#primaryelf

The Aztecs, fabrics and print! Teaching English through Art!

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The langauge

This lesson was a part of our winter camp – a series of lessons devoted to ancient civilisations taught over a week, with each day being devoted to a different country and culture. We had a lot more time than in a regular EFL class because we could spend the entire three lessons focusing on the History, the Art and the Culture each day. Not to mention that each day was packed with the L1 activities in the particular theme, further reinforcing the vocabulary, the concepts and the ideas, turning it into a real experience for the kids.

For that reason, we had a lot more time to explore the language and all our History lessons of this programme followed the same plan: listening to the music of the civilisation to experience the culture, learning the key vocabulary, doing some written work and, the most important part, comparing the life of ancient Greeks, Romans, Aztecs and so on to ours, using Present Simple and Past Simple, which helped us practise a few key verbs throughout the whole week and to really learn some interesting things about a particular culture. It was also a great opportunity for the kids to share their questions and, equally, the knowledge which they already had.

‘Tell me you are the Art teacher without telling me…’ (and the kids left with their hands clean!)

The artist

Sadly but not surprisingly, we did not have ‘an artist’, not one with a real name. Instead, just like with many other lessons of this particular week, we invited a whole nation to our classroom. We talked about the beautiful Aztec prints that are still popular today. I showed the kids a few examples and we called out the colours and the types of patterns there. The kids automatically started to share which one was their favourite, too.

We also looked at a few printing plaques and outlined what ‘a pattern‘ is.

The art

My choice of the resources and techniques for this lesson was influenced by a few different factors. I decided to combine the Aztec love of cotton and amazing fabrics and patterns, the Aztec love of printing and the amazing colours. And this is how we ended up with our lesson.

There were so many precautions and instructions that I really ended up giving a step by step lecture and a demo, while at the same time discovering the technique, having never done it in class before. I cannot show you the video but there is a lot of ‘awnnn’ coming from the kids and a lot of ‘I just looove it’ coming from the excited teacher.

This is what we did step by step:

  • I prepared the fabric (simple cotton, pre-washed, dried and ironed it at home and cut it up at school) and I attached the pieces to the tables. We did not have the frames (which would have been amazing), but I scotched each piece to the table using the thin painter’s scotch, along the four edges, to ensure that it is properly attached but also to make sure that we have the natural frame for each piece. I also put a piece of newspaper or paper underneath to protect our tables and to make sure that the excess paint is soaked up by that, when necessary.
  • I prepared the tools: plastic forks, knives, spoons, chopsticks, paintbrushes and a few foam stamps I had. Later on we also added a few big shells and some crumpled tinfoil, just because we found it at school.
  • We also got the aprons ready, the wet tissues and an additional piece of paper per two students.
  • It is also worth mentioning that we rearranged the tables and put them all together into one big piece in the centre of the room to avoid a situation when the kids need to move around to exchange the colours or tools and spilling the paint all over the room.
  • I put up another piece on the board, for me to use as a model. Again, I used scotch+fabric+paper underneath and it worked very well.
  • The next step was a set of my instructions. I had to focus on: not getting up and moving around (the teacher will bring everything), being careful with the paint and wiping it off your hands immediately, wiping off the paint off the tools once you stop using them and sharing the tools and waiting patiently for your turn.
  • Afterwards, I demonstrated how we work: choose a tool, dip in the paint on the spare piece of paper that we used as a palette (easier to throw out than to wash), print, clean your hands and the tool and repeat.
  • At the end of the lesson, the kids went to wash their hands and went for a walk, I was cleaning up myself (always the case with the acrylic paints).
  • We needed the classroom for our lesson #3 so I moved the pictures to dry in peace to another room that was empty at a time.

I don’t really need to tell you that this lesson was a success, you only need to look at the photos that accompany this post. I absolutely loved how it went, how we worked and where we got with it. It was not an easy task, logistically, but it was absolutely and definitely worth it.

I was really impressed with how well my kids worked regarding all the rules, cooperation, sharing and being careful with the materials. True, I have no idea how many times, within those 45 minutes, I said ‘Wash the tools!’, ‘Wash your hands!’, ‘Show me your hands!’ and ‘Who needs blue / a fork / a flower / a heart?’, but they were absolutely amazing. So much more gratifying that these were not my regular Art Explorers kids and, nonetheless, they were great. The hands remained cleaned, the tables were generally clean and no clothes were injured or harmed during all our creative activities. I made sure I told my kids that I was really proud of them.

Now, the printing was one ridiculously enjoyable and one surprisingly innovative process. The children took my model into consideration and they tried to follow in my footsteps in the beginning but every single one of them took their own steps towards experimentation and their own interpretation of the process. And, despite the fact that we were working with the same tools and techniques, we ended up with a set of different pictures.

All the kids were visibly enjoying the process and it was great to see how they were not only sharing resources but also the ideas and the new solutions that they came up. Some of the works were directed by the colours, some by the tools that were used, some just by the silly ideas that we had out of nowhere.

Despite the fact that it all looks random and abstract, the pictures are the outcome of an organised creative process. In one of the cases, one of my students was debating with himself, along the lines of: ‘Something is missing here…Something is missing here…What is it?’ but because he was doing it out loud and a few of us got into a conversation, sharing our suggestions. That was a beautiful moment and the final product is, indeed, fantastic.

The best compliment to the lesson, I think, is one of the comments that my student made. He was peeling off his picture and looking at from all the sides. I asked him what he thought of it and if he liked it. ‘I want to buy a frame for it. Are frames expensive?’, he said and that is just the best thing that I could hear, I guess.

Another quote came from my admin staff. They were very much impressed with what we created and they asked: ‘Miss Anka, can we display them on the wall?’. I didn’t answer, I only started to laugh because all of my students, every single one of them, asked me during the lesson (and sometimes confirmed once or twice): ‘Miss Anka, are we taking it home?’ Too precious to leave behind, even for a day. I didn’t even try to convince them, I just made sure I had photos of all the fabric pictures.

My thoughts were of a slightly different kind. Looking at my students works, I was thinking, again, of a real gallery exhibition…

P.S. My favourite things: the Art Aftermath!

Happy teaching!

Hearts and Jean-Michel Basquiat

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The language

February is our Fun Cartoon February but language-wise I decided to focus on Present Continuous to work on verbs and to get us ready for storytelling later on in the year. This is also a great TPR-friendly structure that comes in very handy and gives us a chance to move a little bit when we meet at around 4 pm, already a bit tired after a whole long day at school. We have a set of basic activities for that, tried and tested, that include making sentences based on stencils, Pete the Cat and his ‘Rocking in my school shoes’ (video and song) and a miming-guessing game (the calss asking:’Sasha, what are you doing?’, Sasha demonstrating and the kids guessing).

The artist

The day has come! Jean-Michel Basquiat is here! It has taken some time for him to arrive (mea culpa!) but it is finally happening. I was racking my brain in order to find a match for February and my own alliteration challenge because I really (really) wanted to deal with Basquiat (and with Roy Lichtenstein and Keith Harring) as soon as possible.

I introduced him to my students in the usual way (name, photo, country, favourite thing) and we looked at a few of his creations, including one of the self-portraits, cats and his ‘Robot man’. Funnily enough, my kids found some of his pictures a bit scary. That is why we didn’t spend a lot of time on that and we moved on to his technique because that was, really, my main aim for this lesson.

Before the lesson I prepared my own model of the heart because it made it a lot more easier to explain what ‘layering’ is all about. We looked all of the materials I prepared on the table and we tried to count how many I used in my picture and what they were.

My own piece

The art

Apart from the number of layers that my picture helped with, we also made a list of stages that we need to go through and I wrote them on the board: 1. the draft with a pencil, 2. the outline with a marker, 3. and more: all of the other materials, as many as you want and 4. the final one: glitter. The only thing that was obligatory for everyone was the topic, a heart as we had our lesson in the week of St. Valentine’s Day that our school was getting ready for.

This was a great process art lesson, an amazing process art lesson, in fact. I experienced it myself, while creating my own heart. Apart from just having fun, working with all of the materials and resources and experimenting with them brought me a lot of pleasure. Certainly, I was hoping that my students will also be able to experience that. Guess what? They did!

Different children chose their own approach to the resources and the number of different materials and layers to work with. I didn’t want to interfere with that, even though some of them chose only or two resources. I tried to suggest other solutions but I respected their final decisions. This was an interesting balance to those of my students who went over the top and used absolutely every single material that I had prepared. Or more, just because they found some random bits of coloured paper in the glue box.

Two resources only
Only markers)

My favourite thing was probably the fact that the kids went into the task with a completely open mind, willing to experiment, to try new resources and the new combinations of resources and to learn from each other, as well. We discovered that tinfoil can be torn and cut, it can be coloured and glued or glued and painted over. I shared with the kids that you can paint with acrylic paints and a wet tissue and I looked at how they liked working with our almost professional acrylic paints and that a piece of string actually makes a difference. I myself added a few more bits to my picture just observing what my students were doing.

One of my students came to our class for the first time ever and it was lovely to see how unexpectedly creative he is and how beautifully he applied the technique to create his heart.

Have a look at the beautiful pieces in our gallery…

Same artist, two pieces

Happy teaching!

Splat the Cat and the Cat in the Moon. Storytelling ideas

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The story

This time we used the story by Rob Scotton published by Harper Collings Publishers in the series Reading With Help. It is one of the stories in the series my kids know already because it has been translated into Russian. I had a copy at home and I really wanted to use it as part of our going back to roots (aka to the procedures from year 1) when we were reading a book every week as part of developing my students’ literacy.

Underneath you can see how we used this particular story, however, these are not the only activities that this book lends itself to. This is how we needed it and how we used it.

The ideas

  • Concepts: this was, probably, the main aim of this book in our lessons. We have done a series of lessons devoted to development of soft skills in our communication lessons. Splat and Plonk differ in their opinions on what the moon looks like and they sort out this disagreement in a slightly agressive way, teasing and pushing and almost hurting each other. This was a perfect story to bring to class at the end of the whole series.
  • Another concept that I did not include or even forsee from the very beginning was the different ways that we see the world. Plonk looks at the moon to see the craters, as a great space fan, whereas Splat looks at the moon to see the cat’s face in she shades and spots on the moon surface. Neither is wrong, they only have a different outlook on the world. Plonk represents a realist (or, as we called him, the scientist) and Splat has a more creative way of perceiving the world (for us he was the artist).
  • Functional language: this was the main aim of the lesson, linguistically, not focused on any specific function or a situation, only a few useful phrases such as ‘These are definitely craters’, ‘I’ll show you’, ‘Are you ok?
  • Grammar: no obvious structure for us to focus on, since nothing stands out, however, we used it as an additional practice of the past tense. Some of the verbs my students already know (saw, didn’t see, looked) and some were completely new (nudged, hit, aimed).
  • Vocabulary: no obvious set of vocabulary items but we had to introdudce/ check such as: a notepad, telescope, craters etc,

The lesson

Here is the overview of the main stages of the lesson

  • the cover page
  • the vocabulary, I have chosen these words and phrases to introduce and to check, we read them and looked for more examples of use
  • ‘your phrase’: I have prepared a few phrases aka quotes from the story on separate cards to give out to students (one per each) to help them focus on listening. We read them out loud and the students were supposed to listen and to raise a hand when they heard their line in the story
  • comprehension task: Did Plank and Splat communicated effectively? Who was right? Who was wrong?
  • reading: I read the story from my copy while changing the visuals on the powerpoint. I created these using A.I. to match the key moments in the story and to boost comprehension
  • discussing the comprehension questions above.
  • personalisation: How do you look at the moon, as an artist or as a scientist?
  • notes: kids read and complete sentences about the story
  • the following lesson: a few chosen words from the story written on the board, the students retell the story (or elements of it)
  • there are few videos of the read aloud on youtube so these can be used in class, too. I am going to use one of them to share with my kids and I hope that, perhaps, they will read it and watch it again at home.

Reflection and more ideas

I absolutely loved the story. We listened and read, we had a little laugh at the end we had a reall nice discussion about communication and the ways of looking at the world. It even went further because one of my students suggested that the moon can also be a pancake and we agreed that this is how a chef would look at it. I also liked all of the ideas they expressed in their notes and they were definitely not anonimous. Most children liked Splat (but not everyone), most appreciated Plank’s realism (but not everyone, ‘Miss Anka, he is a bore!’) and most children liked Seymour’s trick (but not everyone, ‘Miss Anka, he cheated’).

Absolutely everyone loved the last task in which they had to come up with an idea what to put in front of the telescope lens to play a trick on both cats and this is the only sentence that we read out loud, just to compare ideas.

This lesson and this story is actually going to transform into a lot more because first of all, I got hooded on the visuals created by the A.I. and I want to included it in our Art Explorers and I love the idea of the world seen by different people, the scientists and the artists and this is where we are going to go next week.

Happy teaching!

Soft skills in the YL classroom. Communication

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Why bother?

For us, it was a very simple story of cause and effect. We have a crash situation in my class (yes, I know, I know, they are only seven and eight and I was really hoping that this situationship could wait until year 4 or at least year 3, alas) and I noticed that, among all the other issues that was causing, the two were just fighting with each other. Obviously, it looked like fighting only to the untrained eye. What they were doing, in fact, was just an exchange, communication, only in the clumsiest and in the most unwanted of ways that one could possibly think of. They were obviously drawn to each other but instead of talking, they were just punching, pushing and what not.

On top of that, I noticed that the whole class, both groups, being still children, lack the social skills in general, although, after a year and a half in my classroom, they are, admittedly better now at playing in pairs and in teams. Hooray.

That is how I decided to take the game up to a new level and to start, slowly, developing their soft skills. I haven’t really done much of that in the classroom but everything needs to start somewhere and since we have a good team in our school, I can plan my lessons and consult them and reflect on them with our school psychologist.

In the long run, I would like to spend two or three hours a month (45 min times 3), doing ‘something else’ in class, developing certain social skills and soft skills and helping my students become better group memebers.

Our lessons are run in English but I speak my kids L1 so it is understood and accepted that at times, my students might reply in Russian, although, the aim is to use English as much as possible. I am including all the materials here.

In order to mark these lessons as special ones, we completely changed the set up of the room. The tables were moved to the walls and we were able to sit all together in a circle.

All the aims

  • talk about effective and not very effective communication and reasons for it (we used ‘good’ and ‘bad’ initially, then switched into ‘effective’ and ‘not very effective’
  • talk about different ways of communicating with examples
  • try communicating in different ways (controlled and freer)
  • talk about the different problems in communication and solutions
  • create our own code of conduct

Lesson 1: The ways in which we communicate

Step 1: We play hangman or monster game to guess the word ‘communication‘, talk about what it it is

Step 2: What is good or bad communication (effective and not very effective)? What happened here? We talk about the pictures in the presentation (slides: 2 – 7, description included in the notes). I based those on the real events and issues that we have to deal with on daily basis that are somehow connected to communication.

Step 3: We introduced and revised the vocabulary related to how people communicate. I chose these ten different ways in order to cover the basic ones (body language, words etc) and to include a few alternative ones, too, such as dance or music. I have included all of them here, in the wordwall cards. We went through all the words and illustrated them all with our ideas, mine and kids, to demonstrate that we already use a lot of them on daily basis.

Step 4: The practical part: We took turns to pick a communication method at random (cards I prepared) and an animal (the leader’s choice) for everyone to try their best to show the animal. At this point, I wanted it to be very controlled and not a game, to take the pressure off and to experience how different communication methods work. After each round, we were discussing the experience, a certain animal and a certain method using the language we know (it’s easy, it’s very easy, it’s difficult, it’s very diifficult, it’s impossible). It worked very well and we had a lot of creative fun.

Step 5: The quiz. In order to summarise the lesson and to do something together and to get back to the case studies from the beginning of the lesson, we did a quiz to discuss the better solution in each situation. There is an obvious answer in each situation but I was also accepting all the ‘But, Miss Anka, what if…’ ideas.

Lesson 2: Effective communication

Step 1: Revise all the communication methods using the cards and our examples

Step 2: The practical part #2: I prepared some simple sentences that the kids are familiar with for the task that was a bit more challenging and at the same time involved more decision-making from each child. The students, taking turns, came to the centre, picked one message to convey and then had a moment to choose the most effective way of communicating it. The class were to guess the exact message. The students were demonstrating, the class were guessing and the most interesting part of it was the experience itself. Sometimes the chosen method was not the most effective (for example, communicating with gestures is not always easy if the message is more complex) and more methods had to be added.

Again, at the end of each round, we talked about things that were easy and difficult, for the communicator and for the listeners.

Step 3: Problems with communication: We looked at the second part of the presentation to answer two questions: What is happening? Why is that a problem? In order to outline some of the potential problems with communication.

Step 4: Solutions: What can we help to communicate better? (based on the slides): listen, speak not too loud and not to quietly, take turns, use the right language.

Lesson 3: How we feel about it

Step 1: Revise all the communication methods and play the game from lesson 2 again, with a diffferent set of sentences. You can find my set here.

Step 2: ‘Why is communication sometimes a little difficult?’ is the question that I wanted the kids to answer. They came with quite a few good ideas, some based on what we talked about in class before so it was kind of a revision for us, too. But it was also a way for us to get to the topic of the day, namely the connection between the communication and the emotions. This is when we started to use our presentation (slide 3).

Step 3: This step was intended as a speaking activity and language practice for us but also, as regards the soft skills, there was also another aim: for the kids to realise that different situations may generate different emotions for different people. That is why we were looking at the photographs (slides 4 – 14). I have prepared quite a few pictures but we didn’t use a lot of them in both groups. Some generated more reaction from the kids, some not so much but we did produce some English and very very quickly in the game there were different reactions and different points of view. For example, even the very first picture, a very positive one did. Generally it made us happy (because we like presents, because we got great presents for Christmas) but also a bit sad (because we cannot see what the presents us, because these are not our presents and because we don’t know if the children like their presents or not). It was a lovely lesson because we got to see how differently we look at different situations and I cannot really tell you how many times I get to say ‘Great. This is your opinion’ or ‘Well, this is how you feel’, validating pretty much everything that was said.

Step 4: Summary with slide 14. I decided to keep it here and make it stand out although a lot of discussion was done so far anyway and it was a very simple summary: we have different emotions in exactly the same situation.

Step 5: Different emotions in communication. The linguistic aim of this part of the lesson was reading practice. For that reason, I chose a very simple conversation, with the language that we are familiar with and that we have been doing recently. There was nothing very challenging here and the kids could focus on the accuracy, intonation, pronunciation and enjoying reading a text that is all accessible to them. As regards the soft skills and communication aims, I wanted the children to notice the connection with how easy or difficult it is to communicate in different situations when the emotions of the people involved play such an important part.

To achieve all that we used an activity that I have been using for years in our regular English classes, the emotional reading. What you need is a dialogue (you can find mine in slide 16), a die and two sets of emotions (you can find our ideas in slide 17). We start with reading the dialogue with our regular, natural voices (one of the kids helped me), then we roll the die to assign the emotion for each player and then we read our dialogue in pairs, trying to portray the particular emotion. Depending on the time available, this stage can be repeated a few times. If appropriate, in the final round, all the kids can choose their emotions.

In our ‘regular’ EFL lessons, this is a lovely way of encouraging the kids to read, again and again, in preparation for a role-play, here I wanted them to focus on their emotions and the difficulties.

Step 6: Feedback. This was probably the most important step, as regards the soft skills aims for this lesson, because we had a very simple discussion about how these different emotions in our little dialogues made us feel. Our question, the same for all of the conversations, ‘Was it easy to communicate with X when he /she was happy / sad / angry? Why?’ A lot of these were done in English but, of course, my students are only children and A1 – A2, so they sometimes did resort to their L1. And that’s OK.

I have to say I absolutely loved these debates. Not only did my students put their hearts into re-enacting the emotions assigned and it was obvious that they loved this kind of an activity (mental note: we need to do more of them) but we got a lot of ideas for why emotions might make our communication a bit complicated. It turned out that when we are sad it might be difficult to talk because people speak very quietly and it is difficult to understand them but, surprisingly, when they are happy and excited, they might be speaking too fast or too loudly and that does not make things easy. Not to mention that when we are tired or sleepy or ill, things get even more complicated especially that it might not always be obvious to everyone.

Lesson 4: Things to do, things not to do aka RULES

Step 1: Modal verbs for talking about the rules: We revised the grammar points that we covered in the regular English lessons. We used two activities that were a success. One of them was a set of pictures on wordwall and the activity ‘What’s the rule?’ when the kids had to guess the rule symbolised by a sign. The other one was a simple bamboozle with places (we know these already). The kids had to name the place and give an example of one rule related to this place, things we can, must or mustn’t do there.

Step 2: What’s wrong with this conversation? We looked at seven photographs illustrating different problems with communication (powerpoint here) in order to outline what can go wrong and as a lead-in to formulating what we need to do in order to communicate successfully. I encouraged the kids to use Present Continuous here but that is not the only option, of course. You can see that I have outlined my own ideas (see the notes for the powerpoint) but the kids came up with a lot more ideas. For example, in slide 1, my main idea was that we cannot speak too quietly because it will be difficult to hear us. To my kids, however, this picture looked like a pair of friends trying to have a private conversation, sharing secrets while someone is eavesdropping on them…Same with the slide number 2. For me it was someone not listening and paying attention (teacher’s trauma, ahah) whereas my kids saw in it a man who is busy working and who cannot take part in any conversation at the moment…Fair enough, all valid points, these answers were accepted. The main aim here was to generate a few ideas for the following creative stage.

Step 3: Our communication, our rules. This was a writing task that can be done in pairs, teams or individually and its main objective is to generate ideas for Our Rules Poster. The hope is that after we have gone through the whole cycle of lessons, considered all the aspects of effective communication, we will be able to draft our own ideas that later will help us all communicate better.

The task was to do some thinking and write down five ideas later to be collected and edited and typed up by the teacher and displayed on the wall of the classroom. Which will help communicate effectively, without offending anyone and without any communication breakdowns ever again. Basically, they lived happily ever after.

Teacher says

Overall, I am very happy with the series and I am planning to continue including a series of lessons devoted to developing social skills in my amazing monsters. Simply because we need that.

As I mentioned before, I was able to use the help of our school psychologist (miss Katya<3) who helped with generating ideas for lesson 1 and who found time to come and observe our lesson 4 and to talk to me about it later and the outcomes, things we have achieved so far and things that we can expect in the future. These can be summarised as: ‘it went well’ and ‘we are taking baby steps and eventually we are going to get there’.

As a teacher of English, I am really happy because we managed to revise and practise a lot of language: Present Continuous, emotions and modals for rules. I was preparing these lessons being aware that we would not be able to carry them out entirely in the target language simply because we are not native speakers or advanced learners. I assumed that there will be ideas and concepts that we will only be able to express in our L1 and that was not a problem. However, having said that, I was really (really) happy with the language that my kids produced. They spoke in English and they spoke A LOT for their level. I’d say, about 80% of these lessons were carried out in the target language.

As a teacher of YL, I was really happy that we have sowed some seeds here. We looked at different ideas, talked about emotions, interacted, experimented and expanded our Zone of Proximal Development in the area of soft skills and, hopefully, we will be reaping what we sowed.

As regards my students, I am still to ask them what they taught of these lessons but, just from my observations, I can say that the reaction was positive. The children were involved, they were not scared to share ideas and to try new things, such as new emotions or ways of communicating. They also enjoyed the different format of the lesson and a different seating arrangement, too.

Now we will just keep looking at Our Rules Poster, remind ourselves that what we all want is effective communication and that we can do it. Fingers crossed!

And, by accident almost, this series turned into a mini-series on Splat the Cat and the Cat in the Moon which also deals with communication and looking at the world from different perspectives.

Happy teaching!

Practice, practice, practie. Our favourite vocabulary games

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My primary group are now in their second year, around 7 and 8 years old and anywhere between A1 and A2, all mixed together. And, on top of that: cheeky, rowdy and creative. These have been our favourite vocabulary games this year.

Have you got any…?

Materials: a set of flashcards

Procedures: this game was inspired and very roughly modelled on the popular game ‘Go Fish’. I have already written about it here, in one of its versions. The main aim is to guess what cards the other teams or players have, by asking the appropriate question. I really like using ‘Have you got?’ because it matches pretty much any vocabulary set but there are other options possible. Please check out the post devoted to the Sheep Game.

What have you got for lunch?

Materials: a set of visuals, I use wordwall displayed on the screen, such as those here.

Procedures: the game starts with writing the key questions on the board. In the original form of the game these were: What have you got for lunch? Do you like it? Is it a good lunch for you? The teacher displays the pictures on the screen and asks the students the questions. Some of the lunch options are regular, some are crazy. Some look unusual but kids love them. The main aim of the game is to express opinion and to use the key words.

The first few times we play, we do it together, as a group but the idea is to get the kids used to talking about the pictures in pairs, so that everyone has a chance to express their opinion. This year I came up with the idea of The Cafe -we all sit at our tables, in pairs or threes and we have a little, quiet chat only with out partner, without disturbing anyone. And, surprise, surprise, my rowdy bunch did get the idea!

I have only used it with food so far but a new topic is coming up (clothes, animals) and I am planning to expand the activity with different questions.

Riddles

Materials: a list of words (handouts or displayed on the board) or, possibly, a set of flashcards

Procedures: Kids work in pairs or small groups. The leader chooses one of the words and describes it in three or five sentences. The other students guess which word they speak about. It is a good idea to display on the board the set of all the basic structures that can be used. All ideas are good ideas! Food items can be discribed using some of the following structures:

  • You eat it.
  • You drink it.
  • You eat it for lunch / breakfast / dessert. It is a snack.
  • You eat it hot / You eat it cold.
  • I like it / I don’t like it.
  • It is round / square / big / small.
  • It is yellow / green / etc.

It is a game that is most effective later in the unit when the kids have already assembled some structures and ideas about a certain vocabulary set and they can really enjoy playing it.

I have already written about riddles on this blog and you can find these two posts here and here.

Similar or different

Materials: a list of words (handouts or displayed on the board) or, possibly a set of flashcards

Procedures: Kids work in pairs and they take turns to choose a pair of any two words for their partner with the same question in every single round ‘Are they similar or different?’. The child answering the question makes a decision and justifies it in a way that is appropriate. All ideas are good ideas! We are now in the unit of food unit so for example the food items can be both lunch dishes, two drinks, two items starting with the same letter, having the same number of letters, having the same colour, being the same category (two fruit) or two things that students like etc.

We don’t play this game in the first lesson with the vocabulary but later in the unit in order to give use a chance to accumulate some additional vocabulary during the unit, just like in the case of ‘Riddles‘. In order to raise the level of challenge, we use each word only once, to make sure that we go over all the words. This game usually has a very slow start but as the kids are adjusting their way of thinking of the words and trying to come with more and more unusual combinations and connections, it speeds up and is becoming more and more fun.

Pairs

Materials: a list of words, a poster or a set of flashcards

Procedures: This is, in fact, a variation of the game described above, however, in this version each student is in charge of their own choices and they have to think of their own way of justifyin why the two words are a pair. All ideas are good ideas, as above, and the players have to play using each word only once.

Happy teaching!

Christmas in style! (Or a lesson about symbols and style). Teaching English Through Art

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Welcome to the post about the final Art lesson of the year and, at the same time, the Art lesson that can be (and will be) adapted to different seasons, symbols and styles. I am very happy with it and I am very happy to be sharing it here.

The language

This was our final lesson of the calendar year, done just before we left for the winter break and for that reason our language and content input was heavily focused on Christmas and December. We revised all the Christmas vocabulary using wordwall and riddles and we talked about our favourite symbol of Christmas.

Afterwards, we looked at the presentation (you can find it here) and we talked about the many symbols of the December celebrations and symbols that my students are not really familiar with. I really wanted to broaden their horizons a little bit and to show them that there are different symbols of Christmas in different countries (i.e. mistletoe in the US), different traditions (i.e. Santa bringing presents and leaving them in the Christmas boots in Finalnd), different associations with Christmas (i.e. a barbecue on the beach in New Zealand) or even different holidays that are more visible and associated with December such as Hanukkah and menorah.

As it happened, we also had a chance to extend the topic into our regular English lessons and we had lots of fun with the quiz (‘Santa, where are you from?’) and the bamboozle game about the letters to Santa written by different characters from stories and films.

It’s a reindeer. In case you are wondering)

The artist

We looked together at different artists and how they might have painted a Christmas tree and a menorah. I have chosen Warhol, Kusama, Pollock, Picasso, Mondrian and Dali. Some of these were the artists we have covered since September and some were chosen because they have a style that is easy for children to follow. I have used the images I found online (Christmas tree and menorah).

The real inspiration for the lesson was the set below that I cannot reference. I got it from a friend but there was no real source. Dear author: thank you and I am sorry that I cannot reference you!

The most beautiful picture of them all that actually gave me the idea for the whole lesson

We talked about them a little bit: the most significant details such as colours or shapes and whether we like them or not.

The art

Before the lesson I prepared the materials, pencils and markers and a piece of paper, cardboard divided into 4 sections. I also prepared my own examples of the art: one chosen symbol in four different styles, the regular one and the other ones representing three different artists. For our lessons this time I have decided to include Kusama, Mondrian and Picasso because they are signigifant enough and easy enough for beginners: dots for Kusama, shapes and the colours for Mondrian and asymmetry and colours for Picasso. Each picture was first drawn in pencil and then coloured in as appropriate.

I was really happy with the lesson. The kids were really interested in finding out about all of the traditions and symbols. Now, after we have covered the whole Christmas month, I think that there is enough material to cover all the lessons of the month. There are a lot more ideas for quizes and games. Hopefully, next year we will be able to do all that.

What’s more important, the kids really took to the creative part of the lesson. Most of my students chose to draw exactly the same symbols which they named as their favourite Christmas symbols in the beginning of the lesson although there were some who, on taking everything in stock, went for symbols who were easier to draw. Which is just as well since, this way, they could really focus on conveying the elements of each style.

We were going step by step, with me modelling and highlighting the bits and pieces of each symbol. Kids were working at their own pace, some of them needed more time, some of them were speeding up and taking ahead of the group but they all worked beautifully and they all did their absolute best to incorporate the main features of each style.

I am happy with all the pictures, of course, but it was especially lovely to see the works of my least advanced students. One of them because, although his reindeer is not a perfect rendition, he really did made an effort to represent different styles and he ended up with creating his own style, on a separate piece of paper. The other one, because although she did not attend many of our classes, she took the reins soon after we started painting and right after creating the first picture in the style of the Designated Artist (Kusama), she went on creating in all the other styles, the Smileys Candy Cane, the Harry Potter Candy Cane and, of course, the most touching of all: Miss Anka in four different styles.

The most exciting thing about this lesson is the fact that I will be able to repeat it with an entirely different focus but a similar approach to give the kids an opportunity to experiment with a variety of creative styles. I am considering hearts for St.Valentines, rabbits and flowers for Easter and spring and the summer symbols for the end of the year, as a way of celebrating the whole year of Art.

Here are some more pictures from our lessons

Happy teaching!

‘Competitive games in the YL classroom’

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This article, just as the earlier post here, has come to be as a result of the many (many!) conversations with my trainees and what I observed in my own classroom. It is fair to say that it has become my latest professional passion / obsession / interest. The post that I have written here (‘A balancing act. Non-competitive EFL games for kids‘) is one of my proudest moments on the blog but was just the beginning of the whole story. And one of the top 10 articles on the blog!

The article that I wrote for the Modern English Teacher (Issue 33.6 Nov-Dec) is a continuation of this research anad the search for solutions. It is, unfortunately, only available to the MET subscribed members but I am really proud of it and I can definitely say that the solutions that I came up with and the ideas that I suggest really do work. After a year and a half pretty much all of my YL are now ready to play competitive games. I do recommend!

Happy teaching!

Autumn gloom and classroom management. Setting up the routines in year 2

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Well, miss Anka, you did not do a good job. The classroom management that was supposed to be updated monthly got abandoned. The end of October happened but everything else happened, too so the post didn’t. Here is a two-month reflection then.

Starting the lesson

The start of a lesson has become more SS-centred as I am barely involved. There is now a very interesting role to play, namely the one of the Hello Master. This is the student who takes over the teacher, sits in the centre of the room, starts with ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Hello everyone!’ and asking everyone how they are. In November and December this person is also responsible for changing the numbers on our CountDown to New Year’s Day poster. Apart from that we have two Helpers and two more additional roles, the Game Leader (who helps with choosing the game, divide the class into teams etc) and the Decision Maker (aka the one who helps out with solving any doubts, if we have any). The kids love that and they sometimes ask me to assign a special role to them or they remind me that ‘Miss Anka, I haven’t been the Hello Master for a long time!‘

We still write the lesson plan on the board and the What time is it? and we still sing the Month Song, about how we feel, about the weather and everything related. I started to put up on the board some pieces of language because there is so much language emerging. It is absolutely necessary to keep it in memory, a bit.

It has also become a tradition for us to add a few more names to our list of students on the board. Sometimes our birds feature there (we have a well-frequented bird feeder), sometimes the toys that the kids bring, sometimes even the weird presences i.e. Poor Toe (aka a personalised version of the toe that one of my student hurt). But that means that they kids feel more involved in the lesson and they speak more.

Classroom management and rules

Our rules haven’t changed at all. They are still hanging above the board, we revise them in the beginning of the lesson and we refer to them when necessary but no new rules have been added.

Rewards chart

Our rewards chart is not quite a rewards chart but an activity chart which we use to mark attendance, activity, language production, cases of unwanted behaviour (like before, a simple description) and special rewards for great ideas, fair play, being a good friend and so on. I now simply take a photo of the board at the end of the lesson to use it later on, for assessment or to share with the parents.

We have also started using a greater variety of symbols, stars, suns, flowers, hearts. Yesterday, we managed to get to about a half of the solar system on the board, for different tasks. Basically, one more way to motivate the kids.

Reflection and feedback

These photos and notes are very useful because I have to add marks and note participation in our electronic journal for the parents but I also use them to give feedback to kids.

At the end of every week (which for us is Thursday), I take notes in every student’s notebook, giving them a mark for the week for English, for Maths and for behaviour. This is also my opportunity to thank them and to praise them for something special they did during the week. It is now our tradition to look at these notes in the beginning of the lesson on Monday. I also noticed that I started to comment on these notes during the week, on random lessons for example to praise some students for the behaviour that improved or the behaviour that needs improvement.

I realised that the notes from our tests are too rare and the notes from the electronic journal may not get through to the children as the parents are the main recipients and I needed a direct channel between me and the students. Hence the feedback.

We have been doing it for three weeks now and I know that these notes matter to kids. I keep them secret, written on a page that has been folded etc, but they announce everything to everyone anyway. They do anyway when they have something to be proud about.

Story and songs

To be perfectly honest and depressing as it is, we haven’t had lots of songs recently. We sing the Multiplication Songs from Jack Hartman in every lesson but we haven’t learnt any new songs.

In the same way, we have done lots of reading (fiction and non-fiction) but none of them were real stories. Oh, no! How did it come to that? I have no excuse and I am just deeply unhappy that I let it happen. Sigh.

Socialising

We have been interacting a lot in the classroom:

  • every English lesson starts with the sight words reading practice which we do in pairs. One student is the teacher, the other is the student and I sometimes ask them to give each other grades.
  • we did project presentation in pairs and small groups (asking and answering questions about the perfect house)
  • pairwork games such as riddles
  • Hello Master is my absolute number 1 when it comes to the favourite parts of the lesson, the one that kids do all by themselves, with the teacher being merely an observer
  • we have even played some team games and I am really proud of my kids because now they are ready to do it, on most days.
  • we have also been changing the seating arrangements and pairs since we have had some changes and the group needs a chance to be formed again, from scratch almost.

Creativity

This is the area that I am happy with because we have done enough in that area.

  • we celebrated the Craft Day (which, apparently, falls on the 16th November, at least here) and that is why we made beautiful monster bookmarks
  • we celebrated the Thanksgiving Day and we made our Thankful Turkeys, with feathers made of everything that we are grateful for (The list, for my kids, includes: mum, dad, gran, grandpa, brothers, sisters, pets, Adidas and Roblox).
  • we described and drew our Ideal House and they turned out great, especially that we were getting ready for the project day, reading, looking at photos and talking about all the unusual buildings and rooms from around the world that I could find
  • we wrote out first article in English about a special place. There wasn’t much creation per se since we wrote about real places but we had so much fun researching that and the final product, our journal, looks amazing.
  • I have also noticed that more and more of my kids have been wondering into my classroom during the long break in order to do creative things, using all the resources I have in my magic cupboard.

Teacher

Over those last few weeks, I have been a very tired teacher and I did a lot to save the energy and to use it wisely. Listening to music, chocolate and careful choices while lesson planning helped me do that.

At the same time, I have also been a very happy teacher because I could see how much progress my students have made in English and in Maths. This has become especially clear in all the speaking lessons because the unusual houses and rooms really made the children curious and willing to express their views. That, together with all the cool adjectives that we learnt. During our speaking lessons, I would give them stars for participation and beautiful English and it was just beautiful to see how fast my board was filling up stars. They had ideas and they wanted to share them, in English. A truly joyful moment!

I have also been a very happy teacher noticing how my students are growing up and getting better at dealing with their emotions during our competitive games, learning to be in a group, getting over their own insecurities and being proud of their achievements. We are not a perfect group, the picture perfect class (Well, wait, do I even want us to be that?) and we are not even at the OK stage (not consistently, anyway) but we are getting there. I hope.

Happy teaching!

Working with sight words. A handful of crumbs for the primary students.

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This is a post dedicated to my trainees and course participants because, as it often happens, good ideas surface while talking to other teachers. Thank you! And I hope you find it useful)

About sight words

If in one line, sight words are those precious bits of the English language that, in a way, are exceptions are they do not follow the rules of phonics and which, at the same time appear in the English language with a high frequency (hence another term used to refer to them ‘high-frequency words’) which makes them very relevant to anyone learning to read and write. ‘Sight words are the glue that holds the sentences together’ (sightwords.com) which makes them a necessary part of literacy development, even if they had to be learnt by heart.

There are two lists of these words, the Dolch Sight Words List and the Fry Sight Words Lists and they are organised either by the year (Dolch’s) or the frequency with which they appear in English (Fry’s).

Available resources

There are lots of resources available for parents and for teachers of the English as L1. Naturally, just like in the case of phonics, we need to proceed with caution as they were created for children who already communicate in the language so the meaning of all of these does not need to presented, clarified and practise. Here are some of the

Sight words in primary EFL (a very objective take)

It is some kind of a paradox that sight words do not make even a cameo appearance in our mainstream coursebooks for primary. Or perhaps it is not, actually. After all, despite all the changes and developments that have taken place over the last two decades (my time in EFL), literacy development over all of the years of primary still falls under the category ‘Areas for improvement’.

Year 1 is usually well-taken care of (or at least it is the year 1 coursebooks that have shown the greatest progress in the area) but the same cannot be said about levels 2 – 4. It seems that once the kids are out of year 1 and once they have gone over the few phonics sets, they are all ready to read and write pretty much everything, as long as it has the appropriate lenght and more or less the vocabulary and grammar that follows the curriculum of the level.

It does not work like that and it is not only my opinion. Every time I run a course for primary teachers and meet teachers from a variety of backgrounds and contexts (bilingual, freelance teachers, state school teachers, private langauge school teachers), they all come with the same problem that could be summarised as: ‘How do we teach the kids to read? My students are in year 3 and they still cannot read. The book does not help. I don’t know what to do.’

Yes, as teachers, we are going to be supplementing, staging and facilitating the process and the kids will eventually learn to read and write but it would be wonderful if this area had more systemic support and attention.

Enough of this whining. Let me tell you how we approach sight words with my students:

  • Year 1 of instruction is fully devoted to phonics and sight words are put on hold. The reasons for that are simple. First of all, phonics have to have the priority and I don’t want to overload the students who are taking their first steps in English and in literacy. Second of all, I am taking my time to ensure that when we start working on sight words, kids are not complete beginners and may actually know some of the words they are to learn and to practise. This is also the time when we start moving from sentence reading / writing to text reading / writing and these words really do make an appearance. We start learning and practising sight words in year 2.
  • I divided the words in my own (very subjective) way, according to the categories such as grammar words, adjectives, verbs, etc, to facilitate recognition and memorisation and to enable to come up with meaningful practice activities, something more than just reading. So far I have been using Dolch’s list but I am going to upgrade it, as soon as we get through it. The lists have been colour-coded, printed and laminated and we take one list per week.
  • Read and put your hand up: the introductory exercise, the children are looking at the list and I read the words, one by one. The kids listen and raise their hands if they know the word. The aim of this activity is for me to understand where we are with the words regarding their meaning. Naturally, if we find something new, we explain them.
  • You’re the teacher, I am the teacher: kids work in pairs. They take turns to lead the activity. ‘The teacher’ points at the words in the table, ‘the student’ reads them out loud.
  • Line by line: we work as a team, kids take turns to read one line of the sight words. If the kids are quite strong, they can point at two or three words at the same time.
  • Knock, knock!: one more copy of the sight words is displayed on the door of the classroom. Kids read a number of words on entering the room (i.e. 3 or 5). The words can also be colourcoded, randomly or by the level of difficulty, i.e. 5 words per colour (depending on the list). Kids choose themselves which colour they want to read.
  • Bingo!: teacher prepares a set of cards with the words in question and hands them out among students (4 or 5 cards per student). The teacher reads the words in a random order. The child who has the card with a certain word puts it up to signal to the teacher (‘I’ve got it’) and they put the word away. Whoever runs out of their words first is the winner, like in a regular Bingo game.
  • Make a sentence: this activity requires a bit more than just a list but there is so much potential that I decided to invest time in preparing the resources for it. You will need two sets of cards, one with sentence starters made out of sight words (i.e. I have, I can, I like, I don’t, Do you, I will, I didn’t…etc) and the second set with adjectives (i.e. blue, green, long etc). Kids pick out one card of each and show to their peer for them to make a full sentence made out of these two bits and their own ideas.
  • Invisible sentence: kids work in pairs, like in ‘You’re the teacher! I’m the teacher!’ but instead of just reading the word, the student who is a student makes up a whole sentence or a question with that word. It takes a few rounds of practising together on the board for the children to get the idea, for example with teacher and one of the students taking turns in choosing the word but once they get it, it is a marvellous activity and, apart from practising reading, the kids also put them into context. If there are still some less familiar words or even the unknown words, this is a perfect opportunity to fish them out and to clarify them.

There are just a few of them but we have just started our adventure with sight words. There is more to come, for sure!

To be continued…

Happy teaching!

How to plan for kids without bending your back backwards. A five-step manual

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This post here is my response to the challenge set by my teacher-friend Michael. Challenge accepted. Let’s go, 5 steps.

Lesson aim

The first-est step. Always.

The session devoted to lesson planning on our YL course is called ‘What do you want teacher?’ and that is for a reason. Making a decision why we enter the room and what we want to achieve by the end of the lesson is key. Is the vocabulary the focus or is it a grammar point? Or any of the skills? What is the context? Do you want to focus on the language or the most important thing on the day is the work we put in developing social skills or building the routine? It might be something suggested by the book or chosen by the school curriculum but not always. And even it is, there is always room for adjustments and adaptation. At the end of the day, there is the teacher and there are the students in the classroom that matters most. The programme and the coursebooks are to be adapted.

After the aim is selected, there are more follow-up decisions to make, namely the selection of the focused task (aka the main productive activity) of the lesson?

That’s it, done. The main thing is done and it probably took about 5 minutes. The next step will be looking for things that will help make it happen.

Books basics

The coursebook and whatever it contains is already partially included in the previous step. Most of the time, this is what we use, for convenience and just because we can. The coursebook is not the enemy of course and there is a lot of useful material. Though, not all of it.

I presume the main activity has already been chosen and the next decision is regarding all the other exercises, activities, audio and visuals that are there (and in the workbook and teacher resource packs) that either match or don’t our aim and our focused task, or, in other words, our A or the lesson and our Z.

The most important thing to remember and the thing that is on constant repeat during our sessions and in my conversations with teachers is: the book is not there for us to follow to the letter and to cover and to include all the exercises.

Things you can repeat

In every lesson for YL there are certain elements that we can and that we should repeat because they help us construct the framework and the routine. They include either the elements of the routine: the hello song, the how do you feel today, the rules revision, the homework check, the goodbye as well the elements that are short-temporarily fixed: the songs we are singing in September, the games we are playing in the unit of toys, the story we are reading in the chapter on the jungle animals. All of these will feature in the lesson over a month. It is good to included them in the plan, keeping them on the side, in order to be able to use them.

The missing bits

Having got that far in the lesson planning, it might be the time to figure out how much time we have already taken out of the lesson time and how much time we already have left. Then, look at all the activities there are in the coursebook, all ready and waiting to be used, and, only if necessary, to replace them with some other activities, from another sources or self-designed.

Most of the time, the coursebook will do the job just fine.

Something for the balance (bits)

What I like to do at the very end, when the lesson is already ready, to have a quick look at everything, to check it for the contents and for the balance and variety

  • the ratio of interaction patterns
  • the ratio of different activities: songs, stories, creative and hard work
  • the ratio of new and familiar
  • the ratio of settlers and stirrers

And, when something is off, I fix it. Done!

Instead of a coda

Here are a few words of wisdom from a grandma teacher and trainer / mentor / observer:

  • we want good lessons to be our everyday but that does not mean that every single lesson needs to be an Oscar-worthy (or a Nobel prize-worthy) unit at the cost of the teacher’s sleep, peace of mind, family life or salary. Yes, I sometimes invest a little bit more into my teaching, in terms of planning, resources and time but, after all these years of experience, I also have lessons that are ‘just regular, no fireworks’.
  • we sometimes plan lessons and as soon as we get to school, out of the blue, we come up with something entirely different and it is the best lesson ever. Yes, that happens, but (here comes a very subjective line), it is the result of all the brainstorming and thinking that has already taken place. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have happened.
  • designing your own activites does not have to take ages and it does even require a teacher to be super creative. I personally find it much easier to prepare something for my lesson from scratch, rather than spend hours of looking through materials and resources to match the needs of my group and then, on having found it, still waste time on adapting it to what we (my kids, my course and our lesson) really need (here you can find some of the posts on material design).
  • our coursebooks have a lot of different resources and pictures among them which can be used in a million different ways with very little effort. A picture is an actitivity and you can read about it here, here and here.
  • in general, being a lazy teacher has a lot of benefits. You can read about it here.
  • here you can find another post about the everyday lesson planning

Happy teaching!