#primaryelf

3 songs to get the kids moving

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I have decided to write this post as a follow-up on the earlier post that I put together for novice teachers who are looking for inspiration for the soundtract to their VYL and YL lessons. I shared there my favourite hello and goodbye songs as well as my top five for the music and movement stage of the lesson. But that was almost four years ago and, of course, the playlist has grown longer and the time has come to share my new favourite songs that make us get up and move.

Why do we need these songs? Here are a few reasons:

  • the lessons are quite long
  • kids need some structured active fun to punctuate the lesson
  • and to balance the periods of the focus and hard word
  • these songs can also be the source of the language
  • they help to develop the gross motor skills, balance and focus
  • there is a huge multitude them, in different styles, genres and topics and these songs can be used to make the whole lesson consistent
  • they can be used as an additional support and a way of learning Maths, Science and literacy
  • they were written by adults who know kids and they have become real hits among my students

Danny Go!

Danny Go appeared all by himself. I went on holiday for a week and when I got back, he was already there, introduced by the subsitute teacher. I was not overly enthusiastic about it but the kids were and so we listened to my first Danny Go’s song Sharks in the Water! I suppose, if I were to describe it in one line, I’d say it is like a mini interactive computer game-like experience. The song tells the story (Danny is swimming to the island to get the treasure) and while he is doing that, he performs different movements which the kids had to repeat. Then, the sharks appear and you have to ‘jump out’ of the water. There is some vocabulary there but the biggest advantage of the song is that it is a perfect stirrer and it gives the kids an opportunity to develop focus, gross motor skills and coordination.

Danny has got many topical songs and in that he resembles Peppa Pig – there is an episode for every occasion (or almost) so I have been using this songs to accompany our songs on the topic of deserts, farm, jungle and what not. This is how we found out about such hits as ‘Pigs on the loose‘.

There is another type of songs that you can find on this channel and they are proper dance songs, for example ‘In the mood for food‘, with great movements and a bit more vocabulary input.

Jack Hartman

I have to be honest, Mr Hartman popped up ones or twice in my youtube searches but I did not find him appealing enough, visually, and I did not bother to click and to research. Until one day, when I was walking past by Miss Kate’s classroom and through the open door I saw the kids working out and counting, during the break time…Of course, I joined in! Jack Hartman was counting to 100, by ones and everyone was counting with him AND doing exercise, one type for every ten. I knew I had to introduce him to my year 1 kids.

Apart from different counting workout songs, there are also some alphabet songs, move and freeze songs and, the recently discovered series of ‘Multiply by…’, with a separate song for each table which help us practise and remember! And each of them in a different style so we are also getting educated musically, with rap, rock and roll, disco and reagge!

Dance Freeze!

The idea of all of the songs from the series is pretty simple: you have a few movements which you repeat until you hear the command ‘Freeze’. Your task is to repeat the movements, to listen and, when necessary, to freeze. It is a great and a very simple brain breaker because you get to jump, to dance like a robot, to dance in slow-mo, but because the original song has been so successful, new and new episodes have been added to practise sports, instruments, chores verbs and many more. The five basic songs lasted us a good few months and the channel ‘Scratch Garden’ has a lot more to offer. I am just going through their recordings…Like the ‘Stop Copying Me’ that I haven’t used yet and ‘The Sentence Song’ that will come in SO HANDY in our English lessons!

And, dear reader, here is the bonus! As you have noticed – these are not three songs but three wonderful channels that have a lot to offer! Let’s get moving!

Happy teaching!

Teaching emotions or Four stories to use in class with primary and pre-primary students

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This was a week of our winter (or dare I say spring?) camp classes or, in other words, a week of alternative timetable and alternative activities at the school. It lasted four days and combined two programmes, the emotions activities organised and prepared by our school psychologist and run by the national language programme teachers AND the English language programme prepared and run by me and my colleagues.

I decided to put it together here, as an example of how a curriculum can be composed without relying on the coursebook. Our programme lasted 4 days within the same week but it equals 4 mini-modules, of two lessons each and, theoretically at least, this could amount to a month’s worth of classes and each of these could be further extended to give children an opportunity for more practice.

It needs to stressed that, because of the context of my school, none of the kids are real beginners at the moment and they have seen and used all of the structures and vocabulary before. None of them had to be properly introduced from scratch, for all of us it was a revision and that it why were could squeeze it in two lessons only.

Just as an idea, just for inspiration.

The house for the frog

Step 1: I’m happy, I’m sad.

Vocabulary: all the emotions (the number will depend on the age and the progress of students), the phrase ‘I am happy’. We also revised the extended characters (fairy tale characters and our favourite animals) and used them to make phrases such as ‘The princess is happy’, something that we would need for all the storytelling. The main vocabulary focus for us was the ‘rooms in the house’. We introduced and practised the new vocabulary and I prepared the Magic Bag with items from different rooms in the house.

Songs: there are many songs that include emotions that can be used here, for example Hello song, Open Shut Them 2 or Feelings and Emotions Song.

Story: There are many stories that could be used here, some of them with a bit easier content but I decided to use one of my personal favourites, Rhinos Don’t Eat Pancakes by Anna Kemp which is also available on youtube. I adapted the story, simplifying it a bit and while I was doing it, I asked the kids to help me with describing the main characters’ emotions.

Follow-up: We had two lessons and two main craft activities. The first one was a house which I described a bit earlier here, the other one was creating a crazy animal from different body parts.

Evaluation: The kids really liked the story, Daisy and her purple rhino are always a hit. The house went great, too, as some kids chose to draw the entire kitchen and some just went for a basic symbol for each room in the house. I also had a whole bunch of frog stickers so the houses ended up with having at least one reptile inhabitant.

Step 2: I’m angry.

Vocabulary: The emotions and characters were a part of every lesson in these series, with teh list of characters growing longer. Apart from that, there is also a lot of potential for body parts to prepare the kids to describe all the wild things.

Songs: There are lots of body parts songs, including Head and Shoulders, but one of my favourite ones is ‘This is Me!‘

Story: I chose ‘Where the wild things are’ by Maurice Sendak also because apart from the book in our library, it is also available in the form of a youtube video.

Follow-up: For this day, I planned the music and emotions activity that I described earlier on this blog for the first lesson. In the second half of the day, after the storytelling session, the kids made their own crowns to become the Kings and Queens of the Wild Things and they played the game that I found here on the Famly Blog in which the kids would take turns to dictate the group what to do.

Evaluation: Making a crown is super easy as it only requires an A4 piece of paper cut into halves, lengthways which the kids decorate, cut out the spikes (optional) and glue together and it is amazing how much fun it can bring. Every time I made crowns in class, they were very popular among boys and among girls, too. I was especially happy that the crown would later become an accessory in our game (which, by the way, is a great bonding and team building activity as the kids can make the group perform a complex dance or just a simple gesture such as bending a finger).

Don’t you just love a circle. At the farm.

Step 3: I’m fantastic, I can do it!

Vocabulary: The vocabulary input here was imposed by the story that I really wanted to use in class and this is how farm animals made an appearance in our lesson. We focused on introducing the names and practising. We did the sound quiz together and we played a simple guessing game in pairs, with a set of mini-flashcards for each pair or team. The younger and lower level students played focusing only on guessing the name of the animal and the more advanced were making simple sentences or questions to find out what their partner is talking about.

Songs: I was planning on using Old MacDonald’s but I changed my mind during the lesson and replaced it with the Eddie song that goes with the story.

Story: I have been using this story in class for about 15 years now and out of everything that you can find in Playway to English series, Eddie, the king of the garden is my absolute favourite. It is quite simple, very easy to understand but with a very powerful message.

Follow-up: In this ‘module’ we had time for only craft and I decided to revisit one of my favourite craft activities, Don’t you just love a circle, this time farm-themed.

Evaluation: The activities went well but this day at camp helped me realise that every lesson should include a craft activity, something hands-on, something that we will make and take home. I was planning to include it, initially, but then decided to abandon the idea, in order to make room for riddles and the quiz. It went well but not as well as the other days when two creative (or two paper activities) were included.

Our book about being proud

Step 4: I’m proud.

Vocabulary: I wanted to based this lesson on different activities that kids can do and those that can fill them with pride. The list was adjusted to what I expected my students to know and included the following: Reasons to be proud.

Songs: In my plans I had ‘Little bird’ that we have known for some time as well as the related game ‘Can you? Show me!‘ but, in the end, we did not have time for that. It would have been a great extension and an opportunity for practice, though.

Story: Our story lesson was based on Pip, the would be guide dog and its adventures which we followed with a video from a real school for puppies.

Follow-up: In the first lesson we made a book about being proud, with each page dedicated to a different skill. We went page by page in the following manner: read the sentence a few times, give ourselves a mark, in connection with how strong we are in the area and draw a symbol to represent the activity. In the end we stapled the pages together into a book. I loved watching my kids while they were assessing their own skills. We used the traditional scale we know from school but it was OK to extend it and that is how some kids awarded themselves with 7+ or even 100 for some skills. It was a beautiful moment.

In the second activity, we prepared diplomas that were handed in at the end of the session because everyone is fantastic and deserves five stars.

Evaluation: This was, by far, my favourite lesson of the series. One reason for it was the fact that I managed to find both videos and to balance a cartoon with a documentary on the same subject. The second reason was the fact that the lessons gave us an opportunity to talk about what we can do, to evaluate our skills and to be proud. I did underestimate the kids’ ability to draw for their friends and the ‘decorate your friend’s diploma’ did not go that well. They turned out to be too young and I should have predicted that, skip that element and focus on preparing the diplomas and handing them out on the last day of the camp. My colleague did the same activities with another group and it was a success. I did overdo it a bit. Lesson learnt.

Happy teaching!

Ilya Mashkov and our first still-life. Teaching English through Art

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Still life ingredients

The language

February is our month of food and fruit and this is what we focus on in the language part of the lesson. With my younger group we listened to a great song from the Singing Walrus and we used a set of wordwall cards to guess the fruit and vegetables from the stencils. We did some drilling, too and we talked about whether we like them or not.

The older students needed a more advanced activity and for that I used my magic bag which, indeed, on the day was full of fruit and veg that I brought for the still-life installation. Kids put their hands into the bag and tried to describe the object they were holding using basic adjectives (big / small, hard / soft, smooth / rough, light / heavy). Despite the fact that some of the kids were as old as ten, they all did enjoy it. We also talked about the fruit and vegetables we like and don’t like.

Ilya Mashkov, Pumpkin (1914)

The artist

Our artist of the day was my still-life here, Ilya Mashkov. I have used his painting in my Art classes before and it was only natural that this time I would want to take it up to another level. I did and I am quite happy how it went.

First of all, we introduced the artist himself and his famous (in my opinion) painting ‘Pumpkin’. We defined what a still life is (‘a painting of things’) and we looked at a few chosen paintings by Mashkov. I put together a set of questions, inspired and adapted from the material online Essential Questions to ask about each still life photographs. My final, go-to set for this topic includes: What colour is it? What objects can you see? What shapes can you see? What is the biggest shape? What is the smallest shape? Is it light? Is it dark? Is it smooth? Is it light?, although in the lessons this week we have gone through only a few of them.

In order to prepare for our creative activity I prepared a special slide for ‘Pumpkin’ made entirely of shapes, one to represent every fruit and every vegetable. I was revealing them one by one and the task for the kids was to call out the object that they represent. In the end, I showed them the real painting and we checked our answers. I was a fun activity and it helped them the kids the basics of the composition of the painting and to prepare them for drawing.

The art

We started with putting together our installations and while I was the one responsible for arranging the items for the younger kids, my older group just took over the bag, the table and all the elements. And, it has to be said, not all the fruit made it to the table. Avocado and aubergine were not deemed worthy of our set. I accepted.

We outline the main stages of the lesson: 1. sketching with a pencil, 2. tracing the lines with crayons (one colour or a set of colours) and 3. colouring in with watercolours. I also showed my students the homework that I did before the lesson: a small still-life I painted at home and a photo of it, for comparison.

Since it was our first lesson with a still-life I did not want to invade too much and to direct the kids for example by guiding them in which order to draw the fruit. I wanted to let them try to face the task on their own and, also, to see what they can do. I was preparing my own copy and moving around, handing in the resources for each step (which also help with staging) and admiring what I was looking at. The only thing that I said to encourage them was something along the lines of ‘Don’t be scared, trust your hand. This is our first still-life. Let’s see how it goes’.

And guess what? It was beyond amazing. Some of my students are already very confident as regards drawing and they have a good eye for detail so I expected some good work but still they managed to surprise me, especially the little ones. They approached the task with curiosity, without fear and they were just working diligently on their paintings.

The only question left to answer is: What are we painting next?

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #76 Magic Bag!

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This year’s Magic Bag, Sargent-themed, courtesy of the Tate Gallery in London

Ingredients

  • a pretty bag, ideally cotton, or something that is not transparent. I am joking, of course, that it needs to be pretty, it doesn’t but it is true that it is better if it is appealing visually. I normally use one of my tote bags.
  • a set of interesting objects that are safe to touch that fit in.

Procedures

  • Students sit in a circle, on the chairs or on the carpet, with the teacher in the centre, at a small distance. The teacher revises the vocabulary in question.
  • I like to take out the bag and make a show of it – take it out of a cupboard or a box, show surprise, shake it perhaps if the content allows it, make a face and ask out loud ‘What’s in the bag?’ etc.
  • The teacher starts chanting, for example: ‘Anka’s got a secret, Anka’s got a secret!’ and this is a chant that we use for every student.
  • The teacher demonstrates how she puts the hand into a bag, finds one thing and tries to name it, for example: ‘It’s a lion‘ (topic: animals).
  • Afterwards, the object is taken out to check what it really is. The teacher asks ‘Is it a lion?’ and the kids answer. It can be also used as an opportunity for additional drilling of the key words.
  • The students take turns to play the game.
  • As a follow-up, the kids can do a simple listening activity and help clean up at the same time. The teachers says ‘Sasha, please put the lion in’ etc.

Why we like it?

  • The main reason is a very strong appeal of an activity that is involves motor skills, guessing, an element of mystery and fun. Kids love to put their hand it and try to recognise or to name the objects. It so happens that we use the same bag during the entire year so after the first time, the kids can recognise it and they look forward to it. This week I was walking in the school with my bag (that on that day was ‘just my bag’ and my kids walking past got excited and started to ask if this is what we would do in class on the day).
  • The other main reason is that this activity can be used with a wide range of objects and for a wide range of topics, from those more obvious ones such as school objects, toys or materials to some less obvious such as rooms in the house or comparatives. I have also used it for colours, in one of the first lessons of the course, although, of course, the children did not know many of the objects that we used and we focused only on sorting them out according to their colours.
  • There are plenty of variations of the activity and it can be repeated in a series of lessons. It has not happened yet, over all these years, that I would take out a bag and hear ‘Oh, no, not the Magic Bag again!’ from the audience.
  • As regards the chant, I like to use ‘Anka’s got a secret!’ or a simple question ‘Anka, what’s in the bag?’ which all the kids repeat and which is a great question to know.
  • As regards the procedures, the kids can simply take out one object or try to guess it in their L1, they can describe it with the adjectives that they have (for example pairs of adjectives such as big / small, heavy / light, smooth / rough, soft/ hard or the materials: it is made of plastic etc) for the class to guess. Recently, I have used it also to practise comparisons and every child had to take out two objects, to describe them and then to compare them when they were both out of the bag. If it is appropriate for the objects, the kids can also try to shake them in the bag to check what noise they make. Another option is of course the most tactile version of the game – kids touching the objects with both hands without taking the objects out, through the fabric.
  • The age range of the students can also vary. The youngest kids that I have used it with were 3 – 4 years old, the oldest were my teenagers and they also enjoyed it. The language that we expect the students to produce will depend on their level and age. When we played the game last week with my A1 primary year 1, they were able to produce a set of four sentences in one go because we used it in the final stages of the adjectives unit.
  • Naturally, the objects can be used to introduce the target langauge, to practise or to revise the language, verbally or in writing or even as an introduction to a listening or reading task.
  • As regards the less obvious topics for example verbs or rooms in the house, it is still possible if the objects are used as symbols. ‘A spoon’ can mean ‘to eat’ or ‘the kitchen’, a pair of socks (a new pair!) can symbolise ‘to wear’ or ‘the bedroom’, ‘a tub of toothpaste’ can stand for ‘to brush your teeth’ or ‘the bathroom’ and so on.
  • During the pandemic, I also used the Magic Bag in class, although in the online version the bag was much thinner and I was putting one object at a time and demonstrating it to the camera. I also used to make noises with them, without showing them to the camera i.e. dropping them on the table, squeezing them, tapping on them etc or, as the last hint, showing only a tiny little corner of the object to the camera. It also worked very well! And, in the online world, it was also possible for my students to take part and do the same with things that they had at home.
  • Last but not least, this is a unique opportunity for the teacher to take the most random selection of things to school such as pasta pieces in a bag, a soap, a salt shaker, a spoon, a pair of socks, a tube of toothpaste, seeds in a bag, some flour in a bag, shells, stones, tomatoes, cucumbers, soft toys, an electric torch, a small jar, a pair of earrings, a ribbon, cones…

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. Five months into the course

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Welcome to the second leg of the academic year! We can already start dreaming of spring and of the end of the year and, more importantly, January is over and we have returned, more or less successfully.

Please, don’t forget to check our September adventures in the following posts here, here, here and here and our progress in October, here.

Starting the lesson and How do you feel today?

As regards the start of the lesson, very little has changed since December. We still say hello, talk about how we are, about all the toys we have brought and how they feel. Then we sing a song and look at the plan for the lesson.

Songs

The hello song is gone, gone, gone. We have replaced it with a months song and last month it was January, January, to give us additional practice with the names of the months (especially that sometimes we have sung it together with our ‘old’ months song. We sang it every day, at the start of the first lesson and only sometimes did we replace it with our ‘old’ hello song but that is only because my kids loved (as in: LOVED) singing it in the ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ style singing ‘bye bye’ instead of every single ‘hello’.

Danny Go is still one of our heroes, mine, too and that is because apart from providing exciting brain breaks, Danny also sings about farms, pyramids, jungles and what not and that means we can always find a relevant Danny, to match our topic in Maths or English. All you need is Danny!

In January we did a lot as regards animals, adjectives, comparatives and superlatives and because of that our playlist included also the following: the Opposites Song which can be turned into a game, with the kids singing the other adjective in a pair of antonyms (especially that there is a little pause in the song, even if you decide not to pause the recording yourself which I only did the first two times), As quiet as a mouse which we have already started to personalise with out own verses and What do you like to do?. This last one, my personal favourite, was only introduced, to give the kids an idea of the concept and the structure of the song. We are going to work on it more in the weeks to come. There is a lot of potential there, for games, for personalisation and for fun.

Rules and classroom language

No major changes here. We still have the same rules, although they needed reinforcement and revision, we still get grades for behaviour and for work in every lesson and we still struggle with not wandering around the room for no reason. However, right now, more frequently than before, kids are getting involved in policing each other and reminding each other that ‘I don’t walk around’. I do that, too, although I am using a simple question: ‘Sasha, are you walking around?’ It works, every other time, basically.

Story

January was not a very long month but we managed to squeeze in a lovely book ‘Who’s for dinner?’ by Claire Freedman and Nick East about very clever farm animals and a (not very clever) fox, with a funny storyline and some bits of the text that my kids could actually read themselves. We also did Eric Carle’s ‘From Head To Toe’ which we read through and through, in a shared reading session and a story that we have in our book about a rattlesnake, a mouse and a clever coyote.

We have been also working on the Past Simple Tense (or the tiny elements of it) and this is how Mr Milk came back to be a part of the everyday life for me and how I introduced him to yet another bunch of kids. Now, at least once a week, sometimes more frequently, we tell stories of everything that Mr Milk does in his life. Or what his friends do, among them Miss Juice and Mr Banana.

Socialising

In terms of socialasing, we have done the following:

  • I am trying to use a range of the interaction patters in class: kids nominate each other, I nominate, too, for the balance, we have done some pairwork, some S vs the class activities (interviews, miming and guessing, shared reading), a lot of whole class (one of my groups especially needs to work on ‘when people speak, I listen’) and some 1-1, too.
  • keep a variety of alternative seating arrangements does wanders to the atmosphere and to the focus. In January we did the following: sitting on the carpet, sitting around the TV on the chairs, regrouping, standing or singing for the songs, sitting or standing in front of the group, leading the game. By the way, I started writing this January post with reading the previous month’s entry only to find out that I was very clever to take notes. Not only because of the blog but because of the everyday classroom life and my poor memory. It turns out that I have already forgotten about ‘sitting in two rows’ for pairwork and how much fun we had with it! I did not use it once in January and I so should have!
  • kids still take turns to help in the classroom although they have the official roles assigned by their Russian programme teacher and because of that, they did fight back a little bit. ‘Miss Anka, but why is Sasha handing out the markers? I am on duty today! I should be doing that!’ I decided not to take that into consideration at all. Mostly because I want to keep my classes independent and because that gives me more flexibility as I do not need to think of the rules introduced by another teacher in my lessons when it is not that relevant. Our class, our rules, routines and traditions.
  • our Christmas garlands and fairy lights are down and the classroom became bare and sad. We will be thinking of new ideas for February. Some kind of a hearts + boys’ things (the holiday coming up) + term break fun garland. I am thinking.
  • Maths for Life lessons with us cooperating and interacting with each other’s work.

Creativity

Our creative projects in January involved:

  • Personalising the songs. We started very slowly with simple ‘Hello song’ that my kids love to sing as a ‘Bye-bye song’ and we have already started coming up with new verses to add to ‘As quiet as a mouse’. There is more to come!
  • Mr Milk and his adventures which we make with a set of past tense verb cards, as a whole group. In the end of the story we decide if it was a good or a bad day for Mr Milk
  • We had another lesson with our invisible student, Petya with us helping him with his English homework. It is our tradition now to follow-up the error correction with a series of mini-role-plays when Petya’s mum (me!) calls the teacher (the kids) to find out how her son is doing. He is not doing great but thanks to him we are practising very simple phone conversations. And it is a lot of fun.
  • We started our Maths for Life series in which we are going to design our shops (posters), then go shopping and do some addition and subtraction to find out how much we have spent and how much change we’ve got back. We had only one round but there is a lot of potential so we are definitely going to repeat it.

Teacher

The biggest challenge for the month of January was the long break we were on, almost two weeks with the bell, the rules and the everyday routine. I was worried what kind of kids will be coming back to school and what to do in order to make sure that we can actually study and focus.

I saw the rules reminder poster on the social media and I decided to adapt it to our context. There are ten rules aka ten challenges and the areas to focus on. As soon as I decide that one of them is already back in life, we mark the challenge as complete. As soon as all ten are done, we are going to be celebrating. I am going to write about it in a separate post.

One of my favourite activies in January involved my Magic Bag full of the most random objects that I brought from home such as: a selection of fruit and veg, a bag of raw pasta, a bag of flour, a tube of toothpaste, a small jar, a stone, a shell, a squishy, you name it. We used it in many lessons: in Maths, to estimate quantity and to check the actual numbers and in English – to describe different objects and their qualities and to practise comparatives. It was a success not only because of its novelty value but because we could touch, shake and sometimes smell the objects and to describe them.

We also wrote our second Milestone tests, with a proper revision / mock test lesson and I am very happy with the results. The kids worked well, they took it seriously and with two exceptions, they did a great job. They were really sitting with their papers and going through the tasks.

I also tested all my kids according to the Cambridge speaking YLE exams in order to have a better idea of the group profile and in order to better track everyone’s progress as these are going to be repeated in March and in May. It was an interesting experience and, again, something that I should / will write about in more detail, one day.

Happy teaching!

Jackson Pollock. How to survive a modern art lesson with kids. Teaching English through Art

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The language

We continue to work on expressing our opinions and on justifying them. Since the Unusual Colours was a huge success with both groups, I decided to continue with a different set of visuals. We revised all the basic structures to express opinions, we looked at all the pictures in the set with the group and we said what we thought of them and why. As usual, it was great to see the growing confidence and the courage to express your preferences even if they are different from your friend’s or the group.

This time round I went more slowly, pausing after each picture, to share ideas. I was also trying to encourage the kids to produce a little bit more than just ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’, with questions such as ‘Why?’, ‘How does it make you feel about it?’, ‘What are you thinking about?’ etc.

The artist

Beginning October, my Art classes have been divided into two groups, the younger (pre-school and year 1) and the older (year 2 -4) and the decision to do so was a real game changer because I can adapt the level of the language and the Art input sessions to the age and the language level of the students. Each group has only one lesson a week but they are more meaningful, more focued and more child-friendly.

Because of the holidays and the calendar, the lesson with the older kids comes up first right now and it is also very important and handy. I can prepare for the more group with more advanced language skills, motor skills and with more life expience and do what I really want to do and then just adapt to what my younger kids are able to do. I really like it this way.

In our Jackson Pollock lesson, I introduced the artist of the day (name, country, favourite things) and the fact that he is, most likely, the most renowned modern artist today or, at least, the painter that most people associate with modern art.

Later on, we looked at five of his paintings, in different colours, with different titles, from ‘real’ names (‘Summer’) through ‘Number 5’, to the beautiful ‘Untitled’ and we talked about what we think about them and how they make us feel. In the end, we watched a clip from the video ‘How to paint like Jackson Pollock’ to show the students the real process. I also decided to include a short slot devoted to the main characteristics and I called it ‘What Jackson Pollock would tell us’.

The art

Well, this has to be the first thing to say out loud: Jackson Pollock is a serious logicstical challenge for an Art teacher. Especially if this Art teacher works with young kids and in a room that is a regular classroom which lends its square meters to all the creative activities and then goes back again to being ‘just a classroom’, used and shared with other students and teachers. To be prefectly honest, I am not sure I am entirely happy with how I dealt with it.

Things that need to be taken into consideration are as follows: the technique is a mess-generating one and it requires serious preparations. It is supposed to be done on the floor (which is refreshing and exciting) and the floor needs to be protected. So do the walls, the desks, the chairs and the kids’ clothes, because, surprise surprise, the paint spatter is a powerful force and you will find it in the most unexpected places.

The classroom was almost completely reorganised – the tables and the chairs were put aside, to make room on the floor. I perpared the working station for each of my students (an A3 piece of cardboard, on a much larger piece of newspaper, scotched to the floor) as well as the station with all the paints, brushes, water and tissues. Apart from that we had a semi-circle of chairs in front of the TV where we were to sit during the first, theoretical part of the lesson. We spent here around 20 minutes and later on, we moved to our work stations, to create.

The task was really simple – choose your favourite colours, think what idea you want to convey, take the water and the paints and start creating and experimenting with the technique. This part was great. The kids were trying out different hand movements, they were also observing each other and sharing ideas and opinions. The creativity was slow and a bit inhibited at the beginning but, as we moved on, the kids really got into it. Things were coming together. In the end, we talked about the possible titles for our paintings and how we felt during the entire process. This part was amazing. The paintings were left on shelves to dry overnight and some of my students came on the following day to pick up theirs and to take them home. They did enjoy and they did treasure their creations. Aims – met.

However, I have to admit – these preparations were not enough. The stations were too close to each other, the pieces protecting the floor were too small and, overall, the students’ clothes were not protected. We talked about being careful and respecting the other artists’ space, but I could have done better but mostly because I was lucky, with my older group of only seven students. I am to do the same lesson on Monday, with the younger group and I am working on adapting the ideas and the set-up or, also, entirely giving up on Jackson. I will also be adapting the number of resources used, giving up on the acrylic paints and the guache, because only the watercolours are relatively easy to wash and to clean.

The Pollock lesson – round two. Pre-K and year 1

There were a few things that I had to change for the lesson with the younger kids.

  • I took over a much bigger space on the floor, with the smaller pieces of cardboard (A4) on much bigger pieces of newspapers and with much bigger distance between them. I also marked the place on the floor where the kids were supposed to be sitting, to ensure that they are not facing each other but sitting back to back to minimise the paint spatter.
  • I also gave out the painting aprons that we apparently had at the school. However, I had my plan B – bin liners with holes for arms and head.
  • I was more selective as regards the types of paints, limiting them to watercolours only. Watercolours lend themselves to splashing and spattering, too if more water is added. Acrylic and guache paints are more thicker and more difficult to wash. What is more, a box of watercolours is a box of watercolours, with each child working on their own, at their station, without the need to get up, walk around and exchange jars with friends. Hence – fewer opportunities for stepping into splashes and dirty footprints around the room.
  • I am happy to say that it all worked very well!
  • Apart from that, I have to say that, somehow, my little students were somehow more open-minded and ready to dive into the modern art world. They were eager to discuss what they could see in the paintings I showed them and I really could not calm them down here. They wanted to talk and talk, although, because of their level of language, they could do it in English and in L1. They were also very eager to come up with titles for their own creations. These were really artistic discussions. I was really proud of them and some of these paintings are just precious!

Happy teaching!

Is it bigger? Is it smaller? Teaching comparatives to young learners

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A new series!

Welcome to the new series on the blog! Teaching grammar to young learners is one of my passions, especially that the students are getting younger and younger and / or the context is changing and you find yourself faced with a challenge of coming up with ideas to engage, to present and to practise with people who are still not really ready to deal with abstract terms and the target language goes beyond the easy-peasy bits of ‘is’ is for one cat and ‘are’ is for many (naturally accompanied by gestures and flashcards).

I have been interested in that area for some time already and I have written about before (please check the other emails in that category) but in the recent months, this has been especially present in my life. This year I am teaching in a school with a bilingual programme, and I am a teacher both of the BNC and of the ESL to a mixed ability group and on a random given Monday I may need to teach past simple or comparatives who students who are not the A1 level yet.

Hence this series. I will simply be sharing ideas that I have created or adapted for my students and, naturally, the activities that have worked well. Let’s get started. Comparatives first!

The context at hand

This year I am teaching two classes of year 1 (and of year 3 of the British National Curriculum) and I am responsible for their BNC year 3 curriculum as well as their ESL classes. Consequently, we have about one million different aims and the two most important among them are the following: developing the kids’ language skills and realising the aims of the BNC. My students are 6 and 7, they are in their year 1 of the state education. They language levels vary from pre-A1 to early A2. In case you are wondering regarding the aims, bilingual education to non-quite-so-bilingual kids is a different planet and I am only at the start of my journey but the main objective is that we are going to be closer to bilingual when we get to our year 4. It is all a process.

The most practical implication for me as a teacher is that we do not follow a linear curriculum, typical of foreign language learning and, that, for example comparatives and, subsequently, superlatives, is our target language in the fifth month of our year 1. As one of the examples. That, in turn, means that I am teaching my very young kids some advanced grammar points and I am trying to do it the best I can. I am hoping that some of these ideas will be useful to my fellow teachers out there.

Ideas for teaching and practising comparative forms

Presentation

  • My students already know a range of adjectives, because we have learnt lots of emotions, adjectives to describe characters and also adjectives to describe objects. My main aim of it was to give the kids a range of vocabulary which we can use in telling stories, retelling stories and describing pictures, all a part of my storytelling campaign. However, it was absolutely necessary to choose a very narrow range for the grammar presentation stage of the lesson and for me it was ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’, leaving behind, for now, the other short adjectives, the long adjectives, superlatives or the irregular adjectives. For now. As soon as we become familiar with one, we will move onto the other. For example, in one of the exercises, I decided to ‘smuggle’ longer and shorter, just to see how the kids react.
  • We revised all the adjectives and we had a short slot in which we described animals. I was showing some images and asking students ‘Is it big or small?’. All this time these two words were written on the board.
  • Afterwards, I stood right in front of the board and added, in a different colour, -er, to our words, changing them into ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ and then I uncovered it, faked surprise and asked ‘What happened here? What’s this?’ and I elicited the letters, asking the kids to read the new words. Afterwards, I demonstrated with these flashcards aiming at showing the difference between ‘big’ and ‘bigger’ and, naturally, ‘small’ and ‘smaller’ using a set of flashcards. It could go along the following lines: ‘Is the tiger big or small?’ ‘It’s big’. ‘Yes, it is. But, look, the elephant is BIGGER’. The same was done for small, with a mouse and a butterfly. I also used gestures to highlight the meaning. With these two adjectives, I tend to move my hand up, gradually for ‘bigger’ and move it closer to the floor or the table, gradually, for ‘smaller’. We repeated the same conversation about some other animals, trying to elicit the structure from the kids.
  • The next step was putting the key sentence on the board by adding flashcards to our words on the floor, creating a sentence made of visuals and words. The great advantage of this activity is the fact that you can adapt and create the sentences by replacing the flashcards and reading the sentences together. That, actually, will be the first controlled practice activity.

Practice

  • Bigger or smaller?, a guessing game: the teacher holds a pile of flashcards with animals, all the cards face de teacher takes out one card and shows it to the kids. Then the teacher asks ‘Bigger or smaller?’ and the kids make their decision, saying out loud ‘Bigger!’, ‘Smaller!’. Afterwards, the teacher takes out a card at random and the class check. Afterwards, the game continues with another card. The main aim of the game is to drill the key words in a simple way and to reinforce the idea. It can also be done with number flashcards or with school objects flashcards.
  • Who is bigger?, a simple movement activity in which the students compare themselves, in pairs, and the class decide who out of the two is bigger. The aim is to produce simple sentences, to personalise the target langauge and to involve the whole group, because, of course, only the students in the classroom are able to tell who, in fact, is different. It might be a good idea to think about the careful pairing of the students, choosing those who get on with each other or are friends to minimise the negative impact of ‘being smaller’. I also like to pair myself up with the kids and to highlight that they are going to grow bigger and bigger and bigger (one more chance to use the target language!). I have also ducked or sat on the floor, as a joke, so that the child could be bigger than me, at least for a moment.
  • Magic Bag, an object description game that we have already used in our classes. This time, however, the kids put their hands into the bag to describe the object they are holding but this time they do it twice. In the end, they have to objects they have to compare using ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ or any other adjectives at the later stages of this unit.
  • Who is bigger? Who is smaller?, a simple flashcard games whose main aim was to get the students to produce full sentences with bigger and smaller in a more active way. The game starts with the teacher taking out a card with an animal and letting each student take one, too and to keep it secret for now. The teacher reveals the card and says ‘I am a dog. I am small. Who is bigger? Who is smaller?’. The kids take turns, to reveal their animals and to produce the sentence. At the same time, they get up and take their place on the left of the teacher (if they are smaller) or on the right (if they are a bigger animal). In the end of the round, all the kids stand in line, at the board, lined up, from the smallest to the biggest animal. Since they take turns they can produce all the relevant sentences, i.e. ‘I am bigger than a dog. I am smaller than a tiger’ and so on. We play this game a few rounds. It might be necessary to give out one card per pair of students if the group is big.
  • Draw it!, a reading and drawing activity that I created to give the students a chance to reinforce the idea of the concept behind comparatives and to check understanding. The only thing that is necessary for this game is a piece of paper (or a notebook) and markers and crayons and a handout which you can find here. The paper is printed (only one copy) and cut up, all the cards end up in a bag or in a box. The kids take turns to take one of the cards, they read the sentence, a few times and everyone is drawing a relevant picture. The teacher monitors. The game can be later develop into a more SS-centred activity, as soon as the kids ready. In this adaptation, the key structure is written on the board: _____is bigger than_____ and _______is smaller than ______ and the kids themselves take turn to dicatate a sentence to draw.
  • What is bigger?, a reading and writing activity, also on a higher level in which I wanted to encourage a more creative and a more productive approach to the target language. You can find the handout here. This was the first more advanced activity which we did together, with a whole set of different adjectives at the same time. And the kids were ready! Everyone got their copy of the handout and they were supposed to trace the comparatives and then to create their own sentences with their own choices.
  • Wordwall activities were included in these lessons, too, to give us a chance to practice the target language. Here are some of those that I used: missing words (only bigger and smaller, I had to help read the sentences), let’s compare (either using only the basic bigger and smaller but also to give the kids a chance to use more complex structures, if they are ready, this btw is an activity that I found in the community resources on wordwall and adapted), and a simple set of cards to play ‘Bigger or smaller’ but on the screen.

All of that, on top of whatever you have in your coursebooks. The next steps will be: adding more of the short adjectives and then, eventually, the long adjectives, too. But, as they say, that is a story for another day…

Happy teaching!

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Vasilyi Kandinsky, colours and sounds. Teaching English through Art

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This time, the whole lesson planning process started with my decision to spend the whole month of January doing fun things with the colour and it was an absolute necessity to start with Vasilyi Kandinsky. This particular lesson did not follow the traditional routine and the painting that is usually the centre piece of the lesson, this time made only a cameo appearance that illustrated what our artist liked to create.

The language

We started in a very relaxed way and in the first lesson we talked about our favourite colours. We also learned some more advanced colours names through a wordwall quiz.

I wanted to get the kids to associate colours with emotions, feelings and music, just like Kandinsky did, and that is why our next stage involved watching a video with the unusual instruments and deciding how we would present each instrument and its sound with a colour. After each short clip, we paused the video and shared our views. Only then did I introduce the artist of the day.

With the youngest group we focused on the basic colours which we revised using two of my favourite songs: What’s your favourite colour? – with looking for colours around us and with My yellow car – with pausing and guessing what product is going to be bought.

Afterwards, to get the kids ready for the alternative approach to colours we looked at the set of cards which I prepared – the everyday and familiar objects in unusual colours. I asked the kids to look and to say what they think of the idea, using a simple ‘I like it / I don’t like it’. It was a lot of fun!

Kandinsky, Composition VIII

The artist

The reason for that was the fact that Vasilyi Kandinsky spent a large part of his creative life not only using colours but also trying to understand them (‘Effect of Colour’). After we shared our ideas about different pieces of music, we watched a clip of the video ‘What’s the Sound of Colour‘ to check whether we agree with his interpretation. Sometimes we did and sometimes we didn’t.

As a follow-up to that we looked at Kandinsky most famous creation, Composition VIII, but only to have something to represent him with. We did not analyse the painting apart from the title because the name went nicely with the idea of colours and music.

Our lesson with the little kids was so packed with activities that I had to skip the artist stage, in order to make sure that we had enough time for our creativity. Nonetheless, it all worked very well!

The art

I did not want to create anything in the style of Kandinsky not to steer away from the colour itself. For that reason I chose spread painting – it has the colour at its centre, it is not very challenging and it can be done with a variety of different paints.

Before the lesson, I prepared the paints (acrylic and gouache), the pieces of thick cardboard (photocopying paper box cut up into bits) and the paper. I used the thicker paper sheets used for watercolours to ensure that the paper holds up the amount of paint and water and I decided to go for the A3 size, to give the children more flexibility with the spreading movement and the feel of being real artists who work on bigger sheets.

In this kind of a lesson, it was absolutely necessary to demonstrate the technique and in order to do that, I put my paper on the floor, made a decision about the colours that I wanted to use, put a few blobs of different colours and then showed the students some basic movements to spread the paint on the paper (straight, wavy, circular, semi-circular). Apart from that, I also had a few pictures of my own, prepared before the lesson, with different movements, sets of colours and, in some cases, the additional drawings with a marker. These already had titles, too.

Afterwards, we just went on to create. The most important decision to make was the colour selection and we discussed that while I was walking around the room and monitoring. It was great to see how these decisions were made and how the kids were becoming more confident with the movement and the technique. In the gallery below you can what they produced and how their favourite things are reflected in their creations i.e. ‘the rabbit’ created by a fan of rabbits and Malevich or ‘the goose’ that features in many of our lessons because a goose is my student’s spirit animal. I am also extremely proud of the blue – mustard – silver creation which is the title photo because it was a first for one of my students who so far had been only sitting and participating in our debates. He finally felt curious and ready to get his hands dirty and with what result! I just love the combination of colours here.

Initially, I wanted everyone to name their paintings but then I gave up that. After all, this was our first approach at the abstract art and I just wanted them to enjoy the process without pushing them too much. Our paintings are now on display and we can always get back to them and give them their titles later on, when we are more comfortable with the non-figurative art.

It was a great lesson! Next week I am going to get to repeat it with my younger kids and then, there is the rest of January to celebrate colour!

Here are some of the pictures that my little students created! It was one joy of a lesson, with my students discovering the world of the modern art and the brand new technique, experimenting with it and being proud of their creations. Amazingly enough, they really took to looking for ideas in their paintings and trying to name them. This was just precious.

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. Four months into the course

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Here we are again, at the next important benchmark / stage / stepping stone in our primary course – the end of the four-month period (enough time to have built up some routine) and before the start of the new calendar year with the kids coming back from the winter break having forgotten everything they have learnt. Maybe to immortalise everything before I have to rebuild the world next week or maybe to help myself remember what it was that we did a week ago, here is the post. There was nothing at the end of November (I was on holiday) and December was unusual with many kids ill, many leaving for the holiday early and with our routine slightly interrupted with the rehersals for the Christmas show, here are my kids.

Please, don’t forget to check our September adventures in the following posts here, here, here and here and our progress in October, here.

Starting the lesson and How do you feel today?

Right now, we have developed a tradition of starting with a little chit-chat before moving on to everything else. In a way, it was kind of unavoidable – the kids wanted to share or to catch up with those who were ill and returned, they had questions ‘about everything’ because our school life was quite busy and adventurous (winter photo shoot, Christmas show rehearsals, the general news). I also noticed that it is also the time that the use to clean up the tables, to organise themselves and to switch from the break into a lesson and that is especially important if our classes are the first lesson of the day. Whenever possible, I try to start this stage even before the bell rings but I gave myself the permission to stop being stressed about it and to just take it in strides. This stage does not last more than five minutes, sometimes even less.

Afterwards we move on to asking ‘How do you feel today?’. We don’t have any new emotions but I am so happy that more and more kids started to answer with ‘because’. In December the kids would also bring their toys (and there were more toys because maybe the presents started to be given out early) and they really really wanted to include them in the hello circle. That is why we started to ask ‘How many new students today?’ and this is when they introduce their toys, they count them and they reply how they feel. Usually we manage to get away with one collective question – answer per student but even so this means twice as much production. And everyone wants to share, even those who did not bring any toys on the day so we had the following items introduced as toys and getting involved in the conversation: a pencil, a Christmas decoration, a cushion and a packet of Oreos.

The roll call is a part of this stage, sometimes I lead, sometimes the kids take turns to ask the questions and only after we are done with that, we move on to our hello song. Counting from 10 to 0 stopped being necessary at this point and I don’t use it, on most days. We go back to it only occassionally, when the kids are a bit more excited and louder. This helps them to calm down.

Songs

A lot of December was hijacked by everything Christmas-related and we listend to everything that Super Simple Songs have to offer as regards the festive season. We really liked S-A-N-T-A and C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S which are great because of the spelling and because the later is a perfect illustration of all the Christmas traditions. I loved it and so did my kids. However, the Absolute Hit for everyone (including our non-English staff) was the Snowflake. We used it as a song, as a calming device and as a track to dance to. Even of my ‘Super Cool’ and ‘Oh, I am much more serious that the rest of you’ kids adored it and to see them twirl to it and just enjoy it was beyond precious. Not to mention that thanks to What do you want for Christmas, now we have our ‘I want to’ and ‘I don’t want to’ clocked in forever in our set of functional language structures.

Dance and freeze got, temporarily perhaps, put on hold but there were two great replacements. First of all, we were counting and working out a lot with Jack Hartman and, while I was on holiday, the cover teacher introduced my kids do Danny Go. It is a great brain-break and it helps kids work on the gross motor skills and focus and we get a few random verbs as a bonus. I have to admit I am not a huge fan, especially when the floor is lava, but the kids just loved it. Of course.

It has to be noted that we no longer have a hello song, not as such. Right now, we just choose one of our favourite song and sing it, at the beginning of the lesson or at any point throughout. The kids are given the responsibility of making that decision. We take turns and I take notes who has already been involved.

Rules and classroom language

We haven’t really changed anything regarding the rules. We still need to revise them but at this point it is only once a week that we do it. I have also noticed that the kids became much better with their own time management, a combination of a better adaptation to the school routine and being more familiar with the digital clock. I don’t need to put the end of the lesson time on the board and I do it only occassionally. It is very rarely now that I get a question from the room ‘How much time left until the end?’ and when I do, I just answer it. Or someone else from the group does.

But there are two new additions to the everyday routine. The first one is a detailed lesson plan for each of the lessons. I put it on the board, on the top, usually a set of 6 or 7 points, outlining the main stages of the lesson. Some of them are the code names that everyone is familiar with (‘read’ = phonics exercises, ‘notebook’ = we write, or ‘suprise’ = there is something good coming our way), some of them are bascially there for me, to remind me the order of activities. The kids read them all, that’s for sure and sometimes they ask questions or suggest more stages, such as another surprise or their favourite song. They have also started to ask for the permission to help me write that and that is another precious thing because it means more writing! They are also very eager to help me erase the bits once we are done with them. You can read more about this kind of a lesson plan here.

The other element, grades for each lesson, was introduced because of the serious issues of behaviour that I encountered after my holiday break. I was away for only seven working days and l left detailed instructions for the cover teacher to ensure that the gap between her lessons and mine were as small as possible, but, still, it did not work and after I came back I found my kids very much in their September mode aka ‘all over the place’. For that reason, I make a list in my notebook and I give everyone a grade at the end of every lesson, or, to be precise, two grades: one for behaviour and one for hard work and at the end of the lesson, or during the break, I announce who got what. It also works as a reminder during the lesson and so far, it has had a positive impact on the group. Their behaviour and hard work is clearly reflected in numbers and it helps them as a reference point. I found it to be more effective than my regular rewards charts because it does not take a whole board (13 kids!) and it is contained within a lesson. I am also hoping that, sooner or later, I will be able to phase it out but for now and, especially, right after the break, it is coming in very handy.

Story

Stories continue to be very much present in our classroom lives. There is a lot that we have in our books and I especially liked the series of stories on memories (Global English 3) because it gave us a chance to talk about feelings, to personalise these stories and to introduce very small bits of the past tense.

Apart from that we also did our first story writing (you can read about it here) and we read Zog (and this post here, is partly dedicated to what happened in that lesson and also to the story follow-up activities).

Socialising

In terms of socialasing, we have done the following:

  • kids have been nominating themselves ‘Who’s next?’ although, because of the behaviour issues I mentioned before, I had to mix it with a more T-centred approach.
  • we have been doing a lot of alternative seating arrangements such as: sitting on the carpet (for the phonics games and pelmanism), sitting around the carpet on the chairs (for all the city + prepositions games), sitting in two rows facing each other for pairwork, working in pairs with changing partners
  • kids have been taking turns to give out and to collect materials and to make decisions about the lesson (songs and games)
  • working together as a class to win snoflakes in the whole school advent calendar winter activities
  • we have done a few projects in which the kids were working individually but sharing the resources such as the cards (on the board) or the stickers, learning how to take turns, how to share, how to wait. I was really proud of the children because it all went well.
  • we have had a lot of activities in which one student was leading the game, especially our riddles
  • as a whole class we created Christmas gardlands to decorate our classrooms and it was a perfect bonding project

Creativity

Our creative projects in December were all Christmas-related

  • used the theme in our Serious Maths Classes, with Christmas Maths Stories, Christmas Puzzles and colouring pictures, Help the Reindeer
  • we created our posters about our favourite characters, the day when we were proud. We also created our Reindeer Hats in the final lessons of the year.
  • we played a lot with songs, creating our own versions and we had a blast for a few lessons playing pelmanism and creating wrong sentences (‘Paul washes the dragon’ instead of ‘Paul washes the car’) which finished with a mini-project of our TV programme ‘Crazy Sentences’ in which we made a video of kids reading their creations. That was fun and I am planning to do it again after the break.
  • and the garlands mentioned above

Teacher

Well, these were busy two months and sometimes very tiring because of the behaviour issues but we are working on everything, we are improving and we are learning.

It is good to know that I am sowing a lot but I can reap a lot, too. We have crossed one super important bridge in Maths with all the regrouping activities, as regards addition and subtraction. It was not the smoothest of rides and I think even my strongest Maths kids are not entirely excited about subtraction but we are making progress and I have to admit, I love it when I hear ‘I get it now!’ and they just move on with it.

Our English classes are more and more English now and I can see how they are making progress and become more and more communicative. We decided to test everyone regarding their English level, using the Cambridge exams framework and we are half-way through with it and it will be great to track the kids’ progress over the year. This, in itself, has been a very interesting exercise for me and I will definitely write about it after I have reflected on everything properly.

We prepared a great dance for the Christmas show and this was an interesting experience for me, too.

And, last but not least, we have completed our first big notebook as in: we filled it up with handouts, notes and drawings up to the last page and we could finally take it home. I loved it watching kids look through the pages, reminisicing on everything we had done already and how much we had learnt. Afterwards, we closed them, said ‘Thank you, Notebook’ for helping us learn and we took them home. Naturally, we have already started the new ones, too.

Another thing that did happen over those last two months, also in the category of ‘last but not least’, after two months of studying only with notebooks and handouts, at the begining of November, we introduced the coursebook for English, Maths, Science and History and now they are a part of our everyday school life. We are much more serious students now. Hooray.

Kids after the break aka what happens next

January will be messy. Some students have missed a week of school, many have missed two weeks, some even more. I bet you everyone has forgotten what the classroom is about. Preparing for the first day and the first week will be quite something, as regards the subject and as regards the classroom management. Good luck to me and see you in a while. I will be back with an update.

Happy teaching!

Storytelling for primary. Ideas for the follow-up activities.

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The way that only the freezing winter sunsets can be

Storytelling and storybooks in the primary classroom

Welcome to one more of my obsessions: the story in the classroom, be it a story from the coursebook, a video, a storybook or even a thing that I invent myself, just to sell my ‘product‘. A story is not only the type of an activity that we introduce because of its many benefits or because we want to prepare our students for the YL Cambridge exams but also because the story can be a way and the means of developing the young children’s language skills, reading and writing, speaking and listening but also their grammar and vocabulary.

I have been using stories for ages and I am not exaggerating when I say that this is one of my favourite teaching tools and different storybooks characters, Marvin, Barry, Pete the Cat or Splat the Cat or Peppa, are like my best mates.

‘What’s new?‘, one could ask.

In this academic year (four months so far), I have been involved in teaching the British National Curriculum, KS 3 to my two wonderful groups who are an amazing but mixed bunch, especially when it comes to their actual English skills. One of my main aims is developing my students reading and writing skills, preferably fast (yes, yes, I know, nothing happens fast) while working with a very mixed ability group, ranging from complete beginners to A1+ children. Stories have been one of the many ways of doing and I decided to share a few examples of what we have done, hoping that they can serve as a source of inspiration, for all kinds of classes, EFL or ESL.

The general idea

The way these five stories were used in the primary classroom follow the same pattern

  • pre-book: looking at the cover of the book, reading the title, introducing the main character, asking some questions about it, trying to predict the story, introducing and practising the key vocabulary.
  • while-book: reading / watching the story, sometimes with pauses to check understanding, sometimes to involve the kids through gestures, sometimes through the phrases, if they are used repeatedly.
  • post-book: a variety of activities related to the content of the story or to the grammar or vocabulary of the week in which the story was introduced.

And this is when the post starts to make more sense, I hope, because I am going to share here five different stories and five story-related, follow-up activities that I used in the last few months.

Hen’s pens and Let’s practise vocabulary!

Hen’s pens is a story, one in the series published by Usborne, a lovely resource with the Ted in a red bed, Fat Cat on a mat and Big Pig on a dig. I usually use them a bit later, with slightly more advanced students, in shared reading sessions (and there probably should be a post about that) but this time, I wanted to introduce a longer story, a video story and a rhyming story, specifically to have kids practise noticing rhymes.

In the follow-up of the story, we completed a very simple reading task, in which we put the words into pairs by colour-coding them and then using the chart to practise reading. You will have also notice a colouring page in the handout. This was an additional task for the kids, only for those who like colouring.

Pete the Cat and Let’s speak!

Pete the Cat is very famous in the EFL circles and the story about rocking in the school shoes is an absolute hit. This is my personal way of teaching Present Continuous ever since I have seen the video for the first time and this year, not quite for the first time, I used it also to introduce the school vocabulary, verbs and places.

In our lesson, apart from watching, singing, miming and even re-enacting Pete’s day at school, we also followed up with a speaking activity in which the kids had to create their own sentences in the Present Continuous. They had the main verb forms, mostly taken from the story, accompanied by visuals to support speaking (in most cases, the kids were unable to read yet) and their task was to finish the sentence by drawing something. ‘I am eating…a pizza, an apple, a cookie, a banana’, according to their preferences. Later on we compared our sentences, creating our own day at school. The handout served as preparation for speaking.

Again, those children who were interested, were given a second handout to colour.

Marvin Gets Mad and Let’s practise grammar!

Marvin is, no doubt, one of my favourite characters and he’s been present in my classroom for about fifteen years now (wow!). ‘Marvin Gets Mad’ by Joseph Theobald is a great story for feelings and for learning about controlling emotions but this time round I decided to use it to reinforce the grammar behind the Present Continuous.

In the follow-up task, which was quite a stretch from the plot of the original story but it was exactly what we needed to practise the Present Continuous and to reinforce the idea of the suffix -ing. The kids had to add the suffix to all the sentences and then read them and match them to the pictures of a particular sheep.

Zog and Let’s take some notes!

Zog by Julia Donaldson was a good lesson, too. We focused on revising the body parts but we also did a lot as regards the language practice, as regards the structures we already learnt (‘I can…fly, catch a princess, breathe fire) and a few structures that were used repeatedly in the story (‘What’s the matter?’ ‘I can help you’ ‘Thank you’). While we were going through the story, the children helped me produce all the key language.

After we were done with the story itself, we ‘took notes’ about the story. All the kids got their copy of the handout and we went on through it: tracing the lines, reading the lines and completing them with our ideas. As usual, some of the lines are actually very restricted (‘Zog is a dragon’), some are more open-ended (‘He can…fly, breathe fire, catch a princess, help’), the others – even more. (‘He is…green, big, small, happy, sad, scared’). The final two lines are for tracing and for circling, depending on whether you liked the story or not. This time I included a small picture of Zog for everyone and some kids took time to colour it after they were done with writing.

Ling and her proud memory and Let’s draw!

Ling is a girl from one of the stories in our coursebook, Global English 3, in a series on memories (a sad memory, a happy memory and a proud memory) and I actually loved teaching all three. The story was quite challenging for my kids in terms of the language and I just wanted a general understanding of the main facts. After we talked about the picture and listened to the story, I did a short Yes / No activity regarding the content. This was followed by a note-taking activity, similar to the one we did with Zog, but it was substantially shorter and more limited in terms of creativity. However, this was only because the real star of the lesson was the drawing activity.

The word ‘proud’ was a new concept to us and I really wanted to make it personal, mostly because it has a huge potential and it is a good word to have at your disposal in the classroom. With the help of my T.A. we explained what it means, we gave examples and suggested some ideas for the kids, based on our shared experiences such as preparing for the Christmas show, doing difficult exercises in class and so on. I showed my students my example (below) and I let them draw.

Admittedly, the lesson (or this project) did not involve a huge lot of language production but it was a beautiful moment, nonetheless. And a very necessary one, too! Some children knew straight away what they were proud of, some others needed to take time to come up with an idea. And they did! Even those who started their search with a desperate ‘I don’t know!’.

My example is below and showing it to my class was another special moment and, guess what, they got the idea straight away! Because when we are doing something very, very difficult in Maths and my students keep raising their hands and everyone wants to give the answer, I am very proud (based on real events:-).

Coda

These are just a few ideas of what can be done in class when a story is involved. One of many ideas!

Happy teaching!