#eflteens

Alisa and Petya, my new invisible students.

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Image from www.bullionstar.com

It might be the best way of closing the blogging year, with all these invisible kids. Better than ‘the teacher in distress’, why-has-this-year-been-so-difficult and if-I-stay-in-teaching-it-will-be-because-of-the-kids-and-if-I-leave-it-will-be-because-of-the-adults (after Bored Teachers) that I have been in recently. Let’s try to stay positive, let’s try to give the floor to Alisa, Petya and Pasha instead.

The concept of an invisible student is not a new one…

I have had one in my classroom for a few years now. Long enough to have collected enough material to write a post about, four years ago. Pasha, because that is the name of the first and the original invisible student, has been long enough to have collected his own experiences and now he could write his own resume and tell stories of his adventures in the various classrooms. You can read the original post here. Btw, this is one of top ten most popular posts ever on the blog.

This year has been a fun one also because I started teaching in a new environment and in a new context and a real life Pavel has appeared in one of my groups. It is unavoidable that, after all these years, whenever I say ‘Pasha’, I feel like addressing my invisible student. And I giggle. That also meant that I had to give up on using that concept in that same form in my everyday teaching. It was not an issue because we had other things to worry about. I did not need an invisible student. Then, one day I did and the Invisible Student came back. Two of them, actually.

Enter Petya and Alisa

This year, apart from everything else, I also teach English and Maths according to the British National Curriculum in a bilingual school. I love it but there are also certain challenges that I had not had to deal with before September. One of them is definitely extending the range of ways of encouraging and motivating children to work and to be involved in what we are doing. I have noticed that, apart from the fact of the specific requirements related to the specifics of the subjects (that are different to the regular ESL or EFL), there is also the question of the specific challenges related to teaching Maths in English or to having classes (almost) everyday and having to come up with different approaches four times a week. Which is a higher demand for creativity than in your typical twice-a-week EFL classes. Among others.

Over the last few weeks, I have been teaching some more demanding topics, such as punctuation (English) and subtraction with regrouping and I have been bending over backwards in order to trick my kids into getting excited about these (if we are to perfectly honest here).

During one of the 1-1, me and my brain, brainstorming sessions, I decided to go for ‘play the teacher and find a mistake’. English was first and it was relatively easy to prepare a handout for my kids to trace, to find mistakes and to re-write in the correct from, with all the punctuation marks and capital letters. I set it up, gave out everyone a red marker and asked them to look for things that were ‘not so good’. Everyone got a red marker and we worked beautifully on it.

However, I have two groups at school and when I got to my second lesson with that material, I already knew that it has a certain potential and, feeling inspired, I decided to upgrade it and the lesson started with ‘Listen, there is this boy called Petya. He has a problem…’ Of course, before making copies for everyone, I signed the paper with ‘Petya’. This tiny little adjustment made a huge difference. I was looking at my kids, working dilligently and reacting to the content and I was making mental notes.

Naturally, when, a few weeks later, I decided to use this same approach in my Maths lesson, I knew that there would be a student and how I am going to set it up. Here are a few notes about it, in case anyone wants to use it.

Alisa, the girl who struggles with Maths

  • The first step: to prepare the set of tasks. In our case it was a double-sided handout with sums, addition and subtraction, up to 1000, two- and three-digit numbers, with and without regrouping, as the final task of the unit and the final task of the year. All of these had solutions, as if Alisa had done them, some were correct, some were incorrect, with small and huge mistakes. On the top of the page, there was the student’s name (Alisa) and the room for the teacher’s name, to sign by those who were to check the test.
  • Step two: we could hide it under different, serious-sounding names (‘setting the context‘, ‘involving the students’, ‘generating interest’) and they all apply but what I really did was to tell the kids a story. In one of the groups we even played the monster game (aka ‘hangman’) to guess the title of the story (Alisa’s problem). I told the class a simple story about a girl from year 1 (year 3 in KS3) who is a nice girl and who is trying hard but who still has some problem with Maths. And, most importantly, how we want to help her with checking her test and looking for all the mistakes and, maybe, the things she did well.
  • Step 3: we outline the procedures. On the one hand, these were the three simple steps (‘We check it’, ‘We correct it’, ‘We give a grade’) because I wanted to ensure that they really do go over all the sums and correct them and do the Maths, instead of just ticking and crossing things. Together we also put together a set of symbols to mark with, for example: a tick (V) = it’s OK, a minus (-) = it’s not OK, three exclamation marks (!!!) = very bad and a star = excellent.
  • Step 4: the real work, the hard work: we give out red markers and we get on checking Alisa’s test, individually or in pairs, depending on the personal preferences. The teacher is circulating, monitoring and helping.
  • Step 5: a spontaneous add-on, just because we had a few minutes left: a role-play, in which Alisa’s mum (me) calls the teacher (all kids, in turns) to find out how her daughter is doing. We had smaller groups because some kids had already gone on holiday and we could actually do it with all the kids.

My Oscar-worthy lesson or why I loved having Alisa, the invisible student in my class

A few days have passed since I taught this lesson twice and I have had a chance to reflect and to talk about it with a few colleagues and I think I can safely say that if there was ever a lesson taught category at the Oscars, I would submit our adventures with Alisa and I would definitely hope to win or at least to make it to the list of five nominees. Here is why.

  • The kids were fully involved, every single one of them, my Maths-loving kids and my oh-no-Maths kids, too, the strong learners, those who are just learning and even those who are struggling. Everyone. I was moving among the tables, supervising and helping and eavesdropping on what they were saying to themselves or to their classmates and I was giggling and welling up and beaming, rejoicing their enthusiasm and patting myself on the shoulder for the idea.
  • The reason for that was the story that I told and the context that was this way created. It was not just a handout, just a piece of paper with a set of tasks on that miss Anka brought but a real adventure that everyone was taking part in, with a real girl that we were helping, with red markers and the power that comes with it, with the responsibility the kids were taking for marking Alisa’s efforts and for assessing how well she did.
  • The activity involved the whole child, all the students as humans and as learners, as people who were given a serious task and serious responsibilities and who were also taken into the set-up, for example through accepting their ideas as regards the set of symbols for marking or the grades that they had to make a decision about and, in the follow-up activity, the fact that they were given a chance to be the teacher, during the whole activity and during the follow-up role-play.
  • The exercise was a very effective tool to get my students to do Maths. They zipped through the addition sums (which was not surprising) but they also worked very well with the more challenging problems i.e. subtraction, especially subtraction with regrouping. High five to me for mixing the tasks, addition and subtraction, with and without regrouping. There were different levels of difficulty and the more challenging tasks were beautifully smuggled with the easy-peasy ones.
  • It worked very well as an assessment tool for my kids’ Maths skills. After all, in order to be able to check something, you need to have enough knowledge and skills, and not on the basic, superficial level. Especially that the task included a mix of correct and incorrect tasks that they had to read, check and correct. And they all did! I was so proud of them (and of myself) especially that when they were commenting, they did say things (in their L1), such as ‘Oh, no, Alisa, how could you not notice that!’ or ‘But, no, Alisa, it is easy!’ or ‘No, why did you do this?’. I am not sure if they were aware of how their skills have developed and I think I will have to include this element of noticing own progress as part of the lesson in these kind of lessons. However, even without it, this element, my little kids have learnt. They have learnt. I was touched.
  • In the days after the lessons, I could not decide (and still can’t) what was more touching or inspiring, the skills that were proved to have developed or the fact that during the entire lesson, my kids showed a huge potential for empathy and understanding for Alisa’s problems with Maths. They were not only dealing with the task to help her but I loved eavesdropping on how they were reacting to it. There were plenty of comments along the lines of ‘Oh, but look, she tried to do it, here and here’ or ‘Oh, she almost got it right!’, trying to find something positive in her test. On the other hand, they were just so genuinely happy when they found a sum that was solved correctly. Here and there, now and again I heard cheering and ‘Miss Anka! She did it! from different corners of the room. They were like real teachers celebrating their students’ achievements.
  • And one more thing that made me just laugh out loud was how the kids were grading the overall Alisa’s effort, beautifully out of sync with her actual progress and the number of tasks complete. Some of them were overly optimistic and appreciative, the others overly critical. I just let it be. For now.
  • And the role-plays, that made me laugh, too. We have not done any phone conversations language so it was just jumping in at the deep end and using the language that we know. But I loved it, as I could see how my students tried to communicate in a new situation, wtih limited resources (communication strategies, hello!) although, all in all, our poor Alice is in trouble. In 99% of cases, her parents will have to come to school to talk to the teacher. Which just shows that that is, in my students’ world, the worst that can possibly happen.

I don’t know why but I have a feeling that both, Alisa and Petya will be back in our Maths lessons and in our English lessons…

Happy teaching! Happy New Year!

Celebrating 23 000 hits with my favourite posts ever*)

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*) Not any more. It is 25 000 now. OMG.

Well, it is one of my guilty pleasures to open the blog dashboard to have a look how many hits, visitors and visits there have been since the last I check. I do it regularly, of course, sometimes a few times a day, but I write down only the certain hoops, like every thousand of views. Recently, in the last few months the blog has been very active and I have registered a whole thousand of views within two weeks only…

I have just checked the most recent ‘celebration post’ and it turns out that it was written in January this year and I was rejoycing the fact that I crossed the line of 15 000 visits. Which means 8 000 since. Not too bad, I have to say!

It’s been very rewarding to see that the blog has had a growing number of readers and that, perhaps, there is something useful and necessary about what I do in the classroom and at the keyboard.

The most popular posts so far

In the post mentioned above, you can check the top ten most popular posts in January 2023. Today, this top 10 includes:

My favourite posts…

Here are my top ten favourite posts and why I really like time out of those 246 posts committed so far:

  • Much Ado About Nothing: realistic flashcards vs illustrations in the EFL world: I love it because it started with a not very pleasant conversation on the social media but because what I said was met with derision and mockery, I decided to prove to myself that, indeed, I am right. And a lovely and very interesting research followed.
  • All you need is…a picture! This is a post that was written after an online conference presentation which had my biggest audience so far (almost 700 people) but I really like because it is the post that really reflects what I do in the classroom. I love using pictures and visuals and illustrations and I am happy that I can share my ways of doing that. There is also the part two because the new ideas keep coming!
  • Setting up the routine. A diary, week 1. This is one of the newest post because this one (and the whole series) was created at the start of the current academic year, in September. I started two new groups of primary, of brand new kids, in a brand new context, for them and for me, and I thought that it might be a good idea to keep track of what we do in the classroom during those first weeks. I am hoping that it might come in handy for all the teachers who start in the area and are on the lookout for ideas and solutions but, surprise surprise, it was also an amazing opportunity for me to reflect on the activities and to understand the process even better. I loved writing it so much that I decided to keep this series going, only now the reflection takes places only once a month, at the end of it. If you haven’t read it yet, please check it out! It definitely deserves more hits than the 33 it has got so far.
  • Tell stories! Please do! This is another post that was written with pure love and this time the object of my affection was storytelling and I wrote it for all the teachers who need a little bit of convincing to start using stories in the classroom or to start using them more, not only because of their impact on the students emotional and cognitive development but, mainly, because of the amazing potential for the linguistic development.
  • A balancing act. Non-competitive ESL games for kids. This post started in the teacher training classroom during the YL course this summer. I shared my long-held opinion that our lessons are overflowing with games that are competitive and that there is no appropriate balance of games and activities that promote cooperation and collaboration. And in response to my trainees’ slightly desperate question (‘But how to do it?!’), I did another research and an article came out of it.
  • What an old dog learnt. A YL teacher goes back to the YL classroom. This post came about as a result of one of the adventures (or, rather, ‘adventures’) of my professional life and a real case of making lemonade of the lemons that the world throws at you. One of the things that I learnt in this Lemonade Year was that my classroom is the classroom full of kids and, I suppose, it is amazing that I was given a chance to check and to double check it, to confirm and to confirm it again.
  • A lesson in structures. Notes from the classroom. Here is a post for all the VYL teachers and for anyone who is wondering how much language pre-schoolers are able to produce in the EFL setting. In one word: LOTS. If you are intereted in details, please have a look at the post. These are simply the notes I took about our everyday lesson procedures at the end of the academic year with my level 2 kids. A lot of possible if you want to and if you apply appropriate techniques. Really. I loved writing this post not only because it gave me an opportunity to be really (really) proud of my babies and myself for doing a good job, but also, because only through this reflection and the list, I could really understand the progress made. I have said it here, on this blog, but I will say it again – there is so much happening in the classroom that we simply forget! It is good to take time to look back at your lesson and lessons to remember and to see it in a better light and in a more realistic way.
  • Jerome et al or how the EFL world started to scaffold. This is one of the oldest post, one of the 2020 lockdown posts and one of the first research posts. It is dedicated to one of my professional gurus, Jerome Bruner and the original research done together with Wood and Ross, about the role of tutoring in problem solving (which is the actual title of the article). I do believe that all the YL teachers need to read this one and my post can be the first step to it.
  • How to see a city. From the series: Teaching English to Art. This one is where it all started for me, with teaching English through Art. It involves the following: a long, long time ago, my teenage group, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kalho and New York. If you haven’t used any Art in class, this is a good place to start.
  • And I love absolutely all of the posts in the Crumbs series, the little ideas from the classroom. These are just the activities that I have created or adapted for my classroom and things that worked with my students. I have to admit that I am quite proud of the format of a recipe with the ingredients and the procedures but upgraded with the ‘why we love it’ section. So far, there have been 72 crumbs worth sharing.

A few words from the human behind the words

I love teaching and I love writing and it is a just precious that I can combine these two things here, on the blog and I have been doing it for almost four years now (short of a few months). The funny thing is that I started this post as a way of celebrating another benchmark, 23 000 visits, but, somehow, due to the magic in the world, before I was able to finish it those 23k turned into almost 24k overnight. And, over the next two weeks (as in: 14 days) it became 25 000.

I don’t get it but I am happy)

That means, that somewhere out there, in the US, India, Canada, Russia, Spain, Hong Kong, Japan, Egypt, the UK, Germany, Finland, Israel, Cambodia, Italy, Latvia, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Kuwait, Poland and Ghana, there are people who decided to click and to read about my classroom life. And I hope that they took something out of it.

Thank you, dear readers!

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. Two months into the course

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Starting the lesson

This stage of the lesson is almost exactly the same as it was in September. The only real difference is the fact that we take the roll call, we talk about how we feel and we share what we have got today, on our tables and in our bags and only later we sing the hello song to make sure that the song is really this unifying element after which a proper lesson starts.

How do you feel today?

We haven’t added any new emotions as such but our beautiful cards are on display in our classroom, in both of them, and children refer to them when they reply to the question at the strat of the lesson. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have anything new at all. We have been working with the phrases that we have but the kids became very creative with them and these have been my favourite replies: ‘I miss my phone’, ‘I want to sleep’, ‘I miss my bed’, ‘I miss my puppy (at some point confused with ‘papi’ aka dad) and I miss my daddy’.

Songs

In the recent weeks the greatest hit was everything related to Broccoli Ice-cream. We have been doing food and ‘do you like?’ and the song quickly became a hit, especially that it has four different versions and we could beautifully extend it over a month. It has become a part of the routine itself with looking at all the foods in the beginning of the video, attempts at predicting the combinations and then singing, of course, followed by our own game played with paper flashcards or a wordwall spinner. Naturally, we have already played this game in the dinining room, in the playground and in the hallway, during the break, with our own made-up versions.

The other great songs have been all the songs from the Dance Freeze series that we started in September. They work amazingly well for our brain breaks and I am hoping that all of the verbs will stay with us, too.

The other new songs are also our two new hello songs, Every day I go to school and Hello, nice to see you, and we use one or the other, in different lessons, depending on what we feel like.

After I have found a song about what plants need to grow, I believe that there is a song for absolutely everything!

Rules and classroom language

The system is go. This is how I could describe the rules in our life at this point. We didn’t need to add any more rules, since the end of September, which, of course, doesn’t mean that there will be no new rules in the future. These rules that we have, we have been using to remind the kids how to behave and how to survive the lesson.

That is not to say that all days, every day are smooth and that everyone is a little angel. It is not the case. We have had a few situations in which I had to put the lesson on hold and spend some lesson time on a serious conversation about how we should behave and why. And how we should not behave, too. It is still only the second month of their school life in year 1 and they are still at the stage of figuring out how to be.

Rewards chart and Time

This element of our routine has not changed at all. I am keeping track of kids’ behaviour and we still put up the lesson time (and the number for the clock) on the board, too.

Story

We have had such a good run with all the stories! My storybook library is basically just round the corner so I can just just pick up our next adventure just walking to the teacher’s room or the office.

Over this last month, I have been experimenting with different stories, some of them my real favourites, and I have been also experimenting with different follow-up activities, too.

‘Marvin Gets Mad‘ was a nice follow-up to our lessons on body parts, emotions and Present Continous. The follow-up task was devoted to reading and Present Continous about all the sheep and what they are doing.

‘The Crocodile Who Didn’t Like Water‘ was a blast. This was the story that not only read and listened to but that we also managed to retell, with very simple phrases.

‘Barry and the Fish With Fingers’ was an opportunity to practise ‘I can’ and it was also the first time we took notes about reading, such as a set of simple sentences about the character and the story as well as our opinion about it.

Socialising

In terms of socialasing, we have done the following:

  • kids have been nominating themselves ‘Who’s next?’
  • I have been a little bit more flexible regarding the seating arrangements for some of the activities, allowing friends to sit together and to work together
  • we have done a few projects in which the kids were working individually but sharing the resources such as the cards (on the board) or the stickers, learning how to take turns, how to share, how to wait. I was really proud of the children because it all went well.
  • we have had a lot of activities in which one student was leading the game, especially our riddles
  • we have also played lots of phonics games, as a whole group, individually and in teams
  • kids are also taking turns to give out and to collect materials and resources
  • it is also our everyday feature that when I am writing the lesson plan on the board, there are always some suggestions from the room, most of the time regarding the favourite games or songs, sometimes also regarding the surprises (which, most of the time is synonymous with ‘Can we have some stickers, please?’)

Creativity

Our creative projects in October were related to Halloween as my school decided to celebrate. Apart from decorating countless pumpkin, bringing spiders and coming to school in fancy dress (a few days before the actual Halloween), we have

  • used the Halloween theme in our Serious Maths Classes, with Halloween Maths Stories, Halloween Puzzles and colouring pictures
  • we created our monsters posters to practise body parts
  • we had a great Stickers in the Park project
  • we had a drawing dictation mini-project in our ESL classes, too
  • we had a lot of fun in the miming-drama activities in the ESL classes

Teacher

As a teacher I have been working on including the electronic journal in my daily school routine, especially as regards finding the time to fill it in effectively and as regards taking notes in real time to remember what to put in later on.

I had to step down as the Science teacher because my workload was just impossible to handle. I am sorry because I liked teaching Science but the kids have a great teacher now and I have a few hours to deal with the admin tasks so hooray to that.

I am very proud of all the kids because they are making progress in English and Maths and they are better and better at being students. I hope they are ready for all the new developments. The light term has come to an end and beginning November we are going to start using the coursebooks and notebooks, getting homework and we will start dealing with slightly more serious material. We’ll see how it goes. I am keeping my fingers crossed for all of them!

I will be back with more notes at the end of November!

Happy teaching!

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

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

One: a boardgame

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

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

Here are some useful tricks:

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

Two: I spy with my little eye

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

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

Here are some useful tricks:

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

Three: Tell me about it on Wordwall

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

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

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

Here are some tricks

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

Four: Riddles

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

Five: A list of words

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

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

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

Happy teaching!

A balancing act. Non-competitive EFL games for kids

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It happened way too many times…

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

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

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

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

Should kids even be playing competitive games?

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

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

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

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

EFL and competition

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

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

Things to consider

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

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

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

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

Every little helps

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

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

Non-competitive EFL games

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

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

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

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

Coda

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

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

Happy teaching!

Bibliography

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

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

The pros and cons of competition | BabyCenter

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

6 Tips for Teaching Children How to Lose — Better Kids

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

Six collaborative games for competitive English language classrooms | British Council

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

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

How to survive a coursebook. Part #2 Grammar

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This is the second post in the series that is a diary of a teacher trying to teach not the most exciting unit from the coursebook and sighing all the way. The first post can be found here. Today another one, this time devoted to two lessons on the passive voice. The post includes references to Gateway to English, B2 by David Spencer published by Macmillan. This is the coursebook that I am using with my group and the page numbers refer to the second edition of the coursebook.

Vocabulary practice and revision

This unit has a rather challenging content as regards vocabulary. There are the names of the natural disasters as well as a big set of nouns, adjectives and verbs used to talk about disasters, not a small thing. Hence more practice.

  • A quick test – Here I had a good time pretend play a school teacher and calling out my teens to answer a series of random questions. The teens took turns to give us a definition and an example for all of the key words from the previous lesson.
  • Visuals: I shared with my students a set of six visuals related to disasters (here) that I found on google, illustrating different aspects of a variety of natural disasters, including the damage and the beauty, too. Students were asked to work in pairs and to choose a pair of pictures for their partner to talk about and to compare them (‘Are they similar or different?’), partially inspired by the visuals tasks from the higher levels of the Cambridge exams. There was also a round-up question, ‘Which photograph was the most interesting for you?’ which is also the question that we used for the whole class feedback.

Grammar presentation and practice

From the very first moment I knew that I would try to minimise the presence of the main topic of the unit, in order to give us all a break and to be able to include some more exciting and some less dramatic topics. Because, really, how much can you take. Overall, I decided to keep all the practise exercises from the book (all of them but one using the context of the natural disasters) and to supplement them with something more fun.

  • The context I chose was My International Life. The first part was the presentation about the products that I use, the clothes I wear, the books I read and the devices I use and where they were made. I presented a series of visuals and the group were trying to guess where they were made, my computer, my socks, my coffee and my trinkets. The model sentence we were using at this point was: It was made in…They were made in…
  • Later on we dealt with the form, pronunciation and use, including the difference between the active and the passive voice.
  • The first practice activity was the students talking about themselves. The students were sent out into the breakout rooms to talk about their international life. They were instructed to talk about ten things (minimum).
  • The other practice activities in that lesson focused on the exercises in the coursebook (page 98 in the coursebook).
  • We finished the lesson with an online game, found on bamboozle.com.

Grammar presentation and practice. Part 2

I decided to divide the grammar input into two lessons because I teach a mixed ability group and, although, theoretically, the passive voice structures, in all the tenses, should be only a revision for them, it is not quite true in case of some of my students. For that reason, in lesson 1 we worked on the form in all the tenses and in lesson 2 we focused on the passive voice with two objects.

  • Practice and production: Photographs in our book: I decided to start with a freer practice activity based on the materials from the coursebook. I found different illustrations in the coursebook, namely: set 1: pages 98 and 99 depicting the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina and the typhoon damage in the Phillipines and set 2: pages 87 (a Foo Fighters concert) and page 70 (health). The students were asked to choose one of the sets and to describe the photographs using only the passive voice. We did this activity in the breakout rooms.
  • Grammar presentation #2: we used the coursebook materials to present the passive voice sentences with two objects (page 98).
  • Controlled practice was built around the exercises in the coursebook (page 98 and 99).
  • Freer practice #1 was the activity from the coursebook, too, Find someone who. I had to change the format of the activity as moving students in-between the breakout rooms would be too much hassle and I wanted them to produce a lot of language, rather than talk to different partners which they do anyway. For that reason there were asked to use the prompts from the coursebook and to find out as much as possible from the same partner.
  • Freer practice #2 and the final activity of this lesson was inspired by something that I read on Sandy Millin’s blog once. I decided to call it ‘A story of an object’. In the orignal version of the activity it was the object itself that would be retelling the story of its life and, I suppose, other structures would be the format. We changed it to the 3rd singular as it was the format more consistent with the passive voice that I was hoping that my students would be using. We started with a model and I used my (amazing) Malevich tote bag, probably The Present of the Year 2022. I presented the structure (A story of an object, 3 questions from the audience) and a set of verbs to use (created, bought, brought, seen, loved, kept, washed, worn etc). Afterwards, the students went into the breakout rooms and worked in pairs. Back in the common room, each student gave us a summary of what they found out about from their friends.
  • We finished with another bamboozle game.

Reflection

  • Well, in one line: I was a happy teacher last week.
  • The context of the international life worked very well. We managed to get away for a moment from the gloom of the natural disasters and immediately after the presentation the students got to use the structure to talk about themselves. It was very beneficial even though in the beginning the students were mostly using ‘was / were made’. This gave us a very good basis for the more extensive use and it was a great opportunity to personalise it straight away.
  • The lessons included a good ratio of the individual practice, disaster-focused and the pair-work, disaster-less and more productive. The bamboozle games were another way of balancing the weight of the lesson.
  • I love working with visuals and I was really very happy with how they worked in this lesson. The students were discussing the disasters and using the vocabulary but they were also able to interact with the beautiful photographs and notice the discrepancy between the beauty of the natural disasters in the photographs and the danger and suffering that this beauty is synonymous with in some cases.
  • In the same vein, I was very happy with the way we recycled the photograhps in the coursebooks. It was also interesting for the students to notice when it is and it is not natural to use the passive voice in different situations.
  • A story of an object was probably my favourite activity of these two lessons. I could share with the students the story of my Malevich tote bag but I also loved listening to the stories that my students chose to tell. Some of them decided to share their treasures with the class, such as the favourite book, the phone or the parrot (a bit of far-fetched but she managed!). Some went for the sarcastic approach as they talked about their favourite cookies, the hoover or a bottle of water, sparkling. It’s been a while since the last time I laughed so much in class.

Happy teaching!

How to survive a coursebook. B2 Case study

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Part 1 (skippable) A teacher complaining

This story started last Wednesday evening. I was getting ready for my Thursday classes, including my teens’ group. I knew that we were about to start a new unit but I hadn’t bothered to look at it, I had no idea what it was supposed to be. It was only on Wednesday that I opened the coursebook and I sighed but this feeling quickly turned to anger. Because what we have in store for the next three weeks, the next twelve academic hours and the next fourteen pages are natural disasters, casualties, destruction and damage. Even if we had lived in some more peaceful and optimistic times, that would be a lot to take. For my students and for me, the teacher, too. Especially that the whole unit is some weird collection of depressive topics and debates. Literally, asteroids, tsunamis and epidemics are destroying the planet’s population on every single page of the unit, in the vocabulary lesson, in the grammar lesson and in the every skills lesson. In one word: I hate it and I personally think that this is a rubbish unit. I don’t like it. It needs to be highlighted here that despite the fact that I do believe that the perfect coursebooks don’t exist, I like our coursebook, Gateway B2 from Macmillan and we have had a good year so far. But this unit is simply a disaster.

There are two things that I could do. Naturally, I could just skip the entire unit because I do not really feel like using my and my students’ time doing something we are all going to hate and suffer through. 12 academic hours is 540 minutes or one full working day. I was really considering that and I am sure that if I explained it all to my parents, I could just get away with it.

However, that would mean that I would have to find, create and put together enough material to fill in those 6 lessons and at this point in my life I simply do not have time for that. Then, there is of course the fact that the environment and the natural disasters are a part of the B2 curriculum (why they are there is another question) and I wouldn’t want to deprive my kids of the material that they should be covering. With a heavy heart I decided to go for the option two: try to surive the Survive unit by heavy adaptation.

Welcome to a new short series of posts. My main aim is to record the adaptation process in detail and on the go as well as to motivate myself to reflect on each of the lessons taught, hoping that someone might find it useful.

Lesson 1: Main aim: Vocabulary

  • We started the lesson with the weather vocabulary revision and upgrade. The students were divided into pairs, each student in a pair was given a link to the weather wordwall cards (set 1 and set 2), with the visuals and the key words and definitions. The students were working in pairs in the breakout rooms, calling out one of the words and discussing if they are similar or different, for example: ‘Scorching and boiling? Are they similar or different?’ or ‘Fog and rainbow? Are they similar or different?’ They were both sharing their ideas and discussing.
  • A small set of questions for the students to talk about their favourite and least favourite weather and the extreme weather conditions that they have experienced or read about.
  • The key vocabulary from the coursebook on page 96. We used exercise 1 and exercise 4 but I have also prepared an additional quiz for the kids to practise the words related to natural disasters. It can be found here.
  • As a follow-up I decided to include a debate, modelled on the B2 speaking exam task. For that used the list of the key words (ex 1a page 96) and a question that was added, namely: How damaging are these disasters? Talk about the impact on the people, the environment and the economy. Choose the most damagine one.
  • I decided to skip the text on page 97. I didn’t like it and I decided to replace it with the text on page 108 and change the direction of the lesson towards people for whom natural disasters can be an adventure.
  • We started with a discussion on whether students would like to go to a location of a natural disaster (inspired by ex 1 on page 108). Before we started the discussion, the students were shown two videos of people who research volcanic eruptions and people who like to visit the sites. I used the short clips from the following ones: Cooking pizza on a volcano, Cooking sausages on a volcano, Drone above the volcano. We talked about the reasons that make the people go there and our views.
  • As the final task we read the text to find out more about the expedition to a volcano, as featured in the coursebook, together with the comprehension task (page 108). The final summarising question was: Has this text helped you make your mind about such adventures? Has it made you change your mind?

Reflection

  • Overall, I am quite happy with how the lesson went.
  • I like to start a new unit / topic with a visual-based task but this time I decided to leave it for later. I already have an idea for a task for lesson 2 or 3 of the unit. This time round we started with the weather vocabulary speaking task and it was a good decision. First of all, the topic is related and most of the natural disasters are somehow connected to the weather conditions. Second of all, we could revise and extend our weather vocabulary – some of the words were familiar, some were new but the cards include enough information for the kids to be able to handle it and to participate. Last but definitely not least, the game we played was a great balance to the rest of the lesson, a lighter beginning, not so dramatic and / or desctructive as the rest of the input. And even though it started slowly (‘Anka, but these words are completely different’ aka ‘We can produce one sentence’), it quickly took off and the students were getting more and more creative as regards the potential similarities between pairs of words chosen randomly.
  • We will definitely need to revision and opportunities for practice not for the key vocabulary (the natural disasters) but for all the accompanying words. There were just too many verbs and nouns.
  • Quite unexpectedly, the debate on the impact of different natural disasters was a success. The students are familiar with the format (FCE speaking part 3) and I knew that this would not be a problem. I was worried, however, that they might have enough ideas or inspiration to compare the impact of a pandemic with that of an avalanche. I was wrong. All of the natural disaters are destructive but because of the angle (impact on the people, the environment and the economy), the students got involved and they were almost amused arriving at a conclusion that avalanches, in fact, are not so damaging for the economy and they are not often dangerous for people or the nature because they just happen whereas, in many ways, an epidemic such as coronovirus was even beneficial for the environment as people stayed at home and were not using their cars or flying as much…
  • Using the videos was also a good idea because it help the students understand the eruptions a bit better and it gave them some food for thought and it activated the schemata for the reading task. I have already started looking for a follow-up video, an interview with the volcano tourists that I could use in a listening task.

See you soon in part two of this series!

Happy teaching!

All you need is… a picture. Vol. 3

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This episode is going to be devoted to the older students, juniors, teenagers and adults and those of the higher levels, from B1 upwards.

All of these activities were inspired by the approach in the visual based speaking tasks of the Cambridge exams. I use these activities frequently at the beginning of the ‘unit’, to introduce a new theme, to ease us into it and to start with some freer speaking activity, that, really, does not have any specific linguistic requirements or a very formal framework. Not to mention that by the way, my students get an opportunity to practise and develop their exam skills, in a slightly more relaxed way.

All of these activites are deeply rooted in my professional laziness because even though I have to devote some time to the picture selection, that is, really, the only time investment beacause the task is usually a one sentence instruction and, to be perfectly honest, most of the ideas listed below were created during the lesson, as a follow-up and an extension of the regular Cambridge ‘similar or different’ task.

Usually, my greatest helper while preparing these activities is google search engine. I type in the key words and I look through the images until I find these four, six or eight that match the idea that I have in mind. They can be saved in a document or displayed on the screen (powerpoint or Miro). I save them and keep them for later because they are always recycled.

Frequently, I start the cycle with the simplest of the activities (‘Choose two to compare’) and I follow-up with a wider discussion (‘Have you ever…?’) or any other combination but, naturally, these can be used on their own. All of the activities can be done with the whole class or in pairs.

  • Talk about your favourite photograph: students choose the photograph that they really like, they describe it and justify their choice
  • Talk about your least favourite photograph: students choose the photograhp that they like the least, they describe it and explain why they don’t like it
  • Choose two pictures for your friend to compare: students choose two of the pictures to compare them, to look for similarities and differences, very much like in the B2 speaking part of the Cambridge exams. The fact that there are more than two pictures allows for the activity to be repeated a few times, over and over, in pairs or with different partners. The longer the activity takes, the more interesting arguments appear and the more creative the answers.
  • Choose two pictures for your friend: students work in pairs but in this case they choose two pictures for their partner to compare. It makes the activity more interesting as it is easier to avoid all the obvious choices and this way more interesting contributions are generated.
  • Have you ever done that? This is the activity in which we use all the pictures at the same time. Students ask each other the question about all pictures, one by one.
  • Would you like to? This is another activity that can be used with all the pictures. Students ask each other questions related to the situations in the pictures, but more focused on the future.
  • The comparatives: Another activity in which students discuss all the pictures, going over the list of questions and choosing the pictures that somehow stand out. The set is closely related to the theme of the photographs. For example, in a lesson devoted to health and health problems we looked at these four pictures and we answered the questions: Choose the most serious problem, the least serious problem, the most common problem, the easiest to deal with, the least unpleasant for the doctor, the least unpleasant for the patient, the most expensive to treat, the least expensive to treat, etc.
  • What happened before? What will happen afterwards? This is a cool actvity that I adapted from the latest editions of New Cutting Edge Advanced. Students choose their favourite pictures and discuss the before and after, almost telling a story.
  • Ask a question: students work in pairs, they ask their friends questions related to the pictures, they have to use different pictures and different question words and they need to a different word each time: What? Why? Who? Where? How many? How much? What kind of? When? How often?
  • It reminds me of: students work in pairs, they talk about all the pictures. The talk about their associations, memories or references. It can be a free activity or it can have a theme of: books, films, songs and personal memories.

Make sure you also have a look at the first two parts of this series. You can find them here and here.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #52 Discourse development: All your thinking hats

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Ingredients

  • A set of cards with opinions, for example those that have been used with adults or those that have been used with teenagers.
  • A list of the discourse tricks displayed on the board or on the screen (see below) if the activity is done in pairs OR a set of six thinking hats if you want the students to debate in groups of 3 – 6 people. I have created two versions of these here and here. If you are interested in the orignal thinking hats that this activity was inspired by, you can start here.

Procedures

  • Pairs: student A expresses an opinion which, in the earlier stages, can be limited to only reading the opinion off the list or cards) whereas student B reacts to it using one of the approaches. Afterwards, they swap roles. It is good to highlight that student B has to use a different approach in every round.
  • Small groups: student A expresses an opinion (see above) and the other students in the group react in accordance with the hat that they are wearing in this round. Afterwards, they swap roles and the new hats are assigned. In the original activity, in the real classroom, we have been using dice. In the online world these have to be replaced with the wordwall spinner.
  • Regardless of the format, it is better to play the first few rounds with the whole class and with the active participation of the teacher to show the students that it is in fact easy to switch from one hat to the other and that the hats really help to generate ideas.

Why we like it

  • The main aim of this kind of an activity is for the students to develop the habit of reacting to what their interlocutors say and to give them a range to tools (or tricks) to contribute and to develop the contributions of other students. Hopefully, with time, my students will be able to participate in a debate and opinion exchange without any support of the spinner or the display.
  • This activity also encourages the students to listen to what their peers are saying. This has been more useful with the teenagers and juniors who are more likely to space out and start daydreaming in class.
  • The list of all the tricks can be limited to only the two basic ones (I agree / I disagree) and, later on, when the students are ready, further extended.
  • The wordwall spinner in the online classroom was a bit time-consuming for my liking but it turned out to be very beneficial for my shy / withdrawn / panicky adult students because it gave them the additional time to think and to assume the new role. Later on, we were able to switch to a simple list which served only as a reminder of all the options out there.
  • The same goes for the whole class and teacher participation. With some of my adult groups, I had to be involved more in the beginning, to model both the activity itself (to help with the speaker’s block (does it even exist) and, at the same time, to model the ways of getting involved in a debate. Otherwise, they would be just ‘politely’ waiting to be nominated to speak, even at the C1 level.
  • I have been using these with my adult groups and with my young learners, too, with teens and with juniors, when appropriate.

Happy teaching!

I am a lazy teacher and why you should be, too!

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Two weeks ago I was invited to present at the monthly meeting of the Teacher – Mentor Learning Community which was founded by Anna Kashcheeva who, over the years, has been my fellow teacher, ADOS, trainer, my trainee and my trainer and supervisor. Oh, what a lovely list))

I prepared a session on laziness, one of my professional passions. The session went well, the audience were amazing and I got a lot of positive feedback. We were not recording but the presentation was followed up by a post on the community’s blog and you can find it here. Once you get there, don’t forget to have a look at all the other posts and materials.

Happy teaching!