natural that in a group of children, there will be some students who will be better prepared to work in pairs early and some who will need to more time, even if all the students are of the same age or level. Based on the knowledge of the group and the individual children to end up with the most efficient pairing. This might be necessary to do over a few first lessons, later starting to experiment with some variations. I like to use a set of cards with all the kids’ names and we have a pairwork (or project) draft when we need it. The cards can be taken out of a box or a bag by the teacher or by students, too.
  • Time: Thil will of course, depend on an activity but choosing an open-ended game, without an obvious grand-finale gives the teacher more freedom and flexibility to finish the game when it is best for the class, rather than having to go until the very end when some of the kids might already be getting tired and bore and when they can start losing their focus. It might be a good idea to set a timer on the phone or to choose a song as a timing tool. It is very necessary to tell the kids how long they will play for.

Happy teaching!!!

Bibliography

The Power of Play: How Fun and Games Help Children Thrive – HealthyChildren.org

3 Ways Your Child Builds Important Life Skills Through Play – HealthyChildren.org

Why children need to play with their friends as soon as they can (theconversation.com)

Playing Well with Peers Means Better Mental Health (verywellmind.com)

Something (almost) out of nothing. 5 ideas for the user-friendly resources for YL classes.

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Here is a little post I wrote, about 5 easy to prepare, low-key and YL-friendly and YL teacher-friendly activities that can be prepared with almost no time investment.

One: a boardgame

Boardgames are fun and they are of a great help not only because they provide opportunities to practise vocabulary and structures but also because they help with kids learning to play in pairs or teams, to learn to take turns and to cooperate.

The most basic set includes a printed board, like the one that can be found in Heinemann Children’s Games (published in 1995, omg), featured in the photo below, a dice, a set of checkers. Apart from that, the teacher also needs a set of flashcards or mini-flashcards. The students play the game and every time they land on a box, they pick up a card from the pile and use the word in a relevant sentence (ie they say if they like the food item on the card or they ask their partner a question). Once used, the cards go to the bottom of the pile to be used again. If there are more than one team playing, it is good to use a few sets of cards ie Do you like with animals, food and toys etc. Unless, of course, the teacher has time to photocopy and to cut up the mini-cards.

Here are some useful tricks:

  • Instead of letting the kids roll the dice on the table, give each team a plastic cup with the dice inside and show them how they should shake it in order to get a number. This will prevent the dice from rolling off the tables and slowing the game.
  • Instead of checkers, you can use a set of small paper toys, colourful paperclips, colourful magnets or even simple colourful pieces of paper on which the kids can write their names. I also like to use stickers (still unpeeled, on small pieces of paper). This way, no matter who actually wins the game, everyone wins and the sticker is their reward.
  • Do not worry if you do not have enough time to play the game until the very end, from Start to Finish. This way of playing is only a convention. The game is still fun if the teacher sets the alarm clock for 5 minutes, for example, and then finishes the game, provided that all the players within a team have had the same number of turns. After the game is stopped, the winner is whoever is the closer to FINISH.
Heinemman Children’s Games

Two: I spy with my little eye

The only thing that is needed is a picture, some kind of an illustration, taken either from the website or from the electronic form of the coursebook. I do recommend Starters, Flyers and Movers picture wordlists which can be downloaded for free and which include amazing picture scenes for all the topics relevant to these exams and levels. To be honest with you, it is one of my professional dreams that Cambridge University Press publishes them and makes them available for purchase.

These can be printed or just displayed on the interactive whiteboard or on the computer screen. Kids play in pairs but everyone is using the same picture. The basic version of the game includes the more traditional version of the game (I spy with my little eye something big / small and something green / blue / yellow etc) but it can be transformed into any picture-based riddles or description game or Yes / No game and in that case any vocabulary and structures can be involved.

Here are some useful tricks:

  • There are many variations of picture-based activities. You can find lots of ideas in my previous posts from the series All you need is …a picture which you can find here and here
  • If you have a dice (or even better – a dice per pair or per team of students), you can also use the same illustrations in a dice description game
  • There are plenty of illustrations available. I do recommend Starters, Flyers and Movers picture wordlists which can be downloaded for free and which include amazing picture scenes for all the topics relevant to these exams and levels. To be honest with you, it is one of my professional dreams that Cambridge University Press publishes them and makes them available for purchase. I also like to use any of the Starters, Flyers and Movers materials, the speaking visuals, the reading visuals, listening part 1 visuals. Lots and lots is happening in these pictures and they are appropriate for the younger YL.
  • Don’t forget to check out the silly picture scenes used by the speech therapists. They are lovely, colourful and fun and kids really (really) like them. I wrote about them a few years ago and I am still a huge fan.
  • As regards the older YL, I still use the activities with different visuals: photographs from the google search engine, the higher levels exams (PET, FCE, CAE and CPE past papers, especially the speaking visuals). I also love using the materpieces of the world’s art but, admittedly, finding these might take a bit longer unless you have your set of go-to paintings.

Three: Tell me about it on Wordwall

This, thanks to all the tools available on wordwall, has become one of my go to games. It is a set of pictures (template: Open the Box), with a number of points in each box. Kids work in pairs, they choose the box and they have to say something about the visual in each box. With the higher levels of primary or the older students, the teacher assigns a number of sentences that they have to produce. With the younger students, the teacher gives clear instructions regarding the language expected. Here is one example for the year 1 kids of the pre-A1 level: toys. During the game the kids could produce the following structures: It is a teddy bear. It is brown. It is old. I don’t like it.

The game is a great one because it works with individual students and groups, big and small. Everyone plays together and everyone produces because even if there is one student responsible for choosing the number of the box, everyone can say something about the picture.

I like to play the game as one of the first competitive games with a group of young learners, only we play it teacher vs all the kids (and I do my best to lose:-)

Here are some tricks

  • If you don’t feel like preparing these, go to wordwall, you can find all my games in the community. I made all of them public. You can find them here or you can enter wordwall and look for my profile Azapart.
  • The range and the number of structures can be adapted to the age and the level of the kids. I play this game with my preschoolers and my primary students but also with my juniors and teens.

Four: Riddles

Riddles are, by far, one of my favourite games with any age, with the youngest of students and with my teenagers and adults, too. In order to make it work, we only need a set of flashcards or a set of mini-flashcards. I have already written a (great) post about it and you can find it here.

Five: A list of words

I have to admit, I love being a lazy teacher and I always award myself some extra points for all these occassions when I figure out how to be lazy and effective. One of my favourite ready-to-use resources are the word lists from our coursebooks. Sometimes, these can be a set of pictures + words (younger students), sometimes a table with all the key words, for all the older students, juniors and teens. Sometimes, these are the lists that the teacher has to create, especially if we talk about the higher level groups and about working on the vocabulary related to a text (reading or listening). All of the activities below are used to give the students a chance to use the words again and again and again, they are a part of the controlled and freer practice stages of the lesson.

Tricks or some of the ways in which I like to use these lists:

  • The list is used as the basis for riddles (see above).
  • Questions: students work in pairs, to ask each other questions about the chosen items. Depending on the vocabulary set, these questions can range from very simple (‘Do you like…?’), in a variety of tenses, especially if they are verbs (‘How often do you..?’, ‘Did you…?’, ‘Have you ever…?’, ‘Are you planning to…?’)
  • Pairs: students work in pairs and look for ways of pairing up the words and phrases, based on: similar meaning, same first letter, same part of speech, some logical connection, to name a few.
  • Ordering: students organise the words according to one or more criteria i.e. the important and the less important words, the easy and the difficult, the familiar and the unfamiliar etc or, simply, organising them in the order of importance or preference to the student and then comparing their new lists with other students and justifying their choices.
  • Similar or different: students choose a pair of words or phrases for their partner to decide if these two are similar or different and to explain why. This is, by far, my favourite one, especially for the older and for the higher level students.

Happy teaching!

What a difference a teacher makes! A post for all the novice teachers

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The beautiful tiles shown to us by engineer-history.ru

We are approaching a new academic year, new groups, new kids, new beginnings. What a happy coincidence that it is right now that I found this particular report and got to reminisce about this particular lesson that I observed many (many) years ago. Here is my start-of-the-new-academic-year post!

A quote from the report

‘It was a pleasure to watch you with that class and you have no idea what difference it makes to have a teacher who actually feels at ease in a PW class and who wants to be there. The kids can sense it and respond to it. There were many great activities and clear evidence of routine and good classroom management. Well done!’

And it was a memorable lesson for a number of reasons…

The were two teachers working at one of the branches of my school. One of them got in touch asking for help. One of her groups was a group of pre-schoolers and it wasn’t going very well. She went through the initial orientation and lesson planning with a senior teacher but, somehow, as it sometimes happens, it was not coming together. She requested to be taken off the group. It was an option that was being considered but, we wanted to see first if there was anything to be done and I went to observe the group.

Admittedly, it was not the easiest group. It was quite big, by our standards, filled up to the maximum (we had 8 as the maximum number), the kids were beginners but as it sometimes happens in language schools there were of different ages, there was a four-year-old and two six-year-olds and one of the children was also dealing with some attention disorder (according to what I could observe in one lesson).

It was not the best lesson. The teacher was trying, doing her best but, at heart, she must have already decided that this is not something that she wants to do and it was obvious, to the observer and, apparently, to the kids, too.

Two weeks and three lessons later, this group had a different teacher…

And that’s because we were lucky. During one of our training sessions, I literally bumped into the teacher and, in the hallway, in-between the training sessions, snacks and coffee, she asked me if I know of any ‘homeless’ group of pre-schoolers because she said, she would really really start teaching one. She had never done that.

And although I try to avoid doing it, this one time, I found myself observing the teacher in her first lesson with a group. I was sitting at the back of the classroom, with a piece of paper, taking notes and I could not believe my own eyes. Literally.

There must have been some magic done, some spells cast or, during these few days between the two lessons and the two teachers, these kids were tranformed into focused, well-behaved, engaged pre-schoolers! There were a different group of kids.

Everyone came, the older and the younger and the suspected ADHD, a full house! The teacher got some information about the group and the course from the previous teacher, she had some time to prepare. The teacher did her best to follow the routine of the pre-school groups that we had at the school and to manage the class. Nonetheless, it was her first lesson ever, with this group and with this age group.

Great teachers are made, not born and it was not her best lesson and it could not have been. She was just starting with the group, she was still at the stage of memorising the kids’ names and faces and yet, it was a good lesson. Not so much because of the appropriate tasks, instructions, staging and materials but because the teacher wanted to be in the classroom and, somehow, the kids knew it and they appreciated that and, as a result, they responded well to whatever it was that she brought with her. Everything else, the great results, the pleasure and the Above Standard lessons came later.

Why it is good news for all the teachers starting with a new group / level / age group / coursebook

  • Great teachers are made, not born. Even if the beginnings are complicated, stressful and scary, things are going to get better and they are going to get better thanks to the number of minutes, hours, weeks, months and years clocked in in front of a group of students. These number of minutes has its beginnings in the very first lesson.
  • You as a teacher, you can really (really) make a difference by planning the lesson and by preparing for who and what you might encounter in the lesson. By choosing the appropriate activities, by considering the things that can go wrong, by writing the lesson plan for your primary or pre-primary students, with a lot of variety, by reading about the first primary lesson survival kit and about the first pre-primary lesson survival kit, or about all the things that I wish I had known before my first lesson in pre-primary.
  • You, as a teacher, you can really (really!) make a difference by preparing yourself mentally for the first lessons and by believing in yourself! The one piece of advice that I always give my teachers about to step into the pre-school or primary classrooms is this: SMILE! That is because a smile can get us far and further! It is not so much about maintaining your muscles pulled into a shape of a croissant but about remaining cheerful. Things might not go to plan in this first lesson but it is absolutely necessary to remember that they will get better in lesson 2, 3, 4 and 5. As it is necessary to remember that we are great teachers and we love what we do. And that we do our best. When we do our best, of course, although, I personally think that most of the teacher try to do their best, on daily basis.
  • We are all a little bit stressed and feeling uneasy before the first lessons, all of us. Even those who are experienced teachers and trainers. Sorry! It is true the levels of confidence go up and the levels of stress go down with time but it is never completely relaxed. The only difference now is that at this point I am aware of the fact that things might not be perfect but I will know how to handle it. It is not ‘Oh, no! What if…’ and more like ‘Oh, ok, bring it on.’
  • Power to you, dear teacher!

What other advice would you give to a teacher who is about to start teaching Young Learners? Leave a comment in the comments box!

Happy teaching!

Crumbs # 65 Monster Bookmarks

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Ingredients

  • Colourful cardboard, some white paper, markers, scissors and glue
  • An idea to inspire you. I got mine from I Heart Crafty Things and if you are interested you can even find a template there for a small price although, I, personally, did not find it necessary.

Procedures

  • Before the lesson, I prepared the paper: small pieces of paper for the eyes, a large rectangle of cardboard (for example, an A4 sheet makes 2) folded in half, smaller rectangles (aka strips of paper) cut up for the nose.
  • We had two full lessons on the topic of body parts, monsters, health problems and going to the doctor. By the time we started the craft activity, the kids had already practised using the body parts in a sentence, they had described countless monsters, they had also created a monster with in a dice drawing activity.
  • I showed the children the ready product and we described it together.
  • We started with the kids choosing the colour of the big rectangle (the body of the monster) and so did I, in order to be able to demonstrate every step.
  • We cut up one of the longer edges, 5 – 10 mm, along the whole age (the hair). Afterwards, we applied the glue inside the folded rectangle and glued the two halves together.
  • We decided how many eyes we want our monsters to have. We drew these eyes, cut them out and glued them on the monster.
  • The kids chose the colour of the paper for the nose. We drew the nose on the back and we cut it out. On the back on the nose I drew three short lines at the top, to mark the place where to apply the glue. The kids do the same and we glued the nose on the monster.
  • We finished with drawing the smile and adding some decorations.
  • We finished with introducing the monster (name, age, boy / girl, what he/she likes).

Why we like it

  • This craft was a part of the lesson that in itself was very generative, productive and creative. That is why, for the main craft activity, I wanted something that the kids could use not only to produce the language but to use outside of the lesson. That is why I started to look for ideas for bookmarks.
  • When I showed my monster in the beginning of the lesson, some of my kids went ‘Oh, monsters, I don’t like monsters’ but, somehow, they all wanted to make theirs and they got really involved, boys, girls, the younger, the older. I was happy and not so surprised (because it did happen before) that they all left the classroom almost hugging their big-nosed creations. And, once out, I heard them report to the parents, in a very animated way, what it was that we did in class.
  • The craft is relatively easy, with some simple materials, especially that the cardboard can be easily replaced with the regular paper. It did involve some before-the-lesson preparations but nothing very time-consuming and, again, the templates were not necessary at all.
  • I have already started to think of adaptations and of replacing the monster with other ideas and shapes. I have not done these yet, but I am thinking a lot about elephants and, inspired by my friend’s son, LEGO people…Once they are ready, I will definitely share here:-)

Happy teaching!

Lessons from a year of teaching adults. A YL teacher looks back.

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The bigger picture

A great majority of the time that I have spent in the classroom as a teacher has been with young learners, those aged 3 and those aged almost 18. I have worked with adults, too, both beginners and advanced, exam and general or business English, in EFL and in teacher training, and here and there. However, there is no doubt that if I ever had to choose between these two, I would always choose kids. This is what I like most of all, this is where I can be really creative, this is where I find the challenge and the pleasure.

Over those 11 years that I spent as the ADOS and the YL and VYL Coordinator at BKC IH Moscow all my classes were kids’ classes, with a few exceptions of random cover and summer classes. It became kind of a joke between me and my brain, to pose the same question, every single August, when the new academic year was approaching, ‘Well, maybe I will ask the timetabling department for some adult classes this year?’. I never did, not once over those 11 years. Mostly because it quickly turned into making a choice between teaching my kids who I taught for a few years and taking on some new, unknown adults. I just wasn’t interested enough. Simple as that.

However, last year, a few unsolicited changes were introduced into my life and I went to in the motherland, picking up the pieces. As a result, I switched to the online, became a freelancer for a year, and found myself with a timetable in which about 80% of classes were with adult learners.

Now also this chapter in my life has come to an end and I could pack it up, label it as ‘mission complete’ and move on to reflecting on it. Hence this post.

I am a YL teacher and even though the changes were unsolicited, I really did make an effort to make the most of it and to find something that I could put on both sides of the chart. I took four months to write that post but it is finally here.

The highlights aka making the lemonade of all these lemons

First and foremost, the real hightlight of this year was the ability to impart knowledge and to rejoice the fact that the students were making progress, becoming more accurate, more fluent and more confident about their English, those who were beginners and those who were advanced, each of them was progressing and improving. Although, it has to be said, that it is the general highlight of teaching English. Your students’ achievements are a source of joy and happiness, and it has got nothing to do with their age group.

In the same vein, it was very rewarding to be receiving a positive feedback from my adult students, although again, that is always true and it has nothing to do with how old the students are.

It was an interesting experience for me as a teacher and as a human to work with students coming from a variety of professional backgrounds, true experts in their own area, be if finances, IT, banking, coaching, psychology, food manufacturing, car manufacturing or printing and. I was a kind of a privilege to become a part of their professional world and to learn about it, about the area, about the corporate world and about my own country, too, in a way. I met many interesting people and we got on, well or very well with some of them. Some of the lessons, apart from being a good product, were also lots of fun.

That also means that my resume looks even prettier than before because apart from the plethora of achievements in the area of YL EFL, I also have a nice paragraph about Business English and corporate English and a long list of high-profile companies that I have worked with.

I suppose that for me, personally, the most exciting part was the fact that, although, seemingly, I was like a fish out water, in a new area, in which I had less experience than in YL EFL and, in many ways, out of the box, I could find my way there. Teaching Business English, teaching Banking and Finance, teaching corporate English (which is the term that I personally coined for the general English classes in a corporate environment in which the traditional materials related to travelling, health etc are not the best) in a way that was effective and interesting for the students and also interesting for me was a challenge and I am proud to say that I did rock it. Over this whole year, I created and adapted materials, I experiemented with different techniques and resources and, as a material creator and a planner, I did have fun and I developed a lot. Hooray to that!

The other lights aka ‘Breathe, Anka, breathe’

I have to admit that, despite the whole year and a lot of opportunities for developing this particular skill, I (still) find it difficult to deal with the adults in class revealing their inner child. Naturally, I am trying to be a professional and I have a lot of patience and understanding. However, when something like that happens, I quickly become aware of how much of my resources and energy, I use up to deal with these situations. How thin is the ice on which I am walking.

For example, there were the situations in which the students would get stuck and who would give up instantly, even before they have even tried to do anything at all and even before the teacher even got a chance to explain, to scaffold and to support. This would happen regardless of the level, with some beginner, some pre-intermediate or some upper-intermediate students and what would trigger me especially effectively was the defensive ‘It’s so difficult‘, ‘I don’t understand‘ or ‘I don’t know‘, not when it is merely a piece of information signalling a problem but when it is used as a more polite version of ‘I will not do it. No. No. No!‘.

The same applies to the insecurity related to learning a foreign language, the lack of confidence in own skills and the fear of making a mistake, especially if they are paired up with a position in the company and age. Praising, reassurance and support, something that is easy and absolutely natural when it comes to kids or teenagers, all of a sudden becomes a real task requiring conscious effort and focus in the classroom with adults. I would like to believe that over the course of the year I got better at managing such situations and managing myself in such situations. It was interesting to realise that my patience batteries go flat much faster with adults than they do with kids.

Another thing that I found out about after a few months of teaching these groups was that peace and quiet in the classroom is not my favourite kind of environment and that, fortunately or unfortunately, I thrive in commotion, in noise, in a whirlwind, in a mess that is so typical of YL classes. Teaching my adults I found out that peace and quiet quickly leads to stillness and that quickly leads to routine and that leads to something dangerously close to boredom…I feel really guilty saying it because many of my students were amazing people, fun and intelligent but I have to admit that there were a few occasions in class when I would be teaching, listening, taking notes of all the emergent language and, on the margin, writing down notes for the lessons with kids because my brain would get bored and start wandering and coming up with ideas.

Last but definitely not least, there is also the question of oversharing. As a teacher of a language I do spend a lot of my days and weeks getting people ready to communicate. Naturally, what all the students are really interested in communicating as the things related to their life, private and professional, their opinions and views. However, sometimes it gets a little bit out of control and the conversation with the teacher may turn into a conversation with a friend or a barman or even a therapist. Personally, I do not feel comfortable with it because we are not friends, this relationship should remain within some professional framework. I don’t really feel comfortable with sharing any details about my life and, even more so, I don’t feel comfortable with receiving someone else’s emotional load, even if it is done in English. It doesn’t mean that we don’t share at all but there were quite a few occasions in which I felt the line was being crossed and some contingency plans had to implemented. Although, again, perhaps this is another thing that needs to be worked on and a skill to develop.

This paragraph will finish with an anecdote (for that is what that has become): Monday, evening, the end of a very hot day in July, the last lesson with a 1-1 professional in the area that will remain unnamed. We say hello, how are you, the student switches off the camera and it is only after a while that I notice that, due to the temperature, he chose to appear in class without any garments covering his upper body. I said nothing mostly because of the shock I was in, thinking ‘Well, there you go. I bet you not a single one of my kids would think that it is ok to arrive in such a state to a lesson. Even my teens have the decency to switch off the camera when they don’t want to be seen…’

Anyway, as I was clambering out of the state of shock, getting on with the lesson and coming up with different courses of action and when I had just decided to send the student an email after the lesson to ask him to either wear a t-shirt or study without the camera on in the future, all of a sudden my student switched off the camera and, after a few minutes, reappeared in a t-shirt. I suppose that even though I said nothing and even though I did my best to keep on my professional demeanour, there must have been something in my face that send out the right message. And it never happened again.

Coda

I don’t want this post to be a simple exercise of weighing advantages and disadvantages. This is an account of my personal experience and both things are true:

  • this past year of teaching adults (almost) full-time was an interesting experience and when I look back I still smile thinking about some of the lessons and some of my amazing students and although a teacher should not have any favourites, I wish I could wave from here to all of them but especially the amazing IT people, all the boys and all the girls.
  • although this can change in the future, right here and right now, I am a teacher of young learners.

If you are interesting in reading a little more on that, here are some other posts inspired by this year of teaching adults: the first impressions from the YL teacher who went back into the adult classroom, what my adult students could learn from my kids, and a whole series on discourse development tricks that was created during that year. I would still like to write a proper post on the corporate English but that will have to wait until the following weeks…

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #64 ‘What time is it?’ aka Classroom management tricks for primary

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Ingredients

  • A board and a marker, with two phrases written on the top: ‘What time is it?’ and ‘Time left:….min’
  • A watch for the teacher.

Procedures

  • Drill the question with all the kids (‘What time is it?’)
  • Every time you hear from the classroom the same or similar question, most probably in the kids’ L1 (‘What time is it?’, ‘When is the break?’, ‘How much time we’ve got left?’) etc, point to the question on the board and elicit it from the group or from one student and only when they do, check the time and write the number of minutes left until the end of the lesson.
  • Repeat every time someone asks the question but insist on them asking the question in English.

Why we like it?

  • First of all, this trick gives kids an opportunity to learn to control their behaviour in class. I use it with my pre-primary and primary students in a situation in which they cannot tell the time using the clock and they do not have their mobiles to do this using their digital clocks. Not to mention that at the moment we work in an unusual context and each part of the 4-academic hours-long day has a different length. If the kids understand better how much time is left or, in other words, for how many more minutes they are required to ‘work hard’, they are better prepared to manage their behaviour in the time left. Also, it is of a great psychological help to see the minutes disappear and then even if the day is long, even if the weather has an impact on the kids’ energy levels, even if the activities today are not amazingly exciting for everyone, there are fewer and fewer minutes to go through until the next break time, snack break, the walk, the playground and so on. It has been of a great help in all the summer classes.
  • The kids are likely to ask this question anyway, directing it at their teacher or their peers so giving them a chance to do it in English is an opportunity to learn and to practise some useful language in a natural context.
  • To be perfectly honest, it is a tiny little bit irritating to hear this question and to have to answer it a few times during the lesson BUT the very fact that the question is asked and the frequency with which it is asked is a great source of immediate feedback for the teacher and a signal that, perhaps, some changes need to be introduced in the original lesson plan. Maybe an activity took too long, maybe on that particular day the kids are too energetic or too sleepy for whatever is going on and they need a settler or a stirrer. Perhaps even an activity needs to be abandoned asap, for whatever the reason…Knowing is is much better than not knowing it and proceeding when your audience is not ready for it. That also means that on some days and with some activities, the kids will completely forget to ask the question and that is for the best reason of it. They will be so involved in the activities that the lesson length and the clock will not matter at all.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #63 Musical Challenge meets Andy Warhol

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Ingredients

  • A set of markers and a simple handout (eight circles and numbers)
  • A video with different music samples. I have used this one here, devoted to the unusual instruments.

Procedures

  • In our case (City Camp), the whole day was devoted to music and in the first half of the day we: learnt the names of the instruments, played different games with the vocabulary such as miming, guessing the name of the instrument by the sound and we made our own shakers. I came up with the idea for the musical challenge to follow-up on all of that.
  • First of all, we revised all the colours and we talked about the associations between colours and emotions. We used those that the kids were familiar with (happy, sad, angry, tired, sleepy, hungry, crazy, scared, energetic).
  • I showed the kids the handout, with the eight empty circles and numbers and asked ‘How is number 1?’ and the other numbers. It was clear that they had no colours and no emotions.
  • I told the kids that we would listen to music. ‘Is it a happy music?’ ‘A sad music?’ ‘Are you scared?’. I asked them to close their eyes and played the first part of the video. It is important to mention that I used my laptop here and the kids were not able to see the screen and the instrument. I did not want them to get distracted by the image and I was hoping that we would be able to focus only on the sound and the associations.
  • When the music stopped we talked about out emotions and the best colour for them. Afterwards we coloured the first face.
  • Later on, we proceeded with all the other pieces of music in the same way.
  • In the end we watched the video again, this time properly but we also paused and talked about the emotions and the colours, comparing our pictures.

Why we like it

  • This activity is a variation of the Musical Challenge that I often use with my older students. Initially, I was considering using it in its original format but later decided against it as some of the kids in the group were too young and I was worried that I would not be able to explain in English that they can draw anything they want, that they should be quick and avoid adding too much detail and that we would not really be able to talk about the results properly as the children do not really have enough langauge for that. Instead, I mixed the Musical Challenge with the Andy Warhol lesson.
  • I loved the way the activity worked. As an English teacher, I should probably start with the fact that it gave us an opportunity to produce a lot of langauge because kids started to make some comments even during the listening part and continued later, while making decisions about the colours and while presenting their smiley to the teacher and the group.
  • The same video and handout can be used with older and more advanced students because the music samples / emotions can be used in an extension acticivity i.e. group the samples/ emotions, choose your favourite, create your own instrument and play some music, choose one sample / emotion and tell a story etc.
  • It was also amazing that everyone could produce as much as they were capable of. Since it is a city camp group, we have some mix of abilities but since it is an open-ended task, kids can produce a little bit, the bare miminum (‘It is sad. It is green and yellow’) or a lot more, fully justifying their choices.
  • As an Art teacher (and yes, I dare call myself that), it was absolutely amazing to see how well kids responeded to an opportunity to look at the world from a slightly different perspective, making the connections between the colour, the music and the emotions and representing it on paper. During the entire activity, it was easy to see how the kids actually did take time to think about their impressions and how to express them best through langauge and through colour. Sometimes, they would make an immediate decision, while listening and then rethink it and change it. And the conviction with which they did it was a wonder to behold.
  • As a teacher of children, I loved this activity because it gave us all an opportunity to express our own personal views and opinions and to learn that everyone, the kids and the adults may have a completely different opinion and that there are no right or wrong answers. So at the same time, it was also a lesson on learning how to respect other people.
  • A busy/lazy teacher loves this kind of an activity because it takes about 5 minutes to prepare and to set up.
  • For us the activity was the final project but it can also be used, in a shortened version, as an introduction or a lead-in activity to any lesson related to music.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #62 Secret words. Learning to read

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@Cambridge University Press

Ingredients

  • A text written for the lower levels learners, pre-A – A1 level, preferably accompanied by some visuals. The one pictured above which was the inspiration for this kind of an activity was taken from Super Grammar 2 by Emma Szlachta, CUP, p. 38
  • A set of blue cards to cover some of the key words in the coursebook. It is much easier to manage if the text is displayed on the screen. The SECRET cards can be easily adjusted and moved around during the lesson.

Procedures

  • In the first stage, the kids look at the illustrations and describe them. If you are looking for the ideas how to use with illustrations in the EFL classroom, make sure you check out these posts, here and here. There are lots and lots of ideas. This stage will give the kids an opportunity to produce some language and also to get ready for the reading.
  • Kids read the text in silence, individually and, afterwards, in pairs, trying to guess what words are hidden under the cards. At this point all ideas are good ideas but the teacher should point out that there are some hints in the illustrations.
  • The class read out loud together, led by the teacher or the students, and each pair proposes their ideas. The teacher is revealing the real words. It is not a competitive activity so no points are awarded.
  • The following stage is the reading comprehension task, such as the one in the coursebook.
  • The follow-up productive task can be a text interpretation: the teacher covers all the secret words again. Kids work in pairs, they read a text (one text per child). In step A: they try to remember what the original words are, in step B: the kids read the text again with their own ideas for all the secret words.

Why we liked it

  • The activity is easy to prepare, especially with the use of the electronic devices.
  • The activity can be used with practically any text and it is easy to adjust the level of development by limiting or extending the number of words, by focusing on some specific words ie only colours, only verbs or only a specific grammar word ie a structure or a part of speech, depending on the level of the students.
  • This is one of the ways of breaking up the text and making it more manageable for the early readers.
  • It is also a way of making it more interesting as it changes the reading task into something resembling a guessing game.
  • It can be made productive and generative by the illustrations-based activities or by the creative reading (the final stage) which can also lead to a writing task ie describing your own room or your own dream room.

Happy teaching!

A balancing act. Non-competitive EFL games for kids

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It happened way too many times…

Here is a situation that I witnessed many times during an observed lesson with young learners: a teacher and a group of kids start playing a game, for example riddles. The teacher models, then the kids take over. One student sits in front of everyone, chooses a card for the other students to guess or to identify. Kids start shouting out words, one of them gets it and the teacher takes the flashcard and hands it over to the student who shouted the correct word. The game goes on and it takes about three rounds more for one of the students to get offended / upset / angry / sad about not winning. More often or not, someone starts crying. Oups.

It is not only about losing, although, to be honest, this is a serious problem, too. Here, however, the ‘failure‘ of some kids is clearly visualised with a flashcard. Frequently, it is also very unfair because it is the faster and louder kids that get the point and these are not necessarily the kids who really know the answer. Also, there is another dilemma in a situation when two students shout out the correct answer at exactly the same point. Will the teacher tear the card into halves? No, of course not. Sigh.

That issue, frequent as it was, was always addressed during the feedback session and I am pretty sure every session on games for VYL and YL included the commandment compressed down to ‘Don’t use flashcards as reward points’. This was the bread and butter of a trainer / VYL ados.

My real shock to the system was an invitation to volunteer at Sheredar, our rehabilitation camp for children who went through serious diseases a few years back. I had a chance to go there a few times and teaching kids was an amazing experience. However, before I went, our contact and coordinator, Ksenia, said: ‘They will be one big mixed ability group but you can choose any topic you want. Actually, do whatever, just don’t play any competitive games. These kids have fought enough’. It took me about a minute to understand that I have no games to play. All my favourite activities, those that I frequently used in my lessons, with kids, juniors and teens, all of those favourite ones were competitive. ALL OF THEM.

Should kids even be playing competitive games?

I have been looking for sources on competition in the EFL classroom and I have found…nothing. I started to look around for any texts on kids and competition and it turns out that getting engaged in competitive activities such as sports, for example, can be very beneficial for children.

  • competitive activities can be motivating and encourage kids to improve their skills
  • playing and losing and winning helps children to learn how to deal with competition and with the fear of losing
  • they are also an opportunity to learn how to deal with pressure and how to win and how to lose
  • they are good for building self-confidence
  • they teach kids about the existence of the rules that need to be obeyed
  • they can help form friendships and relationships, with peers and adults
  • and, also, even if they are sports, they can lead to improving academic performance in children

Although, of course, they can also have some drawbacks, such as too much pressure, negative feelings in children and for their self-esteem.

On the whole, competition is a good thing, although it is not a given that all the children take to it naturally. Some of them might struggle, which is natural, bearing in mind that not all the adults have learnt to deal with it successfully, and they should be given help and support.

EFL and competition

As regards our EFL classes, especially those with the younger learners, primary and pre-primary, it would be just reasonable not to abandon all the competitive games althogether but to keep an eye on the balance and on avoiding a situation when all the games and activities that comprise a lesson have promote competition. Apart from competition, there are the other beautiful C-words such as: cooperation, colaboration, cognitive skills development that can and should be the foundations for our classroom life.

Not to mention that everything that we do in our lessons, namely learning a language, is against the very idea of competition. All the kids learn for themselves and although they have the same linguistic aims, their overall results or results in certain areas of language learning do not depend on the results of the other participants. What is more, their progress is measured against their previous results and achievement, although, admittedly, the situation is slightly different when it comes to learning a langauge in the context of a state school where kids’ progress is graded at every step of the way.

Things to consider

The most important thing to remember seems to be the fact that we, as teachers, should not take things for granted and assume that all the kids in our group like competition and competitive activities and that all of them are equally prepared to win and lose with grace.

The other factor to take into consideration is the age of the students. The younger the students, the less likely it is that they have already had a chance to participate in those kind of activities and acquire these skills and that they have enough life experience to be mature about it. It is a combination of their age, cognitive and social development as well as life circumstances such as having a chance to attend kindergarten, playing at home with parents and relatives, having older siblings and so on.

Equally important is the bond between the students. A group of children starting to learn together in September is a completely from the same group in January or even in October, especially in the context of after school groups or afternoon language schools where children might land in a group of complete strangers with whom the only thing they have in common is the age and the level of English, not the family ties, the address or the school. The more they get to know each other, the more they bond, the easier it will be for the teacher to set up activities, including competitive games, and for the kids to handle ‘failure‘. After all, it is easier to lose and get over it when you play with friends.

What it comes down to in real life, with real children, is keeping an eye on the kids, checking how they react to different stimuli and then introducing some competitive games, carefully, step by step. However, with my youngest students, this non-competitive period may span over the entire length of the pre-school EFL. With the most recent group, we started to play only half-way through our third year together and even then it was the whole group vs the teacher (who always lost).

Every little helps

Here are some of the tricks and techniques that a teacher can use in the classroom while introducing competitive games or taming of the competitive games we often include in our lessons (tired and tested):

  • Playing the familiar games such as riddles or pelmanism in a less competitive way. First of all, we do not award points for the boardrush OR we award points to both teams for competing the task, not only to the team who is faster (especially that with boardrush at least it is sometimes very tricky to establish who really was the first one to touch the board). Points here can be pluses or hearts on the board or flashcards given out to the winner in a particular round. Instead, we finish the round, the praise everyone and we simply move on. The game itself (the fun of participating, the language produced or used) is the reward itself.
  • We do not determine the order of participation based on the successful participation, for example in riddles, when the student who guesses the word is the next one to play. Instead, all students take turns, one by one to make a riddle for the whole class, regardless of how good they are at guessing.
  • Playing ‘Simon Says’ without excluding the losers by asking them to sit down after they make a mistake, especially that a growing number of non-participating students is very bad for the overall classroom and behaviour management. Or, in the same way, playing the Treasure Hunt without establishing who the winner is. We all look for clues around the classroom or the school, we all participate for ten minutes and in the end all check our answers, without counting the points or the number of the elements or stages completed.
  • With pelmanism, instead of playing 1-1, with kids uncovering two cards at a time, the whole group can do it in pairs, with two kids always participating, ideally in different combinations. As soon as a pair is found, the teacher and the kids cheer for everyone, and the cards are put aside or given back to the teacher.
  • Play the game in the format of the teacher vs the whole group, to create the support for the individual child. If they win or if they lose, they will do it together, with all their friends, nobody will be singled out. Ideally, in such a situation, the teacher loses and has a chance to model the mature behaviour and how ‘a failure’ can be handled, but, of course, bending the rules in order to ensure that might not always be easy to do. If you are looking for ideas, I would recommend pelmanism. It is very easy to get distracted and to forget (or ‘to forget’) where the other card from the pair is located.
  • Any game can be played in teams, a team vs a team, instead of individuals competing with each other. This way, again, the support, the safety net or the safety blanket is created. Enjoying the victory or handing the loss is easier with your team. Even if there is one child who does not handle ‘the failure’ very well, there will be other children in this situation, too. They will serve as role models.
  • Having the teacher participate, as one of the teams, can also help soften the blow of the defeat. Again, the teacher will be the one to model the langauge use, the game rules application and the player’s behaviour, too.
  • If possible, talk to the parents whose children struggle with controlling their emotions while losing the game. If nothing else, it would be great to find out whether there have been any factors that could have played a part, whether the child reacts this way in other situations and to simply inform them what happened in class. Perhaps parents will be willing to discuss this topic at home, to reinforce what the teacher does at school and, perhaps, to also play games at home, to help the child tame that beast.
  • In one of the posts (see bibliography), I found another great tip. What is necessary is a quick game that can be played a few times, in a quick succession, in the same lesson. Some of these will be won, some will be lost, but the quick pace and the repetition will make either of the results, the victory or the defeat, not so relevant anymore and easier to deal with and to even forget.
  • Another approach that I have been using in some of my summer camp groups was the Points Poster that we used throughout the entire camp. It was very simple, only an A3 piece of paper, with the team’s name, displayed on the wall. Every time we played a competitive game, there were points, for example two or three stickers for the winners, a star for everyone else. All the kids took very well to it because winning the stickers was great but the joy lasted a brief moment only and very quickly the stickers won today would quickly get lost among all the other stickers won on all the other days. The defeat, on the other hand, was perhaps not the most pleasant thing in the world but it didn’t matter much because the students knew that they would be another game on the same or on the following day. What is more, because I was using some leftover stickers, of all kinds, sometimes it was more fun to choose one huge sticker for your team rather then three little ones…
  • Finishing each game with the teacher and the kids thanking each other for the game, with a simple handshake and ‘Good game‘, just like all the football or volleyball players do at the end of the match.
  • Any activity that can work towards bonding and building a community is also welcome
  • If there is the students who struggle with dealing with their own emotions while playing games, I have so far tried two things. One of them was pairing this student up with myself, in 1-1 games, in order to be better able to model, to monitor and to help the child control their emotions during the game. I have also experimented with pairing up with this child in the games that we played in teams because, again, losing (or winning) in one team with the teacher was easier to deal with.

Non-competitive EFL games

First, an anecdote. The heading of this paragraph is what I put into my google. Would you like to guess what the amazing Uncle Google came up with? Nothing.

‘Fun games’ – yes, ‘no prep games’ – yes, ‘exciting games’ – yes, sure. There was one post from the British Council (see bibliography) but not many of them are appropriate for kids and not many are actual games. And one article about an activity that still has winners and losers…Nada, nada, nada.

Here are some suggestions from the non-competitive games that I have played

  • Musical flashcards: a simple movement game, an adaptation of the musical chairs game, only without any kids dropping out. The teacher puts out all the relevant flashcards on the floor, kids move around with some music playing. When it stops, every child picks up a card and makes a sentence for example: I like bananas (topic: food), I haven’t got a cat (topic: food), I am wearing a blue t-shirt (topic: clothes) etc. Afterwards, the flashcards go back onto the floor, the teacher puts the music on for another round of the game.
  • All the logical games such as Find the difference (for example those that we have in the YLE Movers and Flyers) or Odd one out (for example YLE Movers) that can be easily adapted to any topic. A similar activity will be also based on the silly picture scenes that I described in an earlier post here.
  • I Spy: a variation of the game with a set of visuals such as a poster or an illustration from the coursebook. Kids work together as a group (in the early stages) or in pairs, they describe something in the picture, with the relevant sentences, depending on the age and level (I spy with my little eye something. It is big, it is green. It is next to the cat. etc). The student or the students who listen find the relevant object. This game is not competitive because there are no winners / losers and the game goes on until the child / children guess. As the game proceeds, the kids can offer more information and support to help their partner, for example the first letter / sound, the gestures etc.
  • Riddles: the same principle and procedure as above but it can be played with flashcards or a set of word cards or a set of words prepared by the kids.
  • Back to the board: it is a very popular game that can easily be played in a non-competitive way and this way it can go help build and develop a sense of community and give the whole group a chance to work together. One of the students sits on a chair in the centre, facing the group. The teacher writes a word or a simple sentence on the board and signals how many words it includes. The group work together to help the one student guess and recreate the word on the board. With the lower level kids, flashcards can be used instead of words although using simple sentences works wonders for the students to learn and to work better with the grammar, the sentence structure and, progressively, with the meta language.
  • Monster game aka Hangman aka Let’s save the little human: I love playing Monster Game with the lower levels because it helps the students work with literacy, spelling and blending and we always play it as a whole group with all the students contributing and working together to guess the letters and the words and to help the little human who is slowly losing parts of the ladder, the boat or the hotair balloon. To make the game less cruel, the element of getting points can be added (i.e. when the kids guess a part of the word or when they guess the most common letter or when they get all the vowels etc) and with my summer camp group the game finished with the kids drawing some food for the hungry monster because they developed empathy for someone hungry, even though it was a monster.
  • Telephone: this game is a variation of something known as ‘Whispers’, with the whole group sitting together and passing a word or a simple phrase, from the end to the beginning of the chain. This is not a very generative game or a very communicative one but it helps the kids work together towards one goal and it is easy enough even for the youngest kids.
  • Stations in the classroom: this is not really an activity but a format of completing tasks with kids. The teacher sets up a few stations in the classrom, for example in the four corners of the room. Kids move from one station to the other and complete the task such as unscrambling words, completing a simple handout, matching words and pictures, playing a round of pelmanims and many more. Kids complete a few tasks during the lesson and their job is done when they complete a full circle but they do not compete with everyone else in the group. It is up to the teacher to decide when then task is done and they can move on and in this way, even the ‘weaker’ students can play and participate without any pressure from the group.
  • Community building games: on of the 30 Creative Team Building Activities. I haven’t tried these yet but these definitely caught my eye: Cross the Line (22), Paper Chain Race (30), Shrinking Classroom (18), Building a tower (6 and 10). Or 22 Fun Team Building Games and Activities for Kids. Here I really liked: Forehead Dots (4), Some of them have the ‘choose the best / fastest team’ element which works to some extent as it helps the kids to bond within their team but I would still skip this element altogether.
  • Last but not least, among the things that has been on my wishlist of the things to try out in the classroom is the parachute and all the parachute games. Some ideas can be found here.

Coda

But, perhaps, the situation is a little bit better than it seems. While working on this post, I asked my audience on the social media about their opinion and I was very happy to find that those who responded use a mix of competitive and non-competitive games. At the same time, the teachers admitted that they have to deal with the competition-related stress in the EFL classroom, although not all the time and ‘some games, some days, some kids’ was the most popular answer.

What about you, dear reader? Do you play any non-competitive games with your YL students?

Happy teaching!

Bibliography

Teaching children to lose gracefully so they can lose with dignity as adults (oregonstate.edu)

Pros and Cons of Competition Among Kids and Teens (verywellfamily.com)

The pros and cons of competition | BabyCenter

How To Teach Children To Cope With Losing | Casa de Corazón (casaearlylearning.com)

6 Tips for Teaching Children How to Lose — Better Kids

australiansportscamps.com.au/blog/benefits-children-playing-competitive-sports/#:~:text=Competition Can Improve your Child%27s,high school and tertiary studies.

Six collaborative games for competitive English language classrooms | British Council

ETF 57/3 pg14-23 (ed.gov)

Problems with Games in ESL/EFL Classrooms (and Solutions) – BINGOBONGO (bingobongokids.com)

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.