‘Students draw…’ is one of the YL-related lines that is my personal pet peeve…You can see it in coursebooks, teachers’ books, in lesson plans and on the social media. The idea is that a bunch of seven-year-olds (or younger) will have their teacher give out the pencils and they will hear their teacher say ‘draw (insert your word)’ and they will just sit down, get an idea and complete the job in five minutes without any issues and (AND) afterwards they will be ready to talk about their pictures, to present their work or do whatever goes under the productive part of the project.
What a joke! It looks good on paper and in theory and in a real classroom it is going to translate into a neverending, unproductive, very often full of blood, sweat and tears task because the little people simply do not have the drawing skills, the time management, the imagination and the self-control necessary to complete the task that the adults imagine them to do and, more often than not, they will really want to do it well because they care, they love a project and they love drawing and those zoo animals, monsters and princesses that they were told to create. Or, quite possibly, they don’t like drawing, they are into other creative areas and they will devote precisely a total of sixty seconds to that task having then announced ‘I have finished’ and already on the lookout for other things to do. While their more involved peers are still busy and far from finishing, leaving the teacher with a room full of self-induced mixed ability group.
Is there a solution to that? Yes, there is. There must be. This ‘students draw’ has been on my mind for a very long time and there are some ways of handling it, the first of them – taking the coursebook and the ideas with a pinch of salt. Or two. The second of them, working on the staging and the clever way of keeping the activity in shape and everyone on the ball.
This is one of my solutions. It has worked very well with both groups and I am already thinking how to adapt it to other topics. As soon as I do come up with something and as soon as I trial and test, I will be adding to this post. For now, only one topic: the dinosaur.
Ingredients
Paper and pencils or markers for the children
A set of cards that help to shape up the drawing process, like the one that I used in a lesson in which we created our dinosaurs.
Procedures
It is noteworthy that the lesson in which we actually draw the dinosaur was only one of the series of lessons taught over a period of three weeks and was proceeded by a few lessons in which we introduced and practised new vocabulary, did a mini-research and described the appearance of different dinosaurs. After our dinosaurs were ready, we added a fact file, did lots of quizes on dinosaurs and, eventually, had a role-play aka an interview about a dinosaur. The drawing lesson was just a part of a long chain of activities.
The teacher asks the kids to open their notebooks and get the markers or pencils ready or give out the paper for the drawing, depending on the set-up in your context.
The teacher tells the students that they are going to create a dinosaur, their own dinosaur and that they will listen to the teacher and make decisions. It might be a good idea to show the children the cut-up cards and to tell them that each card is a decision about a dinosaur.
The teacher is supposed to draw their own dinsoaur, either on a piece of paper or on the board.
The activity starts with everyone drawing a circle or an oval for the dinosaur’s body in the middle of the page.
The teacher picks up the first card (i.e. ‘draw a long neck’ OR ‘draw a short neck’), the teacher reads it out loud and makes their own decision, announces it out loud and draws the neck for the dinosaur. The teacher then checks with all the students, in turns, what choice they have made, making sure they say out loud what they have decided to do. The kids draw, the teacher monitors.
The activity goes on, with the teacher doing one more round and then the students taking over and reading and dictating for the class and the teacher.
In the end, the student come up with the name for their dinosaur with the suffix -saurus (although it is, of course, not the only suffix used to created dinosaurs names).
The lesson finishes with all the students introducing their dinosaurs briefly and only in the following lessons do the students proceed with working on their dinosaurs (facts, role-playes etc).
Why we like it?
I loved how this format worked in the classroom. It was well staged and it helped me manage the children and their creativity, without losing control and without anybody finishing ahead of time or going on for too long. It was also a perfect combination of teacher-centred and of individual creative choices for every student.
I had quite a few cards to use but I was prepared to use all or not all of them, depending on how focused or interested my students would have been. In the two lessons / groups I did it with, we managed to go through all the cards (aka decisions).
The kids were prepared for the task, vocabulary-wise and we also could use it to practise it further, through reading, confirming, checking etc. The words were out there, in the air, throughout the entire lesson.
The kids absolutely loved their dinosaurs. Some of them even managed to finish their first dinoasaur, and draw another one.
It worked very well also as the preparation for the more productive part of the project, our interviews – role-plays in the following lessons.
Kids also enjoyed the fact of being responsible for making the decisions, step by step, while creating their dinosaurs.
I will definitely be applying this particular approach to our projects in the future.
Even today, after a few days have passed since the day of the lesson, and with other lessons that have happened in-between, I am still simply, well, euphoric, about the lesson I taught and about the art we created. Cloud number 9.
I saw Bulatov in an exhibition more than ten years ago and, my oh my, what an inspiration he was. Really, I cannot think of anyone who had an impact comparable to him. And he stayed with me. For days on end did I draw letters and tried to make them work together. I even turned one of the pictures into a pillow case, in black and white.
A few weeks ago, I got to see his exhibition again and, once more, it was a blast, in every possible way and, naturally, I made an instant decision that we would do it in class, sooner or later.
A pizza!
The artistand the concept
It was with a real pleasure that I got to tell my students that our Artist of the Day is a contemporary artist who is almost 91 years old and who still lives in our city. They got really excited about it.
However, before we looked at Bulatov’s works, I wanted a proper lead-in. It seemed crucial to me that my students start to use the words as images, to have them look beyond the letters and to see the bigger picture. In order to do that I decided to use two tools or two tricks and I am so happy that what I came up with worked wonders.
The first, really easy exercise was to look at the colour words and to read them as words and as colours. There are plenty of resources that talk about the Stroop effect and pleny of resources to use: the online game, the article, the quiz video. I used a super simple visual, like this one here. The kids loved the challenge and I was having fun with them, quietly celebrating the fact that reading (all of a sudden) is an easy-peasy task for my almost-year-2 students.
For the following stage, I used my own illustrations of some of the Portuguese words which you can see the photographs. My students don’t speak Portuguese and I wanted to have them try to guess what they might mean just looking at the visuals. And they did so well here! Preparing those visuals took some time but I loved this kind of a homework and it made for a lovely evening for me. I chose ‘o sapo’, ‘a casa’, ‘o amor’ and ‘os olhos’ (without articles) simply because I had an idea for the illustration and I knew that my students will know these words in English. Obviously, any other words can be used and any other language that is appropriate in the context. I have already decided that when I teach this lesson again, I will use a wider range of words and a wider range of langauges.
At this point it was already obvious for the kids that words are more than ‘just words’ and we were ready to look at what Erik Bulatov created. I chose only five of the paintings. We looked at them and we briefly analysed why these particular words were presented in such a way. The main idea for this lesson was the sentence that I repeated a few times during the lesson and the one that is also the topic of that post: a word is also a picture.
Amor!
The language
The language input was minimal in this lesson as we only talked about the different words that the kids could use. As an example, I suggested using their names, animals, food, emotions and professions (the theme of our summer camp). The kids had time to think about it (as we were getting ready for the creative part, bringing water, getting on the aprons, giving out paints and brushes) and when they were ready, I wrote all the words they suggested on the board.
I was considering showing them a few examples of the English words that were also turned into images such as a few variations of ‘love’, ‘a cat’ and ‘a dog’ but I decided not to put them up, just to see what the students can come up themselves.
It is worth mentioning, however, that, depending the language input can be extended and there is a lot of potential for combining this lesson with a lesson on animals, colours, seasons or fruit and vegetables. I will definitely be going back to it and I am already excited about it. I want to be perfectly honest here, though. I focused on the artistic part because we are at the summer camp at the moment and there are separate English and Art lessons and, hooray, we have more time for English and for Art. Our Art lesson, however, was done entirely in English.
Sapo, casa, olhos!
The art
We used very basic materials: pencils and watercolours. We didn’t even have any real watercolour paper, because we ran out and we had to use the regular photocopying sheets. Not the best choice, but it didn’t stop us from creating.
I gave out the paper and pencils and we started to design our words. It is a good idea to keep a few spare pages of scrap paper for the kids to practice because it might be a bit complicated to get to the ‘acceptable’ level of quality of the letters or the picture, even with a good general idea, this does not happen naturally. I experienced that myself with my ‘casa’ picture and I was just so happy that I kept the drafts because I could show the kids that only practice makes perfect. Next time we are going to create Bulatov, I am also going to include different versions of his paintings that I saw at the exhibitions, either sketches (if they are at all available) or the same painting with various approches to the composition, size of letters or colours that I know exist. They will be a wonderful lesson into the creative process. Actually, here is another great idea for a lesson for me and for us, from the sketch to the masterpiece…Soon, I promise, soon!
A rabbit!
After the sketches were ready and the kids were happy with them, we started to paint. That’s it. The only thing to follow will be only my admiration, love, excitement, awe and multiple rounds of applause and high-fives. My kids did great.
Here is what went well / very well / amazingly well:
We went smoothly from the main idea, to Bulatov’s paintings and to our own creations
The kids did great, many of them knew straight away what idea they want to depict and they just went for it. They worked very well, they were focused and motivated. Many finished their first original idea and went on creating.
Designing the ideal visual was not easy for all the kids and not all of them got there from the first time. Keeping the additional sheets of paper was a good idea, showing my failed attempts was a good idea, too, and it did help some of the kids. I was really proud of those who got upset at the begininng but decided to go on and created real masterpieces.
It was interesting to work with this particular group of kids because they were a new bunch, a mix of my students and some new children who joined us only for those two weeks. All of them, however, apart from one, were new to the artistic activity, unlike everyone who took part in our regular Art Explorers activities that I normally write about here. And it was such a joy to teach them and to take them into the world of creativity.
We used the simplest resources, the pencil and the watercolours, but I have already started to wonder what else we could use. Perhaps gouache, perhaps acrylic paints or maybe a mix of techniques, paints and a collage, with the newspaper cut-outs…So many things to think about!
The only thing left now is to invite you to admire what my amazing artists have created!
This is the second post in the series and the link between them is the painter’s scotch that already futured in the first post but that is still one of my top 5 things in my bag. And here are some more…
The alphabet
We started the academic year with ‘Aa is for apple’ in our handwriting booklets and we spent the first three months on meticulous handwriting exercises. When we got to Zz and we were more or less familiar with the whole set of letters, I would write all of them on the top of the board for the kids to copy. I know that there are a lot of posters available on the market (and my school prints their own, too), but I just didn’t like them as they did not match my set of requirements: big letters, handwriting, font matching what we have been using and some visual representation, too, to help make them a little bit less abstract. With the visuals that we already know instead of some randomness such as ‘N – nest’, ‘Q – quilt’, ‘S – sparrow’, ‘Y – yak’ or even ‘X – xylopohone’ that are either very rare, well beyond the A1 level, not child-friendly or just vile (yes, I am talking about the xylophone that has the randomest pronunciaction of ‘x’ ever).
I made my own. I made two, one for 1A and one for 1B. The only thing necessary was an A1 piece of cardboard, a marker and a set of stickers.
It has spent the second half of the year on the walls of our classrooms and we used it as a reference point in all our writing exercises. The kids used it on their own and I used it, too, to direct them towards the correct letter. ‘Dd is for dog! Look!’. All in all, it helped us made huge progress with our literacy skills. No more than that but so much!
The chalk markers
When I found the Treasure of the Year, I was looking for something else entirely. I was getting ready for the Art classes, White on Black, googling for black drawing paper and white pencils. I found them and the lesson was great (you can read about it here) but what I also found the Solution of the Year and the Teacher’s Love of the Year: the chalk markers.
The thing is for the previous six months I had been forced to use the traditional blackboard and the traditional chalk and I hated every single moment of it, after all my educational like in the Polish state schools, fourteens years as a student and five as a teacher; hatred from the very bottom of my heart, because of the dry hands, because of the chalk dust on your clothes and because of the cloth. And then I found the chalk markers that I had not even known existed!
They are beyond amazing. They last a few weeks, they are just markers and they are quite thin so it is a dream to be writing with them and you can be very accurate and produce intricate letters and drawings. And they erase easily!
The trolley
I spent about three weeks of the academic year being miserable. I had two groups and two classrooms and the whole day was about moving from one to the other, together with everything that I needed in my teaching life: markers, toys, flashcards, cards, stamps, schoolbag, thermos, notebook, my magic wand, glue, craft paper, pencils…Most of the time wasting on it the entire length of the break. Every single time, every single day. The classrooms are door to door but, still, it meant making a few rounds, a few times a day. It’s not that I did not have a place to keep my things in either of these classrooms, I did, but it was still impossible to have two separate sets of cards, two separate sets of puppets, two separate sets of markers for the whole class.
The misery lasted almost a month until I had enough and I looked for solutions. I used to use boxes and baskets in the past, with my preschoolers but these would not work in these new circumstances. This is how I got my trolley, four metal shelves of happiness on wheels. Each shelf has its own theme and I keep there, going from the top: markers, flashcards and storybooks and puppets, cards, packets small scrap paper cards and handmade cards.
It is super easy to move from one classroom to the other or to roll it around the classroom while handing out boxes with markers. It is light so my students can help with it and they love doing it. They actually love to pretend play being flight attendants and giving out things. It made my life much easier.
One more thing! That trolley is getting me one step closer to becoming a Real Babushka!
The cupboards
One thing that I definitely had a chance to find out about myself is that I am thoroughly obsessed with order. It might have something to do with some form of OCD because mess and disorder makes me very unhappy. In the past, I must have lived in some kind of an ignorance but that’s because I was not obliged to share the classroom with another teacher on permanent basis. Until September 2023.
This was when I realised that I am deeply unhappy with the disorder on the table, on the cupbards, on the window sills and on the shelves. This was when I understood that I like my classroom near to empty, without all of these toys, games, books and (omg) candy that children have a full and unrestricted access to, which, of course, has a detrimental impact on the general classroom management. Alas, when you have to share, you just share and try to live to tell the story.
The cupboards made it possible and because there are two that I have got, I can be easy-going with how I organise the shelves and what I put things. In one word, I have room for everything. One full cupboard is filled with books, workbooks and notebooks and the other is my beloved Art cupboard, with all my resources, treasures, aprons and jars. They are all located at the back of the classroom and sometimes, when I teach, I like to glance at one or the other and smile. Peace and quiet, law and order in my resources.
The markers
There are many stationary items in the primary classroom, pencils, pens, crayons, coloured pencils but ‘Nothing compares to you’ is what I would sing to my boxes of markers. I think, perhaps, it might be because of the hours spent in the young learners’ and very young learners’ classroom or, in other words, because of the hours spent with people who are learning to hold a writing tool and people who are learning to use it to write their first words.
On behalf of my students, I prefer them to everything else, because, first of all, they are much easier to handle for an inexperienced hand, much easier to hold, requiring less muscle power to hold and to produce a line, very often much thicker and much lighter than anything else. Not to mention that because of the colours and the excitement of using them, they make the difficult and tiresome task of writing a tiny little bit more appealing and motivating.
We use them throughout the year to colour and, also, in the beginning of the year to write. I cannot really say exactly when we stop and switch to pencils and pens as it varies, from year to year but that is our general procedure.
This was the last episode in our series of Materials in May. The language input was a revision and limited to colours, emotions and animals which was also consistent with the vocabulary that featured in the photos I found online to inspire my students. Which, of course, means that the vocabulary can be adapted, adjusted and selected to match the topic that you are planning to focus on or the topic that the stone painting is supposed to accompany.
The artist
Since our main character was stone, I decided to choose a group Artist of the Day and look at the artistic creations across the centuries made specifically of stone (or, rather, different variations of it) such as the Sphinx of Giza, the Easter Islands monuments, Nike, the Greek goddess and Moscow lions, among others. The great thing about it was that many of these, the kids were already familiar with and they could relate to them on a slightly different level, for example, because they had a lot to share, although most of the time this was done in Russian, rather than in the target langauge.
The art
The art part was very simple and straightforward. We started with looking at a great variety of stone paintings that can be found online, with different smileys, fish, dogs, cats, elephants and what not. The kids were told that they would be able to paint whatever their want.
We proceeded to choosing the stones and handing out pieces of paper and pencils as we were to design our drawings. We traced our stones on the paper and spent some time trying to figure out the best picture or pattern for our stones. I tried to encourage them to be inspired by the shape, especially that we had stones of two different sources.
A word here on the stones themselves. They came from two main sources. Some of them were the ‘pretty’ craft stones, round and polished and I bought them in a craft store. The others were more organic, collected by me in the neighbourhood. These are irregular, ragged, rough but also more inspiring. I washed all of them with soap and hot water. In the end, they were left in a bowl with hot water, in order to sanitise them as much as possible.
When our designs were ready, we put on the aprons and started painting. Our paints were on a big table in the middle of the classroom so that all the kids could share all the resources. We used two types of the acrylic paints, I had some basic colours (but in lovely, rich shades) and some pearl colours (in other shades, as it happened). A part of the fun on the day was mixing of both in order to get the best of both. I am not sure if it can be seen in the photographs but it really worked out very well.
As for the design, as I said before, the kids had a free hand and they chose whatever they wanted. We had some smileys, we had some ‘favourite things’ such as the horses, the geese and Picachu, we also had some ‘magic stones’, which were only coloured and decorated. Because the acrylic paint dries relatively quickly, some of my students managed to decorate both sides of the stones.
I had the black markers ready for the follow-up decorating as it is also an option, especially useful for all the tiny elements of the drawing or the tracing, but it turned out not be necessary in the end. As with all the materials lessons in May, I announced that we would be leaving our creations to dry overnight but, guess what, that also didn’t happen. Almost everyone insisted on taking their stones home asap. I barely had time to take any photos. I suppose that means that the lesson was a success.
Magic stone, step 1Magic stone, step 2A series of emoticonsAnd another series of emoticons
(Or an English teacher reflects on the academic year that has just finished.)
This is the third of the posts in the series of the Reflective Teacher that I promised myself to celebrate the end of the school year. Here you can find me reminiscing on the life of an Art teacher. Here you will find the unexpected memoirs of a Maths teacher and here (because they also secretly belong in the series) – a whole set of notes of a teacher trying to introduce law and order in Year 1.
But, first and foremost, I am a teacher of English, working hard to give the students in my classroom the tools, the imagination and the courage to speak a language. And from that point of view, this year has been a very interesting experience for an English teacher, too.
Something old…
Well, there is a lot of that!
I have been teaching English to primary for many, many years now. I know how to do it and I love doing it, really. Vocabulary, grammar, communication skills, functional language, reading, writing, a is for apple (a a apple), learning how to be a student, learning how to be a member of a community, routine, pairwork, all of that, all at once. It makes your head spin, a little bit, of coure, but then, all of a sudden, it all starts coming together and it feels great.
Introducing all the letters of the alphabet, staring our handwriting booklet, phonics stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, the first song, the first test, the first spontaneous production case, the first storybook. I have jumped through all these hoops with many generations of my students and successfully so and this year we have done it together once more.
The only thing that was different was the fact that I had a lot more time in a week and we could set aside a lot more time for practice. And that, apart from English and the ESL classes, my kids were getting a lot more exposure and practice from the History lessons, from Maths, Science, PE, Art and the break times, too. Every little helps!
Something new…
Do you still remember the title of this post? If not, please scroll up to refresh. Why? Because this is the image that I have in my head when I think of English in this academic year, here goes:
a beautifully constructed framework of the CEFR, with all the levels and their detailed descriptions, skills, grammar and vocabulary, in a sequence, neat and tidy, like a set of puzzles forming one beautiful picture, now scattered on the floor, all over the place and it is not even possible to understand what it was that they showed in the first place…
That is exactly what happened this year and that is all due to the context in which I was teaching, namely my bilingual primary school, with a group of students who were in their year 1 of education but according to the curriculum and age, in their year 3 of the BNC. And who, naturally, were a very mixed bunch as regards their L2 language skills. A very mixed bunch indeed.
Because of that we made a decision to adapt the programme and the plan and divide the children into level-appropriate ESL groups so that they all could learn and take their English to another level and, alongside that, we would teach the English and develop the skills according to the BNC. All in all, it has worked well. The kids were tested throughout the year, both as regards the reading and writing skills (milestone tests) and speaking (Cambridge YLE) and they all made progress. Hooray.
However, all of that meant that I had to forget about what the basics, the CEFR. First of all, because, from the very beginning I had pre-A1, A1, A2 and A2+ and everyone in-between sitting in my classroom. Outcomes: forget about using one single set of materials.
Second of all, we were to follow the curriculum of the year 3 of the BNC and even if we made amendments (as we did), this was nothing in any way related to the CEFR, as regards the structures or the vocabulary and we had to at least make an attempt at combining the English curriculum with our ESL curriculum. Outcomes: adapt, adjust and do your job, feeling just a little bit anxious, with the safety blanket gone.
Last but not least, I had my bunch in the classroom and in the school, for many hours a day and it was my task to make the most of it and to give them a chance and the tools to communicate in English as much as possible and that means (or it might mean) not going nicely from one level of CEFR to the other. I have already written about it earlier, in my storytelling campaign posts here, and this year I definitely had a chance to research it more and to gain even more experience.
Some of the things that meant for us:
introducing lots and lots of verbs, the everyday verbs (to talk about what we do in the classroom), the story verbs (in order to read and to tell stories), the hobby verbs (to talk about what we like to do)
introducing lots and lots of adjectives, to describe emotions and feelings (to talk about ourselves and to talk about the emotions in stories), to describe objects (all the Maths, History, Science lessons because of the comparatives and superlatives used in all of the subjects)
introducing structures when we needed them: Present Continuous (to describe what we are doing in the classroom, to manage the kids, to tell stories and to describe pictures), comparatives and superlatives (the BNC)
introducing some elements of the word formation (some negative prefixes, gerund, er for jobs) because of the requirements of the BNC
introducing the elements of the three basic tenses (the Present Simple, the Past Simple and will) to give the kids a chance to express themselves, to talk about the weekend on Monday and to talk about the things to do on holiday
learn a huge pile of words from way beyond our A2 level and not in some topical sets but because we either needed them in our phonics practice and it was ok to learn them because they were all 7-year-old-friendly words (with such treasures as: feather, together, trophy, sloth, gate, cube, arrow, pillow among them) or because we needed them for our English, History or Science lessons.
introduce a pile of useful phrases, way beyond our A2 level, through stories, just because we needed them in the everyday. ‘It’s impossible!’, ‘Let’s try!’, ‘You’re too loud!’, ‘Just a little bit more!’, ‘I’ve got an idea!’…
Something borrowed, something blue!
Two things that it led to is that we have actually learnt and we have made huge progress over the year, despite this being the first year of learning English for some of my kids and it meant learning some complicated vocabulary and grammar at the age of seven. The other thing it meant for me only was staying somewhat shell-shocked and puzzled at the fact that I have turned the CEFR upside down and inside out and I lived to tell the story…
I am not sure if, with this post, I really want to promote getting rid of the CEFR. Quite the contrary, I appreciate it being a part of our life, as a teacher and an assessor or an examiner. But it is not the only thing that matters and, sometimes, experimenting and playing with it or just blatantly going around it, that is the best idea EVER! Especially that the CEFR itself is one thing and the way the structures or vocabulary items are included and organised in our coursebooks, that is a completely diferent thing.
It’s been years now since I started to introduce lots of verbs, lots of adjectives and the Present Continuous in my VYL classes. This year was the first one in which I brought some elements of the Past Simple and the future will to my young beginners, just so we could talk about the everyday in a meaningful and natural way. And I am very happy with the results. Hooray to that!
‘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.
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!
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.
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
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.
