#settinguptheroutine

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!

Setting up the routine. Two months into the course

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Starting the lesson

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

How do you feel today?

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

Songs

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

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

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

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

Rules and classroom language

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

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

Rewards chart and Time

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

Story

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

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

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

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

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

Socialising

In terms of socialasing, we have done the following:

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

Creativity

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

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

Teacher

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

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

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

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

Happy teaching!

Setting up the routine. A diary, week 4

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This is my September and New Groups Diary. Here you can find the previous episodes: week 1, week 2, week 3.

Starting the lesson…

…stays as before, no changes.

How do you feel today?

We continue to do our little chain reaction of the question – answer, from student to student and, on top of all the phrases, a few new lines appeared, too. First of all, someone suggested ‘I am everything’, which is an interesting albeit unconventional approach, and some kids picked up on it. I will have to come up with a flashard for that.

The other thing that happened, in one of the group, was a flurry of ideas to add to our set. One of the students asked for a piece of paper before the lesson, to create a card, some others got inspired and they ended up producing four or even five during the breaks. Apparently, what we needed (and I did not know!) is:

  • I am feeling sick.
  • I was sick.
  • I want to stay home.
  • I want to go to school.
  • I am bad.
  • I don’t know how I feel.

These cards are already ready, pretty and colourful. I just need to laminate them on Monday.

Songs

This week we have only added one song to our playlist, Let’s go to the zoo! and that is because, imagine that, on Wednesday we were going to the zoo, on a school trip. Accidental though it was, it made me realise that, actually, we are in a desperate need of some ‘we want to move’ songs, for some brain breaks for the lessons themselves or the in-between the lesson time. I am planning to introduce either Move or The Dance Freeze Song next week. They are going to love these and it is about time we learnt a few new verbs.

Actually, there is a lot of verb-related material this week as we also did Milo’s I like you in our English classes and our story was also verb-related as it was ‘Don’t eat the teacher‘ (see below for details).

Rules and Classroom Language…

…has stayed the same as before. We haven’t been in need of any new rules. The kids have improved overall and they know all the rules and they help me revise them in a more efficient way right now. So far I have been giving them the first half of the sentence, together with the gesture (‘I have…’) for the kids to add the key word (‘a question’). Right now, they know all of them and can recreate them when I demonstrate the gesture. On Thursday, I also happened to forget one of the rules and one kind soul reminded me (and us) about it, too.

Rewards chart and Time..

…have seen no changes whatsoever. We are just using what we have introduced.

Story

This week is a week of verbs (see above) and since we have reached the end of the first full week of classes, I have decided to introduce a school story, one of my favourites is ‘Don’t eat the teacher’ by Nick Ward.

We have:

  • done the vocabulary
  • introduced the main character, Sammy, the shark, talked about the cover picture and the little problem that Sammy, the shark has (biting things when he gets too excited (although we used the word ‘energetic and happy’ because these are the words we know)
  • watched the story
  • done an activity with matching the sentences with symbols, ‘don’t’ with different verbs
  • and a similar activity on a handount

I really wanted to add the structure to our set of verbs, on top of ‘I like to do’ that we had from the song. I am also planning to reinforce the ‘let’s’ from the song and to practise both, as they will be very useful in the classroom. Overall, I am happy with the story but I don’t think I will use the video again. We have the paper storybook somewhere in the school library and this will be a much better choice as with the paper, the teacher can control the language, the pace and the audio, the emotions and the understanding.

Socialising

These are the things we did in the previous week to faciliate the community building:

  • We continued doing everything we have done so far: making decisions, choosing songs and activities, helping with the resources, student – student interaction.
  • The biggest event of this week was the trip to the zoo and, for one of the groups, a trip to the park during the science lesson to look for different types of plants. First of all, it helped us create some memories, as a group and we definitely had a chance to be a group, to listen to the rules, to remember about behaving well. Everything went well and I was very happy and proud of everyone.
  • This week was the first week in which we were working with our big notebooks. We have one for all the subjects and we use them to glue in all the handouts, to take notes (yes, we have started) and to work on all the tasks. I have already noticed that the kids enjoy looking back and checking what has been done so far. One or two have already decided to add some bits and pieces to the previously completed handouts and drawings. The kids who were absent were also curious to look at the work that we have done during the days they missed, in order to catch up. I decided to check all of these at the end of the week and leave little notes and comments.
  • We also did an interview game, to practise all the basic questions we have done so far, with all the kids interviewing ‘the new student’ and, during the Maths lesson, we were measuring ourselves and that also required a pairwork, so that the kids could easily read the measurements for their partner. Otherwise, it is very difficult to see how long your nose is or your mouth. This went really well and we had lots of fun!

Creativity

We have had some opportunities for creativity in this week, too!

  • We created a picture of an unusual plant and we labelled it properly with all the part plants. We watched a video from youtube and talked about the plants and their resemblance to what we know. Afterwards, we revised all the plant parts and I wrote them on the board and that helped me create my Coffee Plant, with leaves, roots and coffee cups in lieu of the fruit. Afterwards, as a group, we brainstormed some ideas for the kids’ plants and hey ho, they were on the right path. We did it in the notebooks and ‘the handout’ was only a small piece of paper glued in by me before the lesson, with the list of plant parts to use as a checklist in the end of the activity. I might actually put it all into a separate post later on. Fingers crossed!
  • During our zoo trip I was also the designated photographer and the photos will be used in a whole class project next week. There is more to come!

Teacher

This is only very much Anka-relevant and it might not work or be important for all the other teachers in the world. I decided to take a note here, though, to remember and to see how these things will be changing because they also affect how we work as a group and how I feel, too.

  • I am very happy because everyone is a tiny bit better at writing. Our handwriting booklets are filling up since we are already at T and all of my kids are better at dealing with this slot of the lesson. Something that was a huge challenge for some of my kids is not just a part of the lesson. Some of the students are working ahead of the group, since they are faster and already have a good handgrip and I am ok with that. Three have completed the whole booklet already and they get a tiny little break while we are working. I was thinking what to do about it and I decided to leave it as it is. It will be only a week more for us, to get to Zz and afterwards, we will all be on the same page again.
  • Even the kids who are beginners as regards English started to be more attentive and more productive, at least as regards the repeated parts of the lesson. They get a lot of langauge from the songs, too and it is really good to see. Everyone works very hard in Maths and Science and I cannot tell you how happy I was when on Thursday we did our first ‘copy and finish’ activity in English and everyone (but everyone!) took notes about themselves: I am Anka, I am 100. I am happy. I like cats. I’ve got a brother. Beyond happy, that’s what I was.
  • This was not a tantrum free week, far from it but I noticed that I am better at dealing with them and that also my students are making an effort to try to control their emotions, hard as it may be in some cases. There is hope, basically.

Coda

The ghastly month of September is coming to an end. ‘Wake me up when September ends’ the Greenday sings and this day is today! Hooray.

I will continue keeping notes on everything we do and I will add another post in a month, to see where we are with my kids! Until that day then! Happy October to all of you!

Happy teaching!