I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
Hence the survey.
It is completely anonymous, I am not collecting any data and there are no obligatory questions. I would just like to know who you are, how you have found my blog and why you are reading my posts. Apart from satisfying my curiosity, it will also help me understand which articles and themes are the most interesting or popular for my audience.
‘Anka with fireworks’, my name card by one of my artists
Let’s go alternative in April!
We did! In every possible way.
The size
This was the final lesson in our beautiful and exciting series of the Alternative April series. I really wanted to experiment with the size of the paper. Initially, I wanted us to paint something really big and then something really small in order to really experience the difference first hand. However, based on how the lesson with the older kids was going (in one word: too slow), I changed that for the lesson with the younger kids and opted for the A7 only. We were working well but the creative process, the decisions and the composition, takes time and I didn’t want to rush us and in the second lesson I decided to keep things simple: just the little picture.
The materials
Initially, I had the wild idea of letting the kids choose the medium that they want to work with. It is not a bad idea but, I will be honest, the preparations for its implementation need to be more detailed and organised in a slightly different way to what I did. Next time I will and next time will be better.
In the end, my older students went for the simplest and the most basic, pencils and black markers, and with my younger group I chose for all of us and we worked with watercolours.
The Zebra Heart. Print.
The artist of the day…
didn’t come. The first reason for that was that I did not want to choose one and I felt conflicted about it. On the one hand, I really wanted to stick to the framework that I created for our course and we had always had at least one Master to inspire us. On the other hand, the topic that I chose for the lesson, namely ‘Spring’, is such an open-ended and all-embracing topic, that looking for the one was a task doomed to a failure. Plus, I knew that the format would be enough of a challenge and I wanted to give the children the comfort of working with it. I was worried that I would be limiting them too much, with the artist, the format, the topic and the resource. I decided against it. We sang the song, said hello, brainstormed all the associations with the word ‘spring’ and looked very briefly at a selection of paintings showing spring, without singling anyone out.
And then sat down to work.
How it all went
I know that I sound like a broken record when I say it but I will do it again: This was one of my favourite lessons ever and the reason for that is that, again, we set off on an amazing, 45-minute creative journey.
We all had to be very careful with choosing the topic for our work. The A7 format is a very small one and you have to take into account how small certain elements are and how much effort it would take to execute them.
All kids had three pieces of the A7 paper, attached to the table with the painter’s scotch (necessary!) so they could experiment with different approaches and they really did. The first pictures were usually the most cautious ones, the easiest ones and the least experimentative. However, since there were more pieces available, I could see how much braver and more confident they became in their following steps. Even today, while looking at the pictures, I can tell the order in which they were painted by particular kids. And it is amazing. For example, the triptych in red by Egorka, who started with a scene from Mars, all in red, then moved on to a superhero’s portrait and finished with what he called ‘a zebra heart’, in black and red that ended up being a print. Why? Because he noticed that the paper towels we had on the tables had an interesting pattern and he decided to experiment. Precious.
Three of my students painted only one picture but it is because they decided to make it more detailed and, naturally, these required more time, effort and attention. The other children went for a triptych and, one way or another, these three were connected by a common theme.
One of those three is the first in the world case of the Snail Art in which the artist traces the slime trail left on paper by her pet snail. Which, of course, was her own idea. No snails were harm in the production of this piece.
It turned out that this kind of art is a perfect exercise for improving focus and concentration. It worked like magic. For that reason it might be an interesting activity to improve in the general English classes, for example. I can easily picture it in our ESL / EFL courses, especially that the topic can be easily adapted to match the curriculum and it does not eat up a large part of your lesson. And if you don’t want to get into the whole watercolour mess, the same can be done with markers or coloured pencils.
For the time ever, I had not painted my picture before the lesson to show the kids. I wanted to experience the change of focus myself and I told them about it. This was also something that we did for the first time ever.
Having three pieces of paper came in handy with one more thing. As soon as I announced the topic of our lesson, the same question was asked, almost immediately. ‘Can we paint something we want?’ I mean, I always say yes in the end and inside of me there is one happy teacher celebrating the independence and the artistic freedom that my little kids want to exercise. But we did negotiate a tiny little bit, too and, in the end, they agreed that since we have three bits of paper, a lot can be done. Something that the teacher suggests, something that we really, really want to do…
It is beyond fascinating how much impact the A7 format had on our art, composition and work. Five stars, highly recommended. I hope you enjoy visiting our little gallery in this post.
The sunThe skyThe snail letters
The Snail Art
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
This is the part of the lesson that is still the same: hello, how do you feel today, have we got any new students. It is great to see that they are more in charge of it right now and they are able to answer more fully, without my consecutive questions. If I forget (and that happens), they remind me to bring it back. Right now, it is more common for the kids to ask if we are going to include some other of their favourite elements or games and my stronger writers ask for the permission to put the lesson plan on the board. That is just sweet and it makes my heart melt to see that I can just dictate a very simple plan and they are able to write it down.
Songs
In April we started the lesson with one of two songs.
It was either the absolutel hit from Super Simple Song, The Seasons Song. The kids still really like it and, right now, they are really good at singing. We can properly sing for the pleasure of it.
We still continue singing our month song but in April it has completely turned into ‘I am going to sing about how I feel today’ and we had a few amazing days when it turned into proper comments on the weather (‘What is this? Where is the sun?’ on the rainy days) or an expression of our wishes and hopes (‘Tomorrow I am sleeping, All day’ one day before the May holidays or ‘Where is the summer?’ since we are a few weeks before the end of the academic year). This has been the absolute hit of this academic year!
Rules and classroom language
It is obvious that, on the one hand, the rules are in place and, finally, we almost sit through the lesson, without wandering aimlessly (that was one of our objective in January!) but it is also obvious that the kids are already very tired with the pace and the length and April has not been very easy. The overall attention span has shortened and we have dealt with more issues and outbursts of my kinds.
While planning the lesson, I am more careful with putting the activities in order and with ensuring that the serious tasks that require more of their attention are in the first half of the lesson. It is also more common now to put all the games at the end of the plan and with a question mark. We only play them if we manage to go through everything else. I also caught myself announcing that ‘we are going to do a task’, referring from calling it a game, to signal that we are not doing it ‘just for fun’. Danny Go, our hero from the previous few months had to go, too, because he stirred the kids too much and it was very difficult to bring them back to do some real exercises.
At the same time, I also introduced a new tool for the fast finishers, the ‘I have done everything’ book, with additional tasks from different areas (Maths, logic, drawing, English). The students who have finished their obligatory task can take their booklet and continue working on their tasks. We have had only one week of that so it is too early to evaluate it at this point. We’ll see how it all goes.
Story
April was a bit shorted, due to the term break and my trip, but we still managed to squeeze in a few stories. We read the second part of Marvin, ‘Marvin Wanted More’ by Joseph Theobald and it was cool to read it as it is, with only one or two verbs changed. We also learnt the phrase ‘Just a little bit more!’ and the kids recited it during the reading, when Marvin was getting hungry, which is, basically, every other page.
We also had a fantastic lesson with ‘Wacky Wednesday‘ by Dr Seuss and, last week, with ‘I can read with my eyes shut‘, which we used in a shared reading activity.
Socialising
If anyone dared to think that our eight months in the classroom might potentially mean that everyone is now everyone’s friends, they would be seriously mistaken.
Yes, we get on better with each other than we used to and it is much easier to sort out the issues that come up, admittedly. However, we still have a few issues that bother me a lot. In one of the groups I had to announce that we stop playing games because they are not ready to play. I have one student who is accutely allergic to any competitive activities and recently it turned out that even when we play together, to collect points for the group, the kids start judging each other based on how many points they bring to the kitty. And if someone brings fewer, here you are, the group is ready to troll…
I decided to put the games on hold and I annouced it, officially, but I have a cunning plan. In the time that we have left until the end of the year, we are going to work hard on building a team. Basically you can address me as ‘coach’ for now…I have a few ideas ready and I will look for more. The post will be written, eventually.
Creativity
April would get a strong ‘To Standard’ for the creative element in our lessons:
our patchwork project, a part of the lesson devoted to patterns and shapes, not very generative in terms of langauge but, I will be honest, I really wanted to include something like that in our regular ESL classes
our amazing dinosaur project that was divided into three lessons and consisted of drawing a dinosaur, filling in a fact file for it and interviewing a friend about it
a mini-project in our Wacky Wednesday lesson. The kids had to write only three sentences of their choice about their Wacky Wednesday and draw pictures to accompany them, so simple and so precious. We had a lot of fun.
April was also the month of our story (based on Flyers visuals) that we turned into a real book. I loved the fact that they enjoyed writing it and then reading it, too. We are definitely going to do it again.
An excerpt from the story
‘I ate pasta upside down’ (Wacky Wednesday)
Pure brilliance, from the point of view of illustration
Teacher
It has been a very tiring month, although it was a shorter one. I was tired (and busy with the non-school tasks) and the kids were also very tired (and already looking forward to the summer, the last bit of the marathon, before you see the finishing line and find the last scraps to speed up and cross the line in style).
But the good things happened, too. We have done huge progress in Maths and in reading. The kids are really creative and now, I can say, we read. We have had a few amazing Art classes. But I am like my students, I am looking forward to the end of the academic year.
Please make sure you have a look at our development since September!
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
This was to be our final lesson in the topic of body parts and, once more, after singing the hello and going over ‘How do you feel today?’, we went for our spinner game. I was really worried that we would not have enough time for anything else as I wanted not only introduce a new artist but also a new tool.
The artist
This was the second time we invited Pablo Picasso to our lesson. And the kids remembered! They were a little bit surprised because they met him as a one-line artist with the amazing animals (post here) and, at least some of them, a little bit taken aback by the sheer contrast between the two. I showed them a few portraits and we highlighted the main pointers of cubism (which we also talked about before). We also tried to find all the figures (shapes) in the portraits.
The art
This was a day when we would be experimenting with a new took – oil pastels and that is why I decided to demonstrated some of the basic blending techniques. You can find the ideas in the videos here and here.
Afterwards I demonstrated the double portrait that I made while getting ready for the lesson and we talked about its main features (shapes and colours). I also showed them the simplest way for achieving the Picasso effect by drawing one more face: a shape for the face, divided into halves, smile (ideally misshapen, mismatching halves) and shapes for eyes, nose and hair.The next step went according to the plan one of my students wrote on the board once: ‘3. Miss Anka Paint, 4. We paint’. We started to work.
The kids chose different ways of working with the oil pastels. Some combined them with pencil, some with markers and for some they were just a crayons replacement. But we also had a few properly experimenting with the new tool.
Some of my students refused to see the world through Picasso’s eyes. They really didn’t like his approach and asked if it is possible to draw their friends the way they want. It was more common in the older group, the younger kids just went for it.
Some of the students also asked if they can draw ‘something they choose’, not faces and I also said yes. Obviously, Kolya had his own idea for the interpretation of the topic and for cubism and I am happy I did not object. The house of spades, hearts, dimonds and cards is just beautiful. ‘One house in the city’, as he called it.
Some of them loved it, though, and the best piece of evidence is that they snatched the paintings as soon as possible, to take them home. I barely managed to take my photographs.
We also had one character sitting for a portrait, my new portrait and a few other precious creations.
The Star Girl that you can see below is a joint effort between me and one of my youngest student who decided to help me with the colour. I decided to save it here not only because I am happy with my design but mostly because it shows how the kid’s creativity develops as they go through the task. I drew the face and started to colour it, in the most boring of ways but soon I was joined by my student who took over and decisively so. It was fascinating to see how many different ways of colouring, blending, shading and working with oil pastels he came up with during that task. The final product – below.
Watching the kids work was a real pleasure. One of my students was working on something hard that, from afar, looked like her trying to create one big, colourful, many-layered blob of pastel that some, less patient, might label as ‘trying to destroy all my pastels in five minutes’ but the final product, the girl with a horse, proved me wrong. Experimentation was just experimentation, and one of the many steps towards beauty.
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
Our beautiful ‘patchwork’, all 20 pieces together (one was immediately stashed in the bag to be taken home)
Last Thursday
Five lessons on a regular Thursday, English, a double Maths with 1B and a double ESL with 1A, a nice, short day, with the cherry on the cake being the fact that for me it is the last day of the week. Rounding up, in a way.
What did I do at work last Thursday? Here is the list:
supported a student and helped him deal with distress related to his inability to deal with a task in a subject that he normally excells at. He got upset, abandoned the task but then he calmed down and he decided to catch up and to finish the task, sacrificing his break and a part of the following lesson but he did complete the task. I told him I was proud of him for not giving up.
went through another refusal to deal with the task with another student. We talked about students making decisions and teachers respecting those decisions but also about the fact that if it refers to a test, the teacher will have to grade the test as it is. The student thought about it and decided to take part after all.
listened to two students who had a disagreement and helped to deal with anger and tears
created opportunities for the students to develop their social skills by sharing resources, waiting for their turn to receive them and to collect them and to learn how to respect the other students’ work, everyone’s right to work in silence and in peace
gave the students an opportunity to express themselves through art (see the photo above) and to be proud of their work
created opportunities to develop cognitive skills and to see the world through shapes and patterns
help to learn to deal with failure during the artistic activity by showing how to solve problems with water, paints, splashes and other artistic disasters
cheered on the growth and developement by listening to at least four stories about the milk teeth falling out, shaking, getting lost and found
took part in rejoicing the fact that the holidays at the dacha, at the seaside and at gran’s are coming
welcomed a child coming back after a long absence (The best entry ever, by the way. No hellos but instead ‘I think I have lost my shoes’) and heard all the stories from the past two weeks.
cheered, sympathised and laughed at everything that three Pikachus did over the previous 24 hours
gave a chance for the students to lead the lesson
witnessed two serious meltdowns that were handled by the children’s personal tutors.
taken care of the fast finishers and started a new procedure of ‘I Have Done Everything Book’
A bit much, no? But wait, I haven’t told you yet ANYTHING about the actual learning that we did that day. English and ESL: it was shapes and patterns, in Maths – division using the bus stop method. And it was not even any special day, just a regular Thursday.
Sigh.
The patchwork did it!
I do sigh a lot, actually. I have no idea what it looks like to the outsiders and the passers-by, but, indeed, it is one of the easiest way of letting at least some of the pressure out of the system. Thursday was no different, I was sighing a lot, especially because of the patchwork.
The kids had left already, the classroom was back to normal, I was just organising the finished pictures on the window sill to dry them in the sun and talking to my T.A. I looked at the pictures, the patterns wonderfully chosen, and the colours to match, the paintings looking just amazing separately and together, as a set, too. I thought that they were beautiful and that they are going to make a beautiful photograph and that I am proud of my kids. And then I realised that nobody, looking at the photograph, here on the blog, on the social media or in the parents’ chat, nobody will be able to tell how much effort went into it, how much drama accompanied it and how much it actually took, this photograph. We will file it under ‘pretty’ (where it does belong!) and we will never talk about the emotional cost of this whole adventure, this whole day.
Absolutely the same can be said about any other handout, activity, test, progress made, painting, lesson and sometimes even a sentence. Guess what, dear reader, I have seen it once and I cannot unsee it!
The emotional burden of the everday teacher’s life
It turns out that teachers are the professional group among the lowest scorers as regards health and well-being (studies by Johnson et al.). We are in good company, of course, together with ambulance workers, social services, customer services and prison and police officers.
On the one hand, there is a tendency to highlight the levels of stress related to the number of years of experience, drawing attention to the fact that newly qualified teachers are at an especially high risk of falling prey to burnout (Linqvist et al.) which is easy to understand as we all, including the human behind the words here, remember the dread and the stress that came together with taking the first step in a completely uncharted territory of the school on our first official contract.
However, according to the study among the Lithuanian teachers, both primary and other specialists, the levels of stress and the issues with mental or physical health were not related to the years of experiences, the location of the school, the marital status or the length of employment at one school. Still, despite a relatively high motivation to work (‘enthusiasm was above average’) and the low levels of indolence, every third teacher ‘showed signs of of high psychological distress’ and 12% were assessed as being at risk of depression (Emeljanovas et al.).
The reasons? Well, there are many (Stefanou et al.) But, to be honest, I would like to leave all of them behind, apart from one. Away goes the personal well-being and health, motivation and classroom effectiveness. Off the list come also social behaviour, learning and performance or the particular school and how it is functioning. Or the students’ motivation and well-being. In the same vein, those ‘rapid social and technological changes and constant monitoring of society’ (Emeljanovas et al) or the parents’ and students’ expectations which have changed in the 21st century are of no interest to me at the moment.
Not because they are not important, quite the contrary. It is all very interesting and very relevant but there almost seems to be too many factors which have an impact and which the teachers are affected by on daily basis. The number and the volume of the issues might lead to a realisation that it is a hopeless task because, indeed, how can you deal simultaneously with all the requirements of the everyday teaching reality and with the 21st century outside of your window? I won’t.
The Absinthe Drinker, Edouard Manet (1875 / 76) Attention: NOT because of the alcohol in front of her, but because of the emptiness in her heart)))
The lucky ones?
Because, let’s imagine a couple of teachers that are just ‘lucky’, for the lack of a better word. They work in a private institution so their working conditions are better than average. They are experienced so they have already developed an immunity towards the pressure from the system, the regular assessment and the need to develop professionally. Over the years, they have also learnt how to work with paretns and to manage the children in class. They work in a small school, with the helpful admin staff and the kids are in year 1 so there is not so much checking, testing and reporting, although there is some. What is more, these teachers, they teach with and out of passion. They even like their students. All 21 one of them. The children are just a group of kids. They are all amazing, no one suffers from any neglect at home, some of them have some special education needs but it is not anything that cannot be dealt with. These teachers are lucky, the conditions are almost ideal.
Does it mean, then, that these teachers are not affected by the emotional challenges of the everyday life? Of course not! At the end of a Thursday, like the one described above, they look like some of those characters featured in the illustrations I chose for this post. Sitting in the teachers’ room, recovering, as if, gathering the energy to get up and to put the jacket on and to go home. On some days, walking home, thinking of all the other potential professions out there, of becoming a plumber, a librarian, a chef or a pensioner…
That is the reality and, as they say, ‘there is tired and there is teacher tired‘. It is not sadness, it is not depression, it is not burnout, it is not disillusionment, it is not apathy. Only the unbelievable, unmeasurable, undescribable, infinite exhaustion. And not because you have spent the day ploughing the field or hand-digging foundations for a house but because you have spent 5 or 7 academic hours educating, surrounded by tonnes of emotions coming at you from 21 different sources simultaneously and trying to deal with all of them.
Children are and will be children and dreaming of an ideal lesson, 100% of the time, day in, day out, with everyone listening, following instructions and not getting distracted, not getting into trouble with classmates, and, generally, being ‘little angels’ (or the students that we know from our teachers’ books), that is simply not going to happen. You plan your lesson and then you go into the classroom and life happens.
The good thing is that we learn how to deal with disasters (and ‘disasters’) and with our emotional response to them. The good thing is that, eventually, we get a bit better at it. You can read about it in an earlier post here: The end of the world or Suriviving bad lessons with YL.
The good thing is also that we have lots and lots to look back on, to do the maths and to label the day as ‘good’ and that, frequently, we come home with a joyful ‘Guess what happened at school?’. There are the patchworks that we created and the photos of them that we will share and we will be happy and proud of. And maybe it is the lingering memory of these patchworks that will make us get up the following day and set off to school, one more time, erasing the not-so-good memories of the previous day, in order to try again, to make the children know Math, English or Science and to help them grow and get better and get confident.
The joys and challenges of teaching kids, you know. Which, by the way, and hilariously enough, was the title of one of the first training sessions that I have ever given. The joys and challenges. The patchwork.
Emeljanovas, A., Sabaliauskas, S., Mežienė, B., Istomina, N. (2023), The relationships between teachers’ emotional health and stress coping, Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1276431
Johnson, S., Cooper, C., Cartwright, S., Donald, I., Taylor, P. & Millet, C. (2005), The experience of work‐related stress across occupation, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 178-187. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940510579803.
Kariou, A., Koutsimani, P., Montgomery, A. & Lainidi, O. (2021), Emotional Labor and Burnout among Teachers: A Systematic Review, Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health2021, 18(23), 12760, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182312760
Lindqvist, H., Weurlander, M., Wernerson, A., & Thornberg, R. (2023). The emotional journey of the beginning teacher: Phases and coping strategies. Research Papers in Education, 38(4), 615–635. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2022.2065518
Stephanou, G. & Oikonomou, A. (2018), Teacher Emotions in Primary and Secondary Education: Effects of Self-Efficacy and Collective-Efficay, and Problem-Solving Appraisal as Moderating Mechanism’, Psychology, 9 (4), https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2018.94053
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
We continue the topic of body parts. It might not be the first topic that comes to mind when you think about the alternative art or our artist of the week but I body vocabulary is exactly what we need now. This is why we continue practising body parts in songs and in our favourite game with the body action verbs that I described before here. All in all, the language was not our main focus in this lesson and only one of the sub-plots. But it will come in handy in the following month when we are going to concentrate on the human body in art.
‘Oooooo’ (A confused one)
The artist
I have decided that this month will be our Alternative April. I would like to take the Monochrome March a little bit further and after experimenting with the colour, we are going to play with the formats and approaches and this was our first lesson in the series.
Shantell Martin is the artist that I have found only recently because she popped up on my social media but it feels like I have known her for ages. I might have. After all, her prints and patterns are everywhere and it is quite likely that I saw her on t-shirts or walls. Now I got to put a name and a face to it.
I was very curious how my students would react to her and they did not disappoint. They were curious, they looked at all the works with interest trying to interpret them and to find the words (a bonus task for reading in English!) and they really liked the fact that she is so young and that she is still alive and active. I think it is a signal for me to try to include more contemporary artists that we can connect with on one more level.
We looked at a variety of her works and talked about them a little bit, about these that we liked or really liked. We looked at different formats and modes she creates in and about her many interests that have an impact on the visual art.
However, our lessons last week had one more guest who made a cameo appearance and that was Paul Klee since he was the author of one of my favourite art quotes, namely, ‘A line is a dot that went for a walk’. I brought this up, together with the Bird and the Cat (that we re-created as a stained glass and that still makes our windows prettier). I also put a on display a lot of different types of lines as a source of inspiration.
‘A cat’
The art
Last week we worked on the A4 paper because I wanted to make sure that children have enough time to fill in the entire page. We also got a new tool – a black permanent marker, with two ends, a thick and a thin one for better results. The children were told to choose their own subject, their own types of lines and that they could combine words and lines, too.
As usual, I also showed the children how I experimented with Shantell’s style as I brought three small pieces of mine. Afterwards, we got down to work.
I know that it is easy for my readers to perhaps get an idea that I get excited for no reason or that I make everything look picture perfect for every post. I don’t. I get excited because my kids are so responsive and every lesson is a hit. It is not for everyone in the same way, it is not for everyone to the same extent but I sew and I reap.
The most interesting thing is that the basic materials did not hinder my students’ creativity. We only had the black pen and the white paper but everyone got very creative and some of my students managed to create a few different pieces. We worked on ours, moved around the room a bit to look at what other students created and once something was ready, we would give it a title. You can see the amazing pieces all around the post here. The lesson took place about a while ago but only now could I take photos of everything. I am revisiting this lesson after three weeks, I am looking at their pieces and, again, I am amazed and I am proud.
Shantell’s lesson was one of those days when I ‘lose’ most of the artwork. Not because I am forgetful or clumsy but because my students behave like real artists and they find it hard to part with their precious creations. It is easy to spot when it is about to happen because they carry them around everywhere and then, when I ask ‘Can I put it on display?’, the answer is short and simple: ‘No!’. On a good day I get to photograph what they have created and I am head over heels that I can do that, at least.
What I like about this particular artist and activity is that it could be easily adapted to any of the topics in a regular EFL kids lessons and now I have a lot of evidence to prove that from my students since they created their pieces on the topic of emotions, places in the city, fairy tales, animals and transport. And the materials are very easy to get)))
Here are some pieces created by my students:
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
Once upon a time there were 52 teachers who agreed to talk to me about their novice year in the very young learners classroom. An M.A. thesis came out of it and an article in the March / April issue of the Modern English Teacher (vol. 33 (2) came out.
It is a weird one and a special one. A weird one because it is the only VYL article in the issue devoted whole and wholeheartedly to the topic of A.I. in education. Could you be any more ‘niche’?
At the same time, it is a very special article because it is about teaching, teacher training and pre-schoolers, or, in other words, my whole professional life in three pages. Fortunately / unfortunately, the article itself is available only to the subscribers but it is still a topic that I am really passionate about so I will be writing more about it.
Until then)
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
If you have read this (relatively new) series before, you know that this year I am teaching in a slightly different context and that, beginning September, I said goodbye to the traditional EFL curriculum and the CEFR. On some days, it really does make my head spin, for example when I catch myself suddenly in the lesson on the prefixes im- and un- (but we really need ‘It’s impossible!’) or teaching the infinitive of purpose (but, it is a lovely and generative structure and the kids love using it and making silly sentences with it). On some other days, I gasp and I am in awe at my kids producing the language.
This was exactly the case with the Past Simple. I just wanted my kids to have it at their disposal, even if only for understanding. The Past Simple accounts for only (‘only’) 20% of the everyday use but it features heavily in our coursebook and in many of the stories we read or watch and, with time, there will be even more of it. So we started.
Wacky Wednesday Project
Presentation
First and foremost, I needed a proper context, something that definitely did belong in the past and something that we would want to talk about. My first attempt was the New Year’s break but somehow, when we got back, there was too much to share and too much to focus on. I decided to try again after a random weekend and then reinforced it right after the winter term break.
The presentation was very simple. I chose ten basic and most frequently used verbs, both regular and irregular such as: I went, I ate, I drank, I played, I rode, I listened, I watched, I liked, I played, I got. I prepared a very simple poster, in colour, with the pairs of verbs and we just tried to make some sentences to describe our weekend. The clarification was rididulously basic ‘I drink coffee’ – we do it everyday and ‘I drank coffee yesterday, on Sunday’. I also added an example in Russian, to show that we do the same in their first language, we change the verb form to signal that something has happened. We read the verbs, drilled a little bit and that’s it. I decided not to burden the kids with the differentiation between the regular or irregular verbs.
Since then, during the first lesson of the week, we have started to use these to talk about our Saturday and Sunday as we do until this day. I write a set of verbs on the board, usually up to 7, and everyone has to choose at least 4 to talk about the things they did at the weekend. About two or three weeks ago to all these ‘I went, I ate, I drank, I liked’, I added ‘I didn’t’ to broaden the scope for the kids. This way we get a chance to share the stories of our weekends and in the appropriate verb forms. Some of my students choose only the required four but some start their stories with ‘Can I talk about everything?’ and yes, of course, they can!
It was only this week that we started the topic ‘properly’. I added more verbs to the list and we started practising in a more focused way. See below for the activities that we have done so far.
Reading the crazy sentences on wordwall. It is fun to give the correct answer but we are also having lots of fun with reading all the incorrect versions, with the easier version (choosing the correct verb) and the more challenging one (choosing between the present simple and past simple).
Mr Milk and his day. We use Mr Milk and all his friends, Mr Banana, Mr Apple, Miss Umbrella, Mr Juice and many more, to tell simple stories. Children take turns to make simple sentences with the verb forms that I show and this is how we tell the whole story. In the end, we decide if it was a good day or a bad day. I have made cards, double-sided, with the basic form and a symbol to help the kids remember the meaning and the past tense form on the back but the electronic cards can be used, too.
The idea of Mr Milk was also used in the boardgame that I put together. Every student could talk about Mr Milk or they could choose their own character. We played the game and talked about their days using the verbs on the board.
Tell me about yesterday, a simple dice game. The kids played in pairs, they had to roll the dice, choose one of the two verbs (I wanted include as many as possible, hence the double set) and make a sentence, crazy or not crazy, and address their partner, for example ‘I ate a pizza. And you?’ and compare their days this way, If there is time, the kids can change partners once or twice and to continue the game.
A song ‘Oh what a week‘, from Superminds / Quickminds 3 by CUP. We looked at the pictures and described the actions, we listend to the song for fun and afterwards, we listen again to number the pictures and we found all the past verb forms in the lyrics, to practise reading and to facilitate the singing / reading in the future. We have been singing the song since and, in a few days, we will also write our own version.
Storytelling #1, based on the Flyers materials. I have used the Charlie story before and I have written about it here but this time Charlie was just a warmer for us. I pointed at the pictures on the screen and gave the kids sentence starters with the verbs for them to complete.
Storytelling #2, based on another set of Flyers materials. We looked at the pictures and prepared a list of words that we can see in the pictures. Kids were brainstoriming the ideas and I was writing them down on the board, in groups: people, places, emotions, objects and actions. Every word got its own number for the future reference. When kids need a word and ask for it, for example ‘Miss Anka, where is ‘students’?’, I can simply reply ‘It’s number 4’ and everything gets much easier. I printed the materials (see above), cut them up, stapled them together in booklets and gave them out, one per student. They we got down to writing our own versions of the story.
Storytelling #3 and the amazing Wacky Wednesday by Dr Seuss. It was a perfect choice for our classes because it includes some past tense, my kids love the idea of ‘wacky’ (or ‘crazy’) days, stories and ideas and we could actually do it on a Thursday which was a nice coincidence. We read the story because we have it in our library, I was reading and the kids were pointing at the wacky things in the pictures and we also tried to talk about these. The story is available also in a video format. In the end, we made notes in our notebooks about own own Wacky Wednesdays, writing only about three things: I saw, I went to, I ate.
What did you do at the weekend? This is how we start our everyday Monday lessons. I write on the board a few verbs in the past tense (I went to, I ate, I drank, I bought, I played, I saw, I rode, I watched, I made, I didn’t) and each child has to choose four things to tell us about their weekend, at least 4. We also added ‘Me, too!’ to react to whatever the kids are retelling and to involve the rest of the class. Our most recent addition is one question. I initially planned it as my question to the person who is talking but the kids suggested taking it further so right now I ask one question to the speaker AND the speaker asks me one question, too.
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
This is the part of the lesson that is always the same: we say hello, we talk about how we are and we introduce the new students aka all the new toys that the kids have brought to school that day. It is a lot of fun to see how they are getting better at it and how much smoother it is now, compared to what it used to be a few months ago.
Songs
Our song writing at the beginning of the lesson is getting better and better. We started with the official versions of the song, ‘March, March’, but it went on for only a week or two and then it took a new direction. Nowadays, we sing two versions of it. The first one could be labelled as ‘my favourite month’ and some kids sing a verse about Christmas and Santa coming (presents, presents!) or about their favourite month. The second one is just a long and musical answer to a question ‘How do you feel today?’ and everyone is becoming more and more creative. This is definitely one of my favourite parts of the lesson these days and we usually have six or seven variations. And the language that is coming out of it! I am over the moon!
Another song that we started to sing in March is another hit from Super Simple Song, The Seasons Song. It is not a very new song, it was published a year ago but I have just found it while I was looking for something about spring. I love it. The lyrics are great and not so easy and the music is uplifting, a perfect song for the morning. We have been singing it for about a week now but soon I would like us to write our own versions of the song. I am hoping there will be different things that we can sing and love about the spring, not only the flowers…
Rules and classroom language
I have come up across an interesting problem related to rules and classroom management and I am now in the middle of considering all the implications and the steps I will have to take to sort it out.
I have realised that for some of my students our interactive lessons, so different to their ‘typical’ national curriculum classes and the approach of their national curriculum teachers have given an idea that the English lessons are not serious and that, for example, they don’t need to think about the rules that much or that they can simply op out of the activities as they would opt out of a game…I am not sure what it means yet but I know that I need to do something and introduce some changes. More on that later.
Story
We did a lot of storytelling in March. We were practising jobs and that is why we watched an episode of Steve and Maggie and turned it into a role-play. We also read and listened to our first story in verse from our coursebook, Lenny, Jenny and the Jumperoo. The story was quite long but the kids were really involved and with all the illustrations and proper staging, we made it into a good lesson.
And, after the success of the Wocket in the Pocket (which we also read again in a shared reading session), I decided that we are ready for the Green Eggs and Ham. We read it together, properly and it was a lot of fun. Our copy is a collection of five or six Dr Seuss’ stories and once my kids saw the other ones, they immediately made a plan for the next few weeks and the order in which we will read them all. I think we can say that Dr Seuss will be a frequent guest in our lessons!
Socialising
We kept working on our class friendships. We have done a lot of pairwork (surveys with different partners), we have played bamboozle, ‘Tell me’ and Wordwall Quiz, as one big team, collecting the points for our class. We have done a few ball games and we have even tried some Maths multiplication boardgames. The kids also had a chance to cooperate with each other during the treasure hunt activities as they could choose to work in pairs or small teams.
Creativity
Since our February was not the most creative on months, I tried to make up for it in March:
we wrote a lot of songs and this way we produced a lot of langauge
we read a poem and we wrote our first poem in English
one of the topics in March was ‘Inventions’ and we created our own inventions
we had a great lesson about Alfonso Pomodoro, a ghost and we used his interview with Miss Viola as a model for our own interviews with characters and we role-played these later.
we acted out our versions of the Steve and Maggie conversation from the video
Teacher
It has been a good month. We did our third milestones test in Maths and English and it was just great to see that so many of my students got excellent results. Although, all of them worked hard and I am proud of every single one of them! It is really a pleasure to look at how they work and get better and I even had to write a whole post about it!
A few months ago we started our dear diary project and some of the kids still continue writing and I get so much pleasure from reading them and replying. Especially when they give the notebook to me, then pester me to read it straight away and keep asking whether I have already replied or not and then they get their answer, read it as soon as possible and try to reply within the same day. We ARE communicating!
We have just started division in Maths and we are about to start unit 6 on Dinosaurs in English! Exciting!
Also, I bumped into Santa and managed to get out of him a pile of handwriting erasable notebooks and this is why I could give my kids the most amazing present that, within minutes, they started to use to write, in English and in Russian, to draw, to create stories, to take notes, to calculate Maths…
So, apart from being a teacher of English, a teacher of Art, a teacher of Science (occasionally), I am also (drum roll) a teacher of Maths, year 1 of primary (or Key Stage 3).
I am aware that perhaps not too many of my readers have Maths on their daily timetable but I decided to share these ideas nonetheless. It is because they are all rooted in the different ways of encouraging children to get involved in the activities that are challenging, tiresome and not always easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
For myself I simply wanted to leave a note and a record of the things we do, for future reference. On the other hand, I know that all of these activities have a lot of potential for the regular and the beloved ESL, for grammar and vocabulary practice or reading.
Treasure Hunt is a task that I have used many times over the years. It takes some time to prepare and to set it up, especially the first time, but once you do it and once everyone figures out the rules and procedures, it is a great task that my students have always loved and asked for if we stopped doing it for a while. The main idea of the task is that we go around the school, look for all the tasks hidden there and we solve them. Once all of them are completed, everyone returns to the classroom to check the answers. In the past, we used to collect new words, solve crossword puzzles with clues around the school. We used to look for answers to the quiz or instructions how to colour the picture. This year, we use it mostly for Maths, solving different addition, subtraction and multiplication tasks.
Usually, we go out as the whole class but this kind of a treasure hunt can be easily turned into a running dictation, with kids working in pair, one of them running, one – taking notes of the answers. This works especially well with really big groups.
As many as you can: most of my kids are huge fans of Maths and they approach the tasks with mountains of motivation. To be honest, I don’t really understand it, since my brain does not really feel happy around numbers and prefers words, languages and visual arts. But, I can almost risk saying it, my kids’ enthusiasm is infectious, so, in fact, I like teaching Maths.
‘As many as you can’ is one more task type that we do in class. It is super simple, it involves an A4 page of exercises that the kids work on individually. There is only specific rule and that is: everyone is allowed to do as many as they want or can.
I love this task because for the kids, it is an opportunity to approach a task without a lot of pressure and it works very well with a mixed ability group and for me it is an opportunity to see how well each and individual student feels about a particular topic. True, sometimes, the external factors get into the way and the number of exercises is affected by the kids’ mood or the levels of tiredness but, overall, it is a good indicator of how well everyone has learnt and how well they have assimilated the particular topic.
Oh, Petya: Petya is one of our invisible students and having him works very well in ‘find the mistakes and correct them’ tasks which we usually do at the end of the unit. I have already written about him before and you can find the post here.
Jigsaw puzzle is another idea that I have been using in our Maths tasks to encourage the children to go through the task from the beginning until the end. It is very easy to prepare because you basically need a page with the Maths tasks and another colouring picture (in the theme of the month, like Halloween or Easter). The colouring picture is cut up into pieces, into a number that corresponds to the number of tasks and they are put into separate envelopes. As soon as the kids complete one of the tasks, they can come up to the board, open the relevant envelope and take out one jigsaw puzzle. I also like to put the correct answer on the envelope, to give the kids a chance to also check their answers. Once all the exercises are complete, the kids put the jigsaw puzzles into a picture and we glue these into out notebooks. The pictures can be coloured in the end, as an option.
Password, password! is a variation of the previous task – we collect tokens for every exercise completed, only in this case, these are letters that, together, a part of a password. Kids work on their tasks, invidually but they take turns to come to the board to solve a task and to uncover one of the letters. This task works wonders for bonding and building the class community. Just like the colouring page, the password can be adapted in any way that fits the theme of the month, the number of the exercises or the number the kids in the class.
One of the first passwords that we did this year was: ‘We love Maths and we are fantastic!‘ I wrote it on the board, with the numbers for each letter and I used hyphens to break the sentence into words. But it can be anything!
Well, is it something that you could use in your lessons? Please let me know!
