#primaryelf

Just a little bit of Art (in your English classroom)…Erik Bulatov once more!

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This time, I did not teach my regular Art lesson. Last Thursday, in the middle of a regular unit but at the end of the term, with all my kids already tired and looking forward to holidays and with the first properly spring days outside of our windows, I decided to let our hair down and engage into some creative activity as part of our regular English lesson. Yay to great ideas!

The language

This time round Erik Bulatov joined us in our regular English lessons. At the moment, we are in a fanstastic unit ‘Going places’ (Global English, CUP) and we have already revised the transport, learnt some less traditional transport, we did our Big Transport Tournament (choosing the best one, in qualifiers, quarter-, semi- and finals which was basically a lot of speaking) and now we are comparing the transport (‘Are they similar or different?’). We have also worked on the verb ‘to get’ and all its meanings (aka ‘The best verb in the world’).

And then I needed something lighter, more fun and more creative for the last lesson of the term.

The artist

I taught this lesson before, twice, in different ways (the previous posts can be found here and here). I reused the presentation I prepared before even though some of the students have taken part in my Art Explorers lessons already and it worked well.

We talked a little bit about the meaning of words and the meaning of pictures and I introduced the Artist of the Day. We looked at his paintings and the meaning and how Bulatov tried to show his ideas through words and through images.

I have also showed the kids again the images in Portuguese I created for the previous lesson (in the posts mentioned before).

The art

I showed the students the template I prepared, just a simple word TRAVEL in block capital letters and together we brainstormed their own associations with the word. Afterwards, I explained that their task will be to illustrate the word in such a way so as to show the word speak: as a word and as a visual. And that all ideas are good ideas. I gave out the pencils and the markers and they got to work. They were working and I was just supervising and helping with the content as we had to do some research to look for images or for information.

Afterwards we had a short presentation for everyone to see all the ideas (‘This is my poster. I’ve got…because…and…’) and when all of them were done, we also had a feedback session. I wanted to praise everyone together, as a group, apart from all of those individual praises I gave while monitoring and I also wanted to highlight that we had lots and lots of different ideas and that they were all precious. One of the students suggested choosing the best poster but I objected. I explained that all of the posters were great and so different that it is impossible to choose one, the best, they are all great.

Apart from that I also wanted to ask the students for their feedback and whether it was easy or difficult to use the words and images in such a way. This was also a precious part of the lesson.

It is also important to mention that this lesson, untraditionally, was longer as it took more than 1 academic hour that we normally spend on Art in our Art Explorers. I could do it because we had a double English on that day and it was absolutely necessary as only a few of my students are the regular creators and I did notice that these did have a different time management mode and ideas generation mode. The others needed more time to make decisions, to generate ideas and to execute them. Which is something to bear in mind. If it hadn’t been the last day before the term break, we would have created in one lesson and carried out the presentation + feedback on the following day.

The teacher watches and ponders…

Oh, this was one wonderful lesson!

I was really really curious how my regular class would react to the Art content as out of all the students only three or four attend the Art Explorers regularly, all the other ones do not have the chance to stay for the afterschool classes and only some of them attend our term break classes when these take place.

But it went well…I mean, it is a good lesson and, for me as a teacher, it has been tried and tested so I was confident and I knew that great things might come out of it. But the kids took well to it. They were curious about the artist and his paintings, especially that they were in Russian and they were interested and invested in answering the questions I asked.

The brainstorming session, something that we rarely do in the Art Explorers, also helped because it helped the (potentially) less creative students generate ideas or, at least, to see that there is a range of interpretations to choose from. To be honest, some of the kids really surprised me with their ideas and their interpretations as they were fresh and spot-on.

The presentation was a great idea, and again, something we rarely do, because only in our classes we have more time and a relatively even levels of English for everyone to produce and to understand but it was also worth it. I need to think of how to smuggle elements of it into our Art Explorers classes.

My favourite part, however, apart from the creation, was the feedback and all of the comments the kids made. The general consensus was that sometimes it was easy and sometimes it was not to come up with the ideas and to deal with their execution. I really loved the fact that there was such a variety of the interpretations and they the kids had a chance to see everyone else’s angle, too, further broadening their horizons. Some of my favourite ones were the following: travel represented by the sights from around the world, travel represented by things that we need to travel, travel represented by the flags of the countries that the artist likes, travel represented by the flags of the countries that start with the letters t, r, a, v, e and l, travel represented by the travel associations that look like the letters of the word or, even, travel represented by the potential problems which you might encounter while travelling…

The most beautiful line and the one that I will finish this post with was a question from one of my students, one of those cool one, the older ones, the ones who do not attend the regular art classes. It went like that:

‘Are we going to do it again?’

Happy teaching!

A dice story that wasn’t…Crumbs #80 One more way to write a story

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Ingredients

  • the idea this time was taken from Global English 4, with the unit 5 whole focused on storytelling. There is an activity there with a framework to write a story: you roll the dice and choose one of the options for the time of the story, the setting, the characters and the dilemma. This grid gave me the idea for our lesson and it helped me shape the preparation stage to our writing. It can easily be replaced with a much easier vocabulary set, adapted to the level of the students. And a few die.
  • a template
  • my own story to be used as an example

Procedures

  • We started the lesson in our usual way, with hellos, our hello song and an exercise to practise past tense, our main grammar thing this month.
  • We revised the main parts of a story that we would use mentioned above and the dialogue and why we have it in the story (to help us express emotions in a story better)
  • I showed the kids the template written on the board and I read the story I wrote before the lesson using the dice and the framework from the book
  • We put together a few stories, using the same framework, and a variety of set-ups: everyone rolling and contributing one element at a time, everyone contributing an element each, in turns (i.e. 9 different days, 9 different locations etc), each child contributing their own element, without the support of the book etc.
  • Afterwards, we started to work on our own stories. I kept the coursebooks open for the kids to have some sources of support and ideas but even before I managed to finish giving the instructions, some of my kids were asking ‘Can we use our ideas, please?’
  • Everyone had a handout (see above) and we were going step by step, with me modelling and creating my second story on the board and making sure that everyone was on the ball as we went along.
  • In the end, we added the title and signed the story.
  • When the stories were ready, we had a reading session and all of them were read out loud. With one of my groups, I had to suggest three options: a) the story is read by the child, b) the story is read by the teacher, c) the story is read by the teacher only (for the sake of my shiest student). I introduced all the stories and we had a round of applause at the end, for everyone.
  • We haven’t done it yet but I want to type up and print all of the stories for the following issue of our school journal so next week I am going to ask each student to write a short description of the illustration they want the A.I. to create for their story.

Why we like it

  • The dice story was a perfect introduction to the lesson and an ideal idea-generator. I decided to use the coursebook as it is, in order to expose the students to the real un-graded language.
  • It was an easy thing to write (it was short) but it had enough for funny and entertaining stories which my kids’ work proved.
  • By adding two lines of dialogue to the framework in the coursebook, it became even easier and more fun to write and to read.
  • Initially, I planned it as a one-lesson event but seeing how much they benefited from extended practice and preparation, I extended it into two 45-minute classes.
  • All of the kids got really into writing their stories. One of my students literally dragged me into the classroom, from the break, as, in his opinion, I wasn’t walking fast enough and he wanted to start work as soon as possible.
  • All of the stories that were written are great and I am really proud of my students, but there are four or five that are really way above the average, with the funny dialogue and an unexpected ending, a really good piece of work!
  • I am planning to use the dice framework to prepare a similar but simpler sets for the everyday use, for us to tell little stories in the beginning of every lesson while we are still practising the past tense. I am hoping that now the kids will be able to tell these stories in pairs.

Happy teaching!

Spring in year 2 classroom management. Setting up the routine. A series.

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First a few words of introduction…

It has been quite a while since I wrote in the series (the first episode is here, the most recent here). I was travelling in the beginning of March and I couldn’t write and later I just didn’t feel like putting together a piece, just because the schedule said so. I didn’t, I decided to be nice to myself. However, it also made me think that maybe the time has come to change things here a tiny little bit. Even in January and December, half of the post went along the lines of ‘no changes’ and I realised that we (the class) have changed so much that new solutions have to be put into use.

I will still keep notes here, because some of the things we use might be useful for other teachers and I still need this series as a way of reflecting on my teaching and their learning and progress but I will not be on monthly basis.

The routine et al.

All the new tricks I have added and how they work for us:

  • the nicknames we still use although the question I ask now is ‘Am I writing your name or your nickname?’, just to give the students some freedom and flexibility. Those that feel creative on the day can express themselves (and some do a lot of that, our current record is 8 lines of a nickname) and some just use their names, sometimes written in a different colour or with a heart. The other kids are always curious to see who is choosing what each day and sometimes they add detail, help with translation or correct me when I, accidentally, use the wrong nickname or when I use the name instead of the nickname. Which, really, just shows that they are listening and paying attention. And that’s all I want. Plus, it is definitely something that we do together, a feature of our community. When someone comes late to class or when we exchange groups and Class A comes after Class B, they try to guess who chose what as their name.
  • the improvisation song is still with us (and it has been now a year and three months). Sometimes we sing once, sometimes more than once and I love the kids continue to use it to express themselves in English, to talk about emotions, to experiment with different ways of singing certain words and how we started to use it as call – response song whenever there is a question or whenever they just feel like reacting in their own ways (instead of just repeating the verse). More creativity? Yes, please!
  • give your teacher a grade: admittedly, it is not something I do every week but I try to included it once in a while, more or less twice a month. I am trying to use different techniques like leaving notes and grades on the board or preparing cards with specific questions (Was it difficult? Was it interesting? etc).
  • the grades for the week: I still write notes to summarise the performance of the students over the week only now we have a few more categories, although these vary depending on the week. This week, for example, we had: English, Maths, Behaviour, Notebook (we are working on handwriting and neat notes) and Accuracy (a specific task we did in Maths). The kids usually get to see them on Monday and they are still really curious about them. And they care. Sometimes they want to tell everyone what they got, sometimes they check with me or ask additional questions, they always read.
  • new rules were added, too, based on what we have been going through, emotions and lessons, basically the things that seemed like something that we might use in the future. These include ‘Get it together’ (a nice call to action from a song), ‘My feelings are the message from my brain’ (also from a song) and ‘Wait’ (just because we need it, still and desperately, too!).

Story, Socialising and Creativity

All our English classes have been about stories as the whole unit in our book has been devoted to adventures, superheroes, stories, adjectives to describe heroes and we used that opportunity!

We have already finished but we managed to: introduce and properly practise Past Simple, lots of regular and irregular verbs and questions, talk about our yesterdays, we watched and talked about some clips from ‘How to Tame Your Dragon?, we talked about types of stories and why we have narrative and dialogue, we wrote and talked about our favourite stories, we wrote a short story and we read ‘Splat the Cat. The Name of the Game’ because it seems to be a perfect story for us and all the problems we still deal with while playing.

Our story lesson was particularly memorable because we created a few beautiful pieces, we had a reading session in two language, we praised everyone and I want to type up all the stories and turn them into another issue of our school magazine. I will only have to ask the kids to describe what kind of an illustration they would like to have with their story. We will only have to write some description for the kind A.I. to create them. Next week.

We haven’t done any other creative tasks, not properly, but I noticed that kids expressed a lot of interest in the creations that always dry on the window sill after my Art Explorers and I think it might be a sign that I need to think of something like that.

The teacher

I have been a tired teacher in February. I was busy with all the other project (term break camp, conference and the real life errands) but I have had quite a few good moments like realizing that we have really made progress regarding reading and writing and that we have actually learnt how to understand and use fractions and decimals.

The classroom management and bringing up the kids never stops (never never never) but we have made a lot of progress and I know we are going to be fine. It is great to know that while some of my kids keep repeating ‘I don’t like school’ or ‘I want to go home’, they also add, to each other, mostly, ‘I like English, though’ and ‘I really like Maths in English’ so there is some comfort in it, too.

Things to do in March / April

  • another story
  • going back to the more advanced phonics
  • preparation for the YLE Cambridge
  • more pairwork and speaking
  • our garden

Happy teaching!

Movement March! Nature (aka Turner and waves!!!)

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The language

This week was simply a repeat of the previous week’s class, with the only variation being some new sentences in our game (‘What are you doing?’) and a new set of pictures for the presentation and this time we used the famous paintings. This stage of the lesson was relatively short but that is because the artist would make a proper entrance.

The same artist. Twice.

The artist

The guest and the Artist of the Day was J.M.W. Turner who visited in the past. I decided to bring him back because he felt perfect as a representation of movement through a very simple medium of the sea and the clouds.

Normally, the stage in which I show the kids my model happens a bit later in the lesson, just before we start creating. In this particular lesson, however, I changed the order and before revealing who the artist was I presented my two paintings: the seascape painted practically with one colour and almost with no lines and the other one with plenty of colours and plenty of lines. This was to demonstrate the difference and to encourage my students to use these two basic tools later on in the lesson. I also asked the kids which one they liked more. (Unsurprisingly, the second one, for the majority of students but there were some who liked the peace and quiet of the first one, too!)

Afterwards, we looked at some of the paintings created by Turner and how he tried to depict the movement in them. It happened almost naturally that they started to express their opinion (‘It is beautiful’, ‘It is scary’, etc).

You can find the presentation we used here.

Here you can find a very interesting article about the movement in art.

Here is a whale jumping out of the water…

The art

Last week we worked with watercolours and the task was ridiculously simple: draw the sun, the sky and the water (just like Turner did!) and try to show the movement using the colours and the lines.

This was a day of surprises in the classroom and here is the list of the things that surprised me most:

  • how easy it is to create a beautiful seascape, even for the artists who are only five or six or eight
  • how touching are all the images the children created
  • how involved all of my students got into the task despite the fact that we are a mix bunch and there are some who love art and creating and those who don’t really do it very frequently
  • how they approached the task and how they adapted it to their own needs and perspectives, by adding human figures or animals or boats to accentuate the movement, by changing the setting and visualising movement in nature in the mountains or in the fields and how proud they were of their works
  • how easy it was for them to experiment with the colours, the lines and the settings
  • how un-coincidental all the decisions were. And I know it because I could hear what they were talking about while they were working.
  • how they enjoyed the task
  • how the youngest artist painted a very calm and uneventful sea but then decided to experiment with the materials and his sky was, in fact, created with the wheels of the toy car, resulting in thin black clouds
  • and how the other young artist, almost as young, but attending our classes since September, has shown a lot more maturity and understanding of the task (though I love both pictures!)
  • how two of them decided to change the settings and go for the mountains instead
  • how one of my older students found a new passion for colour and for experimenting with mixing different shades and colours
  • how one of my most talented just went for a huge, uncontrollable cloud, a hurricane almost
  • how this most precious picture was created by one of my students, two days after the lesson, just because we have found the van Gogh background in the stack of the recycled paper. How the real artist saw the movement in the clouds and how the transformed the sky into the sea because the idea lingered…
The mountains, just before the movement
The mountains
The cat under the sky
The sea and the sky
Art at 6
Colours, colours, colours!
A magnificent storm!

Happy teaching!

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!