Once upon a time there were 52 teachers who agreed to talk to me about their novice year in the very young learners classroom. An M.A. thesis came out of it and an article in the March / April issue of the Modern English Teacher (vol. 33 (2) came out.
It is a weird one and a special one. A weird one because it is the only VYL article in the issue devoted whole and wholeheartedly to the topic of A.I. in education. Could you be any more ‘niche’?
At the same time, it is a very special article because it is about teaching, teacher training and pre-schoolers, or, in other words, my whole professional life in three pages. Fortunately / unfortunately, the article itself is available only to the subscribers but it is still a topic that I am really passionate about so I will be writing more about it.
Until then)
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
‘Calm night’ that started as an apple, if I remember correctly…
I am happy. As a teacher of English and a teacher of Art – I am happy. I have my Art Explorers classes twice a week, there are two groups so every lesson is not only taught twice and every idea trialled and trialled again. I am happy because I am getting better at coming up with ideas and with combining all the elements and finding the links between the artist, the language and the technique. And I can see how my kids are reacting to it and becoming more familiar with the paintings and more confident as artists.
I have also realised that all of us, we are more involved in the process and we are enjoying it more. The final product is important, of course, but so is the journey. It is all very rewarding and I am just happy that it is a part of my weekly schedule.
‘You destroyed my food’Sasha’s favourite food
The art
As usual, out of the three components, one had to be prioritised and, this time, it was the art itself. I wanted to give my students an opportunity to experience the process of creating a non-figurative art piece. We tried doing it a little bit in our Jackson Pollock lesson but there the lead was taken by the very specific technique. The outcomes, amazing as they are, were absolutely accidental, and only at the very end of the lesson, we gave our paintings their names.
This time, I wanted it to be fully conscious, purposeful and planned, from A to Z for the kids to understand how a figurative painting may become a non-figurative piece and the artist (aka US!) takes the responsibility for that.
The goose after the wind blew it awayThe goose
In order to achieve it we did the following:
we decided what to paint. I suggested a fruit and veg still life since it was still our Fruit February but I allowed the kids to opt out of it if they really wanted to. Some did.
we made decisions about the composition and started to drip draw with the paints. I had a set of paints that I bought for the stained glass lessons but they turned out to be of a very bad quality, too watery, to liquidy and I could not use them for stained glass. They spent about five months in the drawer and last week I had already taken them out to bin them when the hoarder in me hesitated and decided to use them somehow. Since they were so good at dripping, dripping was what I chose to be their destiny. We used a technique we experimented with before, spread painting.
we drew the contours with drips of the paint (sharing the one set of paints, hooray to the social skills development!)
we photographed the ready picture
we used pieces of thick cardboard to spread the paint and a decision had to be made here to, regarding the movement (or movements) of the hand.
we gave the paintings a name. In most cases, it was a list of the items of the picture but some of the children came up with different names, not related to what the painting first was. Real artists, I am telling you!
As usual, the creation started with a quick modelling session during which I produced a painting of a watermelon and then turned it into a non-figurative item.
A watermelon and a horseSame watermelon and same horse
The artist
This was one of the lessons in which we did not have one superhero but a whole dinner party. I divided them into two groups to illustrate what figurative and non-figurative art is. Our definitions were very simply, in order to convey the message even to my youngest students. ‘Figurative’ was defined as ‘I can see real things’ and represented by a still-life by Cezanne, by Rene Magritte’s Son of Man, by an apply by Yayoi Kusama and a still-life by Ilya Mashkov. ‘Non-figurative’ was defined as ‘I can see shapes and colours’ and represented by a piece by Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky’s circles, Mark Rothko and Yves Klein that I have just discovered for myself.
I also brought two pictures that I created at home and I asked the students to guess what fruit I tried to paint by the colours that they could see or the shapes that were still visible, just to highlight the fact that the fruit might be only represented by a fruit, not necessarily by shape.
Lemon, orange, chocolate, banana……and when they still resembled themselves a bit more
The language
The langauge in this lesson was, as in every lesson of this month – fruit and vegetables. Apart from that I wanted to play with the language and to reinforce the idea of looking at the world from a different perspective. In order to do that, we looked at a set of pictures of the everyday objects and fruit and vegetables, seen either under a microscope or in a close up. We did it as a guessing game, using the set of wordwall cards I put together. This was a lot of fun and I am definitely going to use this resource again!
A selection of favourite things…And a favourite blur
Outcomes
It’s not going to be the first time I say it, here or in the real life, but this, indeed, was one of my favourite Art lessons ever. The rest you can see in the paintings my students created.
This is the second episode in my Made-up Phrasal Verb series which deals with the different aspects of being a teacher who works with kids. The first one is devoted to stepping out of the shoe of a Miss/Mr Serious Teacher in order to become a human in the classroom, who, first and foremost, cares for the child’s well-being and who takes care of the whole child, which sometimes means putting some (or all?) of the methodology principles on the back burner. You can find the post here.
As it often happens, right after I wrote the post I had an opportunity to ‘practise what you preach’. One of my little students got terribly upset about something she didn’t manage to and right after the class ended, she crawled under her desk and, as a result, I spent some quality time on the floor, in my freshly-washed jeans, under the desk, just hanging out and keeping her company in that difficult moment, until she calmed down. All things considered, it was the most useful thing that I did as a teacher last week…Teachering down full time!
But teachering down is the solution for some of the daysand for some of the situations. Sometimes, the teacher needs to do the contrary, to be the real teacher and even more than that. Hence this post.
Teacher up!
Like many of teachers, I follow the social media in order to keep my ears to the ground and to find inspiration for teaching. Then, there are activities that my colleagues and teacher friends share and those that my trainees bring to the course, too. Up until a year ago, there was also the monthly intake of the ‘things I saw in the lessons I observed’ but at the moment, I observe less frequently. Nonetheless, there is a steady inflow of ideas or, in other words, lots of food for thought.
Statistically speaking, a lot of brilliance that can be taken into the classroom directly or after some minor adaptation and it is just great! And if you have any doubts, think about the teacher’s life ten or even twenty years ago when googling ‘ideas for a snowman craft for kindergarten was not an option. Nor was raking through your favourite and trusted bloggers’ accounts for insights. Or sharing a story about a horrible day at school to get a few virtual supportive pats on the shoulder. How did we even live back then?
At the same time, the amount of the seemingly educational material out there is just worrying. There are so many ideas that, at a glance, look like something that would work well, that, on closer inspection turn out to be only ‘the Instagram teaching’, high on the WOW factor, and ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ low on methodology and appropriacy as regards the child in the classroom.
Looking at these, the trainer’s eyebrow raises and the teacher’s muscles twitch. And a plethora of questions floods the mind of both. Why did you think it was a good idea for a group of preschoolers? What is the aim for that activity and how is it even connected to everything else in the lesson? Is it in any way appropriate? Generative? Safe? Is it in any way methodologically justifiable? Is there anything to it apart from the WOW materials and WOW photographs that you will be able to post on the social media or send to parents?
Entering the classroom full of pre-school or primary school students, we assume many roles. We become in loco parentis, sometimes a mix of a nanny and a baby-sitter, sometimes more of a governess or a nurse, sometimes a coach, sometimes a witch, sometimes an actor. But, despite all that, first and foremost, we enter the classrooms as teachers.
Teachers who have clear aims for the lesson, linguistic, personal and child development aims, teachers who have thought of the lesson as a whole and all of the puzzles in it, teachers who selected activities and materials with a full awareness of the children’s needs and abilities. There is nothing that ‘just happens to be there’ and even if there is some fluff, it is a well-thought-out and justified fluff that also has a clear aim.
It is a happy coincidence that the first post and these ponderings came at the same time as a series of posts from @abc_academia_ (Katerina Balaganskaya) and @ginger_teacher_efl (Evgeniya Kiseleva) and their project ELT Expert Hub, especially the one about the need for the teachers to focus on good quality continual professional development (see the link in the bibliography). This is all came together. Enthusiasm is great, passion is a must-have, great ideas are precious, optimism and energy in a human make the world go round but, first and foremost, in the classroom, we are teachers. And Michael, a teacher friend, kept sharing the ideas he came across.
Examples? Yes, please. Here are three.
When you are reading them, please remember about my background and context: I am a teacher and a teacher trainer, I work with pre-schoolers and primary school children, who come in groups, possibly fifteen at a time and for most of my students, English is a foreign language whereas for some it is becoming their second language. With some students we have only 2 academic hours of class a week, with some of them we have a lot more but it is in response to a more demanding curriculum. None of my students has a bilingual background or a full-time exposure to English at home. The time in class is precious.
Craft (but NOT for craft’s sake!)
If you are looking for reasons why craft should (and must) be included in the lessons for primary and pre-primary students, you have come to the right place. The best place, I could even risk saying. I love craft at home, I love craft in my classroom and I have already spent a considerable part of my life trying to convince teachers to be a little bit more excited about it. You can read about five reasons of using it in the classroom here and why craft is so important in the VYL world here.
BUT.
Regardless of how much kids love craft activities and of how passionate teachers might be about them, not everything is a lesson-friendly idea and not everything is feasible. Even in a lesson with pre-schoolers, the choice has to be made in connection with and following the methodological principles of teaching English. We are teachers and we walk into classrooms to develop linguistic skills, first and foremost. We need a language aim, we need language production, we need staging and the coherence with the rest of the lesson, the rest of unit and the curriculum. It cannot be ‘just something that we will do’, just something to kill the lesson time, to keep the kids occupied and that will make them go ‘WOW’.
As an example I decided to use the ideas from the video that I found on youtube, on the Gathered Makes channel, here. I actually love all of the ideas presented here but not one of them is a craft that would would work in the language classroom. The tissue paper wreath is pretty and it would really look good on the door or on the window but preparing them would take a painfully large portion of the lesson and it does not offer any opportunities for language production, not even as regards the functional language. A huge part of the task is repetitive and involves sticking on the green tissue and a lot of it so the kids would not be required to ask for different colours or different resources. This would, naturally, lead to a lot L1 in the classroom and, potentially, to some unwanted behaviour. You cannot even ‘talk about’ the different elements of the wreath because it is all just green. The finished product cannot be used in any speaking activity either.
Button candy canes are perfect for the fine motor skills development but I would not want to give out pieces of wire to a group of children, even with a teacher assistant and I would need lots and lots of buttons for the whole group. I am afraid, the little fingers would need help and assistance in the final stage, with tying and fitting in the candy canes and that would simply not work. What’s more, no communicative purpose here and that is one more big disadvantage.
Paper plate Christmas trees look so pretty and they require only the basic resources (the little pompons could be replaced with paint or stickers) but, again, the process is too complicated for a group of primary and pre-primary students. I love the trick with the paper clip here, to keep hold the tree in shape until the glue sets (although I would still use a stapler because I have some serious glue trust issues) but even in the video the child needed the adult’s help with the shaping of the tree. Exactly the same thing would happen in the classroom, and that could mean one pair of two adult and skilled hands AND eight or ten pairs of little hands in need. I have already tried a WOW Christmas tree craft and I simply have to say no here.
Lolly stick snowflakes. No, sorry. Glitter does not enter my classroom. It is probably the single resource that I personally hate. No matter how hard you try and how careful you are, it is tricky to use, it is accidents-prone and it stays with you forever, on the tables, on the body, on the clothes, everywhere. Even if you are using the glitter sticks. And that’s on top of all the other reasons, similar to those mentioned above.
Easy paper decorations are, indeed, easy and fun, as a way of transforming a 2-D shape into a 3-D shape. There is a little bit of cutting (5 circles for a child in the group) and I am not against cutting up things in large quantities to prepare for a lesson but I do when this helps me get lots and lots of language from the children in the proces (for example here). Here, this aim would be difficult to meet. I am not sure about the staging here as painting of the 3-D finished product would be just too messy and, potentially, too frustrating as it would involve holding a half-painted piece and getting fingers dirty and destroying what already has been done.
As mentioned above, I do love all the craft activities but the effort made, the potential complications and the potential for language and the kids’ safety and well-being are absolutely crucial to be taken into consideration. The WOW effect or the pretty photos on the social media cannot be the driving force behind the decision that a teacher makes to include or not to include something in the lesson plan.
If you are looking for any ideas how to plan craft lessons, please have a look at this blog (Chapter: Craft) where I share the ideas from the classroom, tried and tested. I would also like to recommend MadFox which is Carol Read’s creation and six word manual to the principles of craft activities in the classroom. You can read more about it 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom.
Games. Because educational fun is important
‘Fun’ is one of the most popular words added to titles in education. ‘Young children learn through play’ is probably one of the first things that you will hear in different courses, workshops and trainings devoted to teaching children. It is true, of course, and it applies not only to languages but to all the other skills. This makes our lives much easier and it helps to get the kids interested and keep them involved in the tasks that, at a glace, might be less exciting or those that might involve some hard work. For that reason, only this week, I have decided to teach subtraction to 100 through colouring dictation, through puzzle and through a bunch of reindeer with a serious problem. That is why we have been developing our reading skills through jigsaw puzzles and through Petya, my new invisible student who needed help with his English and that is why I made up a chant about classroom rules. Yes, in a way I was a marketing specialist and an advertising expert, I wanted to sell my product. I did.
In one line: games are good, we need them.
And here is a game that a teacher played with a group of kids in kindergarten. If we had an observation report with the certain standards to observe and to meet, the observer would certainly be able to tick the box: game. Yes, indeed, the teacher prepared a game for the lesson. And that would be all.
Naturally, that is only a small part of the entire lesson and there is no way of knowing what happened before or after and what the aim for the lesson was. However, judging only by this short video, there are quite a few areas for this teacher to work on. It is very difficult why this particular activity was even included in the lesson and what its aims could possibly be. There are no linguistic aims as the kids only do some counting and they use only one colour (orange), only one student is involved at a time while everyone else is watching and it is impossible to figure out whether there were even any child development aims. To be perfectly honest, none of the children taking part seem to be enjoying it and some are even forced to be in, despite their intentions.
If we had to describe the game for someone who did not watch the video, we would have to say that ‘the teacher brings one of the children into the circle, to blow up a balloon and to let the air out right into the children’s ear while the other children are watching and laughing’ and that really turns the category of the activity from a game into ‘a game’. If I had been the observer and the assessor of this lesson, the comments section on the lesson plan or the obervation report would simply say: ‘Please, don’t do this again‘.
A few years ago, there was this tendency at the YL conferences that I happened to attend. Everyone seemed to be criticising the idea of fun in the classroom and replacing it with some other, more serious, methodology-worthy words such as ‘enjoyment’, ‘motivation’ or ‘pleasure’. Maybe it was a trend, maybe just a coincidence but I did not like it. I am up for fun in the classroom, although, for my own personal use and for this blog, I have coined the term: educational fun, to differentiate it from the carefree merry-making.
There is no denying that this carefree merry-making is very necessary in life but since we are teachers, we are obliged (oh-o, the serious words have entered the building) to ensure that we happens in the lesson is deeply rooted in the methodology and child development knowledge that is not only there ‘because because’. Maybe it is true that ‘girls just wanna have fun’ but teachers want to have fun and they also want to smuggle something more while doing it.
To continue with the advertising metaphor from a few paragraphs above, I did have fun but I also had a real product to offer and to promote: a set of classroom rules, a pile of sums and lots and lots of sentences to read and to improve. My students would have done them anyway, we would have to, basically, but it was easier and more pleasant because we did it through and with fun.
Project. What’s love got to do with it?
Here is one more example of the educational path to hell that is paved with very good intentions and the social media teaching that has nothing to do with real classroom methodology but that is extremely photogenic and has ‘WOW’ written all over it. I give you: a CLIL / STEM project devoted to the moon phases.
This is a real example of an activity that one of my teacher friends, Michael, was asked to do with his group and that he happily shared with me, having his own human-adult-fatherly reservations about it. As with the craft activities above, I have nothing against the activity per se but taking it into a classroom full of kids is something that I fail to imagine.
Food allergies aside and the fact that some parents might simply not approve of teachers dishing out sugar portions in class (as, presumably such issues would be dealt with beforehand), there are a few other things that might turn this seemingly amazing and wonderfully appealing project into a complete disaster.
somebody needs to buy Oreos and in a situation when a school struggles with providing scissors, glue, paper, plasticine and markers, asking for Oreos is just not worth it and might simply not happen. Purchasing them by the teacher is out of the question.
separating the cookies into two even halves, without breaking them and with the cream staying politely on only one of the sides is…well, I don’t know. It’s been years since I played this way and not with Oreos but with my delicious local equivalentand I just don’t remember. Anyway, we separated them for fun. Our main aim was consumption and we would devour them regardless of how much cream there was on either side. At best, no one can guarantee that all the Oreos for all the kids will comply.
shaping the cream into the required shape to reflect the phases of the moon is not easy either and it does require something close to surgical precision. And a tool of some sorts (a popsicle stick).
you are allowed to eat the final product and, hopefully, there is time to talk about the changes and to admire the work done but, ideally, there has to be a lot more Oreos than the number of students x 4 Oreos. Otherwise, we are going to be the cruel people to have the kids work on the cookies, touching them, smelling them but without eating them for a long time and it is a guarantee that not all the kids will be able to stay strong. In the lesson that my friend was asked to teach, the cookies did not last and the model was never made. Either the kids were too hungry or the smell of the cookies too strong, they could not resist. The resources were eaten before the completion of the project. And, to be perfectly honest, I do get it. As an adult, I would struggle myself and I would be tempted to nibble. Or to do a full-on Cookie Monster.
Perhaps it is a fun project to do and a great way of learning about the phases of the moon. For me as a teacher and as a trainer, there are simply too many ‘but’s’ that make it simply not worth the effort. Especially, that there are plenty of other, less high-maintenance and less high-risk and more methodology- and teacher-friendly replacements that can be done with paper, paints, plasticine or ping-pong balls, craft activities and projects that would be more beneficial for the kids.
Coda
We are teachers. We think about the activities that we bring to class.
We are teachers. We respect the parents who trust us with their children and who pay for our teaching skills and the educational process that we provide.
We are teachers. We walk into the classroom with clear lesson aims, linguistic, child development and personal aims, too.
We are teachers. We want to have fun but not for fun’s sake.
We are teachers. First and foremost, we are teachers.
Happy teaching!
Bibliography
Carol Read, 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom, 2007, Macmillan Education
This post starts in the classroom (Surprise, Surprise!) and they are generated by me but only in connection with what I do in the classroom and how my audience reacts to it. This is everything, aside from the thoughts of the experienced teachers, aside from what we find in the coursebooks, aside from what we learn about in different workshops and lectures. How the kids react to what happens in the lesson…
And since most of my professional life is spent in the presence of the very young one, the reaction and the feedback is immediate, without the intermediary help of the admin, parents or educational supervisors or trainers. If the lesson is good, you know it. If the lesson is bad, you will know straight away. If you can read the signs and reading there must be a special part of the brain devoted to looking out and reading these signs, while teaching, learning, monitoring, supervising and growing goes on happening.
Hence this post.
Teaching the whole child
This is definitely one of the key words in the EFL / ESL methodology, which teachers, trainers, bloggers, authors are more than eager to recite, together with the ZPD, scaffolding, short attention span and many more. ‘Teaching the whole child‘ will also be on that list.
In order to understand what might be hiding under this term, it is necessary to have a look at the list of the key development areas outlined by Sandie Mourao and Gail Ellis: personal, social, emotional development, communication, language and literacy, problem soling, reasoning, numeracy, knowledge and understanding of the world, physical development and creative development. These are naturally the areas, typical for the early years child development, first and foremost age-related and not specific for any particular context, L1 education or the EFL/ESL education. But, especially, because of that, they need to be included in both and in teaching of any subjects to the early years children, be it their L1, a foreign language, Maths, Art or judo.
Carol Read can also be a point of reference. She has quoted her C-Wheel in quite a few sources and apart from the overlap with the areas mentioned above, she also included a few others that would help to better understand the idea behind the whole child. These are: care, community as well as context and connections (i.e. family and school), coherence and challenge as well as the cultural context. The most important factor, the child, is in the centre of the wheel.
But the quote that really made an impression on me comes from a post I found on Teaching Channel where, on top of some practical solutions for implementing the approach, I have also found this way of explaining what it means to be teaching the whole child: ‘by being responsive to children’s understandings, interests, and abilities, allowing them to deepen their natural curiosity and their eagerness to want to discover and learn more’.
It deeply resonates with me because of the conviction that I have held for a long time (and which I have tried to brainwash my trainees with over the years) that the most important thing that a primary or pre-primary school teacher can do is to sit on the carpet with the kids, literally and figuratively speaking, too, in order to change the perspective and to try to see the world from their point of view. This change of the point of view is absolutely crucial when it comes to classroom and behaviour management, staging, lesson planning, craft, literacy skills development and many many more.
‘That is very well but what is your point here?‘ you might be wondering.
It seems that, sometimes, regardless of our good will, professionalism and even experience (yes, I know what I am talking about), we, the teachers tend to allow our methodological principles take precedence over the child in the classroom and choosing between ‘what I need to do today‘ and ‘what the room needs‘, being the professionals that we are, we choose the standards and the rules, not the audience, not the child. It is all well-intentioned and well-meant, of course, but it might not mean that it is also the best decision as regards the said audience.
In this post today I would like to call the teachers to teacher down a little bit! Remember about the standards, methodological, institutional, cultural and what not, but to put them on the back burner and to focus more on the six-year-old beloved crowd insead.
Below, the three areas and some classroom stories from yours truly.
Storytelling
A story first. It was a lesson with my adorable monsters, in our fifth or sixth year together and it was a story lesson. I got everything ready, the audio, the text, the words to be pre-taught, the comprehension task, a game and, most importantly, a while-reading task. I wanted to be very clever and, since the story had a repetitive element and it was perfect for prediction. I wanted to have us read and listen to it but with pauses, with the kids discussing every stage (‘What happened?’ and ‘What will happen next?’). I thought it was a brilliant idea and, perhaps, it really was. However, once we started to go through the story, after two ‘episodes’, one of my students, one of the more confident ones, looked at me and said: ‘Anka, can we just listen to the story?‘
And I don’t know what it was, the tone of voice or how effectively she used intonation to convey meaning, carefully stressing ‘listen’ in the whole phrase, or maybe it was the faces of the rest of the class showing a mix of dedication but this simple human fatigue that made me realise that I overdid it.
I took a story, a great story, that we would be interested in listening to or reading, something humanly exciting and fun and I turned it into an exercise, a learning activity, a task, at the same time, and totally unwillingly, making it dull and tiring, simply because of the context – our classroom. That made me gasp in shock.
Naturally, we read to learn, to extend our vocabulary and to practise grammar and to develop the reading comprehension skills and all the other skills, too. However, a story is still a story and it deserves to be enjoyed, in a human way, even if we are in an A1 classroom full of kids, at least to some extent, at least in a balance with all the very teacherful activities with a clear learning focus.
In the classroom that can be done through: including a variety of stories, coursebook stories, YL exam stories and storybooks, traditional stories and videos, including elements of reading for pleasure, a school or class library, just listening to a story for fun before any reading comprehension tasks are introduced, giving the students an opportunity to express their views about the story and accepting different opinions, also those negative ones, basically anything that we might do with a story in our real L1-life.
‘My students don’t like to sing!’
It is one of the most common comments that my trainees make and one of the most common questions they ask right afterwards and that is: ‘Should we make them if they don’t? How?’
Well, the short version according to Murao and Ellis is 8 reasons to bring songs into the classroom. Carol Read mentions a few more in her book. In an earlier post here, written based on the materials I found in different sources, there are 60 reasons, for the kids and for the adults. There are so many of them that we have enough justification to change the famous song’s title into ‘The classrooms are alive with the sound of music!’ Or, at least, they should be!
But, with all that in mind, or, almost against all that, what we do with a song in our L1 life, as adults or kids, is to simply listen to it and to enjoy the fact that it is on. Sometimes we dance to it, sometimes we might sing some lines, sometimes not. As people, we are not expected to know all the lyrics, to like all the songs and to sing along every single time. We definitely do not listen to complete some comprehension tasks or to focus on a particular structure or an idiom. There is a danger, then, that by imposing all of these on our students we will be destroying the organic character of this resource.
Again, it would be a good idea to remember the need to teacher down songs in the classroom a little bit. Accepting that not all the students will love all the songs equally and that not all the students will want to sing all the songs every single time seems to be the first step here, although that does not mean that songs will disappear from the coursebooks, curriculums and lesson plans. In the everyday teaching, it might mean simply starting with ‘Let’s just listen to the song!’ before we get down to the vocabulary, grammar, lyrics and all the follow-up activities and asking the kids whether they like the songs or not. Getting the students involved in the song selection is another important way of teachering down here and either focusing on those that they actually really do like and including their suggestions in the lessons, too.
‘We have so many things to do today!’ or about the lesson plan
This time the story took place in my Playway 1 lesson, at the end of the year, somewhere in the food unit. Those who have used the book might remember the listening activity in which students have to listen to a boy, one of the charcacters from the coursebook, who talks about his likes and dislikes and mark these accordingly in the picture. One of my students, Sasha, a 6 y.o. boy, didn’t deal with the task very well. ‘I like pears’, would the character say and my Sasha would say: ‘I don’t like pears’ and then, to my horror, he would cross the heart in the book, instead of colouring it in. Every single time Sasha did not agree with the character in the recording, he would loudly comment and then mark the answers according to his preferences.
I was watching him thinking the following thoughts: Oh, Lord, he is not following instructions, he does not understand what to do, he will not pass any of the exams and, in general, I failed as a teacher. None of which is true. I am happy that, despite the way I felt in the lesson, I reacted as a true educator, I went for the child’s well-being and I did not insist on the ‘correct’ answers. Thinking of the lesson afterwards, I was laughing out loud at my professional silliness. My little student told me, in English, what he thought of certain food items, he clearly understood what he listened to and he reacted to the content. The problem was not me or the child but the activity itself that assumed that the little people are able to disentach themselves from the activity and to de=personalised the content in order to complete a task. This made me look in a completely different way at the YL coursebooks content and it has been a turning point for me.
This same approach can be applied to any lesson plan. We go to school not to teach the lesson plans or the coursebooks but to teach the kids, the particular kids in our classrooms. Not everything that the great authors at the famous publishing houses thought of for the particular lesson, unit, activity will be appropriate for Masha, Katya, Sasha, Tomek, Agnieszka, Juan and Pierre that are entering our classrooms. Not everything that we have prepared for the lesson might not be the best idea on a Monday morning after a long break etc.
In the everyday life teachering down might mean:
evaluating the coursebook material carefully as regards its relevance for the particular group of kids and appropriate adaptation and adjustments as regards the content, the cultural context, the emotional context, the personalisation or the lack of, etc
adapting the lesson plan on the go, depending on how the students are feeling on the day. Pushing the day agenda at all cost will not be effective and might result in frustration.
putting yourself in the kids’ shoes while preparing the activities for the lesson and trying to answer this simple question: Why would they want to do it?, apart from the obvious, the fact that a person in the position of authority, older and taller than them, someone that knows their parents and is also able to assess them is bringing this to class and tells them to do it. Is there anything in the exercise, activity, story, listening, song that they would want to do anyway? And if it is not there, can we add it?
while things are not going to plan, looking at the situation through the kids’ eyes to better understand what is going on in order to deal with it more effectively.
involving the kids in the decision making process about the lesson, as regards the songs to sing, the games to play, the stories to read or even the order of the activities (when possible), to share the responsibility for the learning but also to find out more about the audience and their preferences.
Codaor what this post is NOT about
I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I am calling for a complete abandonment of all the methodological principles, present-practice-production, good teaching standards. Far from it. ‘Organic’ is a nice word to use to describe a lesson and a teaching approach as long as it is not synonymous with ‘I didn’t bother with planning the lesson, we’ll just go for it!’
It is an invitation to keeping your eyes open and to not forgetting that our students are very young and that the age will be very often the most important factor behind their behaviour and attitude. On the one hand. On the other hand, they are people, too and that we can act as people, too, instead of being teachers 24 / 7.
What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments!
And make sure you come back for more because the second part of this mini-series is coming up! ‘Teacher down!’ is ready now. The post about the need to teacher up is already being written!
Happy teaching!
Bibliography
Sandie Murao and Gail Ellis (2020) Teaching English to Pre-primary Children, Delta, page 10 – 11.
Carol Read (2007), 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom, Macmillan, p. 7.
Well, it is one of my guilty pleasures to open the blog dashboard to have a look how many hits, visitors and visits there have been since the last I check. I do it regularly, of course, sometimes a few times a day, but I write down only the certain hoops, like every thousand of views. Recently, in the last few months the blog has been very active and I have registered a whole thousand of views within two weeks only…
I have just checked the most recent ‘celebration post’ and it turns out that it was written in January this year and I was rejoycing the fact that I crossed the line of 15 000 visits. Which means 8 000 since. Not too bad, I have to say!
It’s been very rewarding to see that the blog has had a growing number of readers and that, perhaps, there is something useful and necessary about what I do in the classroom and at the keyboard.
Here are my top ten favourite posts and why I really like time out of those 246 posts committed so far:
Much Ado About Nothing: realistic flashcards vs illustrations in the EFL world: I love it because it started with a not very pleasant conversation on the social media but because what I said was met with derision and mockery, I decided to prove to myself that, indeed, I am right. And a lovely and very interesting research followed.
All you need is…a picture! This is a post that was written after an online conference presentation which had my biggest audience so far (almost 700 people) but I really like because it is the post that really reflects what I do in the classroom. I love using pictures and visuals and illustrations and I am happy that I can share my ways of doing that. There is also the part two because the new ideas keep coming!
Setting up the routine. A diary, week 1. This is one of the newest post because this one (and the whole series) was created at the start of the current academic year, in September. I started two new groups of primary, of brand new kids, in a brand new context, for them and for me, and I thought that it might be a good idea to keep track of what we do in the classroom during those first weeks. I am hoping that it might come in handy for all the teachers who start in the area and are on the lookout for ideas and solutions but, surprise surprise, it was also an amazing opportunity for me to reflect on the activities and to understand the process even better. I loved writing it so much that I decided to keep this series going, only now the reflection takes places only once a month, at the end of it. If you haven’t read it yet, please check it out! It definitely deserves more hits than the 33 it has got so far.
Tell stories! Please do! This is another post that was written with pure love and this time the object of my affection was storytelling and I wrote it for all the teachers who need a little bit of convincing to start using stories in the classroom or to start using them more, not only because of their impact on the students emotional and cognitive development but, mainly, because of the amazing potential for the linguistic development.
A balancing act. Non-competitive ESL games for kids. This post started in the teacher training classroom during the YL course this summer. I shared my long-held opinion that our lessons are overflowing with games that are competitive and that there is no appropriate balance of games and activities that promote cooperation and collaboration. And in response to my trainees’ slightly desperate question (‘But how to do it?!’), I did another research and an article came out of it.
What an old dog learnt. A YL teacher goes back to the YL classroom. This post came about as a result of one of the adventures (or, rather, ‘adventures’) of my professional life and a real case of making lemonade of the lemons that the world throws at you. One of the things that I learnt in this Lemonade Year was that my classroom is the classroom full of kids and, I suppose, it is amazing that I was given a chance to check and to double check it, to confirm and to confirm it again.
A lesson in structures. Notes from the classroom. Here is a post for all the VYL teachers and for anyone who is wondering how much language pre-schoolers are able to produce in the EFL setting. In one word: LOTS. If you are intereted in details, please have a look at the post. These are simply the notes I took about our everyday lesson procedures at the end of the academic year with my level 2 kids. A lot of possible if you want to and if you apply appropriate techniques. Really. I loved writing this post not only because it gave me an opportunity to be really (really) proud of my babies and myself for doing a good job, but also, because only through this reflection and the list, I could really understand the progress made. I have said it here, on this blog, but I will say it again – there is so much happening in the classroom that we simply forget! It is good to take time to look back at your lesson and lessons to remember and to see it in a better light and in a more realistic way.
Jerome et al or how the EFL world started to scaffold. This is one of the oldest post, one of the 2020 lockdown posts and one of the first research posts. It is dedicated to one of my professional gurus, Jerome Bruner and the original research done together with Wood and Ross, about the role of tutoring in problem solving (which is the actual title of the article). I do believe that all the YL teachers need to read this one and my post can be the first step to it.
How to see a city. From the series: Teaching English to Art. This one is where it all started for me, with teaching English through Art. It involves the following: a long, long time ago, my teenage group, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kalho and New York. If you haven’t used any Art in class, this is a good place to start.
And I love absolutely all of the posts in the Crumbs series, the little ideas from the classroom. These are just the activities that I have created or adapted for my classroom and things that worked with my students. I have to admit that I am quite proud of the format of a recipe with the ingredients and the procedures but upgraded with the ‘why we love it’ section. So far, there have been 72 crumbs worth sharing.
A few words from the human behind the words
I love teaching and I love writing and it is a just precious that I can combine these two things here, on the blog and I have been doing it for almost four years now (short of a few months). The funny thing is that I started this post as a way of celebrating another benchmark, 23 000 visits, but, somehow, due to the magic in the world, before I was able to finish it those 23k turned into almost 24k overnight. And, over the next two weeks (as in: 14 days) it became 25 000.
I don’t get it but I am happy)
That means, that somewhere out there, in the US, India, Canada, Russia, Spain, Hong Kong, Japan, Egypt, the UK, Germany, Finland, Israel, Cambodia, Italy, Latvia, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Kuwait, Poland and Ghana, there are people who decided to click and to read about my classroom life. And I hope that they took something out of it.
Every time we run a course at our teacher training centre, regardless of how formal or informal it is, we always give out a feedback form and ask our questions how useful they found the course and all its components.
‘We want to know what you think’ is not only a nice marketing phrase that should be a part of the end-of-course email. Neither is it a request for only positive feedback, a puff that will make us, the organisers, feel better. For me, personally, it is an opportunity to check and to confirm that I haven’t gone rusty or complacent as a trainer and that we still offer a good product. At the same time, it is also a way of brainstorming ideas for how we can further improve the course. This is post is going to be about one of the examples how these ideas are put into practice.
A few courses ago (a new, teacher training time expression), one of our trainees mentioned in the feedback form that they would really appreciate an opportunity to talk to trainers individually to ask some of more personal questions. It sounded like a great idea and that is what we did.
Tutorials and consultations
Individual communication between the trainees and the trainers hasl always been a part of our courses. We always chat before or after the sessions, regardless of whether they are run online or offline and many of my trainees keep in touch either via social media or via email. Some of the courses also include tutorials but their format and aim is a little bit different. They are run usually half-way through the course, they are obligatory and their main aim is for the trainees to reflect on their progress on the course and for the trainer to run a preliminary evaluation on the said progress.
We added the consultations as an optional individual meeting with the tutor, 30-minutes long, to be used in the way that the trainee chose, to discuss the issues of the particular interest. We arrange these meetings during the time that the course is run, usually before or after the input session.
Topics that were of the particular interest
a variety of questions that came up in the course of the reflection on the particular sessions
focused lesson planning
lesson planning and classroom management for the online YL
working with large groups
using L1 in the YL classroom
designing a curriculum and planning for a year
choosing a coursebook
bilingual education
problematic students and individual case studies
support for the novice YL teachers
What do our course participants say?
Love this idea! Yes, I did. Find personal consultation very useful, cause we could discuss our issues and challenging situations.
To my mind, the additional session is a perfect option that gives an opportunity to ask a question or discuss something.
The 30-min consultation helped me, too. I noted down some great ideas about the cases we discussed.
I had a chance to share my difficult students’ cases during our consultation and got useful advice.
As for the consultation, I prepared a list of questions and got really valuable answers from Anka. I really appreciate her help and encouragement. I feel much more confident and enthusiastic before starting a new page in my career (working with YL).
The additional session felt more personal and I believe I could participate more freely. And without being worried about judgmental eyes (not because anyone would judge me, I am just a bit shy) it was easier to ask questions that I had to ask.
It’s great to be able to talk about things where i don’t feel very confident (like bilingual kids) sharing experience is priceless ; it helps reminding myself that we all learn all the time and it’s ok to struggle and try. thanks for the meeting!
I could only participate in the 30-min individual session. That was really helpful as it helped me clarify a few questions I had about my teaching.
This is a very cool addition. The opportunity to ask questions that arose after the course.
What do I get out of it?
An opportunity to really meet my trainers. We talk a lot during the discussions in the breakout rooms and in the common room, before and after the sessions. However, the consultations are an opportunity to take it to another level.
It gave me a chance to cater for the needs of all the trainees even better. It is obvious that the more extrovert and confident students take part in the whole class discussions more freely and more frequently and that some trainees prefer to share their views only while in the breakout rooms. By adding the individual consultations to the mix helped me ensure that even the shyest and the least confident teachers will have their chance to talk to the trainer comfortably.
It is a fascinating diagnostic tool that helps us adapt and improve our courses because they show the fuller range of topics that might be interesting to teachers that are not always included in the current programme. It is a signal that some areas or aspects need to be incorporated in the existing sessions or that, perhaps, we need to start thinking about revising our courses and adding some new sessions. And, as such, they are just precious.
A bonus track, Tea for Two that lent the title to the post here, with Ella Fitzegrald.
A folding surprise by Kolya (Renamed as: Teachers in September)
This post, like many many others, starts in the classroom when yours truly spends countless hours every week. Some of those hours are happy hours, some are very much not. Sometimes, no matter how passionate and dedicated you are as a teacher, no matter how much time you have dedicated to preparing amazing lessons, resources and activities, it is just not coming together and it does feel like it is the absolute end of the world. But, definitely, it is not. But it feels like it.
In the sessions devoted to classroom and management behaviour, there is this one activity that we do: ‘Look at the picture of the classroom. What is wrong with it?’ My trainees usually have lots of great ideas but where I am trying to get them is the fact that, beautiful as it is, this photo, a real class and a real lesson does not really look like that 100% of the time. So google, with all its amazing visuals, this time helps us create unrealistic expectations regarding our professional life.
I am not saying that it does not happen, that kids never get fully interested and involved in the task or that the teacher never has the full attention of the group. They do and when it does, it is the best thing ever, cloud number 9 and the top of the world. But, to be perfectly honest, a day like this one in the Kindergarten Cop, this is also a part of the teacher’s life.
Those bad days are perhaps more likely to happen when you are less experienced and somewhere at the start of your teaching career but (and I am sorry to be saying that), no matter how many years you have been teaching for, bad days can still happen. Although, indeed, as experienced teachers, we are more prepared for them and better equipped to deal with them, on the spot and in the long run. That is why, in this post, I decided to share how I resuscitate myself and get myself back on my feet from having crumbled into pieces after a bad day at school.
Prevention first
Apart from lesson planning and keeping your resources organised, it is very important to remember that a teacher needs to be alive and feeling well in order to remain happy, smiling and passionate about the lesson and in order to be able to give a good lesson. That means that a teacher needs to eat and drink, breakfast and lunch and snacks, and, a teacher must find time for her / his own breaks.
I know very well how easy it is to skip breakfast, lunch or the mid-lesson snacks (or, even more impotantly, the mid-lesson toilet runs) because, well, because things just happen. Kids lose things, kids need help, kids have a bad day and a meltdown and a teacher, more often than not, just brushes off her/ his needs and does whatever is necessary to help the kid. It’s just in the blood.
Then there are the unplanned meetings with the headmaster, the admin, the parents and sometimes it is possible to put them on hold or to reschedule them and sometimes it is not. Again, the break (whatever its purpose) gets cancelled or cut short. The teacher goes on teaching without food, coffee, water or worse and, naturally, that has an impact on the level of tiredness and / or stress and on the lesson.
When the bad day has already happened…take time out.
Most of the time this will be a very short time out slot, a few minutes in the teachers’ room, or even in your classroom, looking out of the window, wasting time, listening to your favourite song, or, if you are really lucky and the breaks are long enough to allow for that, you will be able to get out of the school to pick up a coffee somewhere round the corner or simply to take a walk, somewhere in a slightly different environment.
This will help to see the world from a different perspective and, naturally, to regain the peace and quiet for the teacher.
Talk to your teaching buddies
As soon as the opportunity arises, chat to your teaching buddies. It doesn’t matter if they themselves had a good day and will be able to act as the source of the energy or if they had an equally disastrous day and there will be there for you to compare the levels of the educational catastrophy. The most important thing is that this will be a chance to talk to someone who fully understands how horrible it feels to have to walk home after a bad day at school and who can offer an ear if not a real solution, although the latter is also an option, too, because the school life is full of fiascos, tragedies and all kinds of situations and, quite likely, your friends have it already happened to them and might be able to tell you about how they sorted it out. In any case, listening to their stories will help to understand that you are not on your own and that’s a lot!
Talk to your VIP, whoever they are
For me, personally, equally important is talking to my Very Important People, not only because that is what they are, but, also, because they have absolutely nothing to do with education, teaching English and teaching children.
Getting valuable advice or even having someone to talk to, in order to relate all the horrors of the day is not the main aim of these conversations. On the contrary, these help me get a completely different perspective and go back to basics, to everything else in life that matters an that is as far as possible from the young learners EFL/ ESL. Just to check that the world outside of it still exists and that it is doing great.
I love my job and I cannot imagine not teaching kids but, on some days, I need to forget about children, parents, child development, methodology and everything related to it, specifically in order to recover and to recharge my batteries, physiological and psychological.
Get a hug (real, virtual or metaphorical)
Well, yes, just that! The hug can be real, the hug can be virtual as not everyone huggable might be available physically but it can also be any way of pampering yourself and doing somethinggood for your body. A nice meal, a pint of beer, a quiet evening, an evening with your favourite music, a piece of chocolate, a walk with a dog, a bunch of flowers, a cup of coffee, a sports game, a round of your favourite computer game, exercising, a combination of a few of those or all of them together. Whatever it is that makes you feel good and that brings a smile to your face.
For example, I am a real public transport supporter but, on those really difficult days, I like to take a taxi home and being in the backseat, driven home, with my favourite city in the world blinking on the other side of the window, it really does calm me down.
Sleep on it
Or, in other words, not being too harsh on yourself and taking time to reflect and to see the whole day and everything that happened from a different angle and from a distance.
The world looks a bit different after a proper night’s sleep and only then it is possible to reflect on the day, to connect the dots and to understand better the reason behind the kids’ behaviour or the explanation why the activities fell flat on their face. Finally, this distance will also help to see the good things that also happened because they always do, although, admittedly, they are easily overshadowed by the disasters.
Try again!
Last but not least, there is always tomorrow, another lesson and another day to have another go and see what happens. With young learners especially, the first time we play a new game or try a new activity, in a new format and with a new set of rules, the very first attempt is just a reconnaissance, for the teacher, for the resources and for the kids. It is almost bound to be a failure and it is a big mistake not to give it another shot.
(Notes from the Back to School September 2023 webinar at BKC Moscow)
The aims?
Since I believe in leading by example, also here I decided to verbalise the aims for this webinar and for this post. I knew that I would have a mixed-ability audience, with some experienced and some less experienced teachers who might have or might have not used stories in their lessons. For that reason, I chose two main aims for this session:
For those teachers who have little or no experience with storytelling in the classroom (or little or no love for storytelling in the classroom): to provide the basic tools that will help them get started
For those teachers who already have a lot of experience with storytelling in the classroom (or a lot of love for storytelling): to bring in a new angle which will help to reinforce this love
What is a story and why we even bother
A structure of a story it is super simple. Rob Bisenbach calls it a three-legged stool here, since there are always characters who have a goal they try to reach and, on the way there, they encounter some obstacles or get over some challenges or, basically, who have some adventures. Everything else is an added value, like a set of blocks that you can add, take away or rearrange. I like this approach to and it does help me with preparing the materials for my students.
The best thing is that our life, our private life, our non-teaching life, is all built around stories. We read, watch and listen to stories in form of books, audiobooks and films and series. We tell stories of what happened to us at work, at school or just something that we witnessed on the metro or in the street. We tell stories to share our feelings, to make people smile, to make the little people fall asleep or to eat lunch. If we look for even a wider context, our family’s history is a story, our nation’s history is a story, everything that we read about on the news, the serious bits and the less serious bits, everything is a story.
No wonder then something that is such an important part of our life made its way into the EFL classroom, for children and for adults. Two years ago I gave myself a task of counting all the reasons that there might be to bring a story into the kids’ classroom and, based on what I could get my hands on in 2021, I found as many as 50, some related to child development, some related to teaching foreign languages. You can find this post here. I do recommend!
Different types of stories and their advantages (and all the tricky bits)
Coursebook stories: This is the place to start from all the teachers who have not worked much with storytelling with young learners. From the point of view of the leaners, these stories are easily availalbe, they often include the favourite characters who the kids can follow throughout the entire year and the language in terms of structures and lexis is carefully chosen and consistent with the material covered in each unit. On the other hand, these stories are also very teacher-friendly because they come with a set of instructions and ideas. Even if they are not ideal, they are a great starting point for adaptation and development. Our coursebooks also provide for a good variety of stories. Superminds from CUP for example include the following: cartoons (print and video versions), action stories for the younger kids and real, extensive reading stories for the more advanced primary school kids.
Traditional stories: They are a little bit more challenging, for both parties but they also have a lot of advantages. In many ways, these stories are already available to our students. It is quite likely that they have already heard them, watched them or read them in their L1 as the Little Red Riding Hood, the Enormous Turnip or Jack and the Beanstalk are a part of the world culture and bringing them into the lesson, in a different language version will be welcomed with joy. However, the beautiful and rich language, that is the main benefit of using these stories is also the biggest challenge in the context of the EFL or ESL young learners. More often than not, children would have to rely on their memories as a lot of the story will not be available to them. Consequently, these stories require more adaptation and grading and, in general, more work since these stories are not accompanied by ‘How to’ manuals and teacher’s books.
Phonics stories: This is another type of a story that was created not for the second/ foreign language learner but simply for a child learning to read. The language of these stories, although very often simplified and handpicked, focused on certain sounds and phonics, might still be beyond a regular young learner beginner learner. However, the teachers still use them because of their potential for the literacy skills’ development although it means more work and more careful lesson planning and staging on the part of the teacher.
Storybooks: There are many advantages of using storybooks with YL. These are the real stories, written for children and their plot is not limited by the set of the words that need to be introduced in unit 5, which, unfortunately, often makes the story very educational and, consequently, very boring. Storybooks are far from this danger zone. They use beautiful language, great characters and fantastic illustrations which can help develop not only the children’s language but also their visual literacy and literary tastes. It is true that, again, a lot of work might be required to adapt the langauge and the plot to make it available for our EFL/ESL students. Not to mention that the handouts and teachers’ books don’t exist, either so teachers are basically on their own. However, as a teacher who had an opportunity to see the long-term impact of these stories being present in the YL classroom, I can say that it is absolutely worth it.
There are some earlier posts on using storybooks in the EFL classroom and you can find them here
My favourite storybooks to have in the classroom, Top 10
Choosing a storybook for your EFL classroom, My experience
Videos: That is an interesting resource that was not available to us in the past and that has definitely blossomed since the time of the pandemic. There are certain limitations regarding the language, the support for the teacher but it is a resource that is readily available for the teachers and for the students and their parents and that is almost unlimited. Teachers often like to use Peppa (that most kids are familiar with), Pete the Cat or the Little Princess. I have so far committed only one post on Peppa and you can find it here.
YLE Cambridge
If the fact that stories are everpresent in our life is one important reason to bring stories into our lesson, then the Young Learners Exams are another. All of the modern coursebooks are aligned with the YLE skills and requirements, they offer skills development in the format of the exam and even if we do not prepare our students for taking the exams we will be developing their language skills in some connection with the papers format.
The exams themselves were introduced in 1997 and since then, as a conference presenter, a teacher, a trainer and a manager, I have often come across comments (doubts, inquiries or even accusations) that the exams were introduced for purely mercenary reasons and that children should not be exposed to any formal assessment at that age.
For me, personally, the main benefit of the YLE Cambridge is the research that was done and has been done in order to find out what being a young language learner is about and how chilren’s language skills can be tested in an appropriate way. And it was done not in connection with a group of students from only one L1 background but around the world which means that by analysing a lot of date, the L1-influence can be taken out of equation, helping us understand how children learn. Here is only one number for you: the initial versions of the tests were trialled on a group of 5000 children from Europe, South America and South-East Asia. If you are interested, please have a look at the Research Notes published by Cambridge online in February 2002.
Stories feature in three exams, starting from a very simple picture-based reading and writing task for Starters, through Movers, up to Flyers, with a real extensive reading and a reading comprehension task, a writing and a telling of a story based on a set of visuals. The storytelling tasks are included in the KET writing task.
The language
This is, by far, the most important reasons to use stories in the classroom: the language.
In order to tell a story, the students need to be able to operate quite a few structures such as the present or past tenses, adjectives, emotion adjectives, adverbs, linking words, time and sequence words, sensory words as well as the functional language in the dialogue. This means that the students need to possess all these skills to tell a story which, in turns, means that for quite a long time, for some of the levels, the students will not be able to do it. Or will they?
I do believe (and I will try to prove it:-) that storytelling is not only the aim in itself, it can also be an approach, and these structures can be introduced in order to enable the students to participate in storytelling as soon as it is possible.
For example, as regards adjectives, according to curriculum, the beginner students are not required to know any, apart from a few basic ones. The real adjectives input is scheduled for the A1 level (Movers) when the kids encounter comparatives and superlatives for the first time, although adjectives are around us and the meaning can be easily presented and practised because they are representational.
Far from being a call to action to change the curriulum, it is possible to introduce a lot of this language much earlier, in a way that is appropriate for young language learners.
I have already written about something that I called The Storytelling Campaign. You can read about it here: Introduction and here: Activities. Below, you will find the ideas as I presented them in our webinar.
Introducing adjectives: emotionsand not only
These are very easy to introduce. With our pre-school and primary school students, we start with the basic set of happy, sad, angry but then, as we go through the year, more and more adjectives are added. The photos that you can see here illustrate the set of adjectives that I use with my online YL and a set of homemade flashcards for our pre-primary. This second photo was taken in December, after only three months of classes with my youngest pre-primary and at the time they already knew all these 12 adjectives only because we started each lesson with talking about how we feel.
The other source of language as regards adjectives are the songs, from Super Simple Songs and other channels on youtube, for example Open Shut Them or As quiet as a mouse.
All of these can be used in the following way:
talking about how we feel in the beginning of the lesson, it is good for the language, for bonding but also for the teacher to find out how the kids are in class
this is the langauge that can help to signal problems, when kids are not feeling very well (‘I am sad’, ‘Are you angry?’)
and it can help sort out other classroom management issues (‘Look, Sasha is sad now. Don’t take her pencils, please’)
adjectives can be used to make riddles and to express opinion and this way personalise the content
adjectives can be used in simple Yes No game to describe any picture to prepare the kids for the listening or reading task or to practise vocabulary, for example: ‘The cat is sad. Yes or no? No, the cat is happy’
and this is exactly the same structure and approach that will be used to describe the pictures that are a part of a story (see: Movers or Flyers)
This is another topic that, in my opinion, is not really used to its full potential in our coursebooks. For that reason, I like to introduce games and activities that promote the use of verbs. From the very first lesson we play a movement game (‘Abracadabra, 123 you are (dancing)’ and ‘Everybody is dancing’). I also introduce the verbs through the songs, for example What do you like to do, I like you and Please be quiet, I am trying to sleep. Sometimes I introduce them because of our curriculum, for example the third song here that covers Present Continous and the rooms of the house. Sometimes, they feature in our course just because they are a source of a plethora of verbs and this is how we learn them before Present Simple or Present Continuous make an appearance as per curriculum.
In the classroom, apart from the obvious advantages for classroom and behaviour management, as it is an easy to use stirrer, we can also use these structures to describe any pictures, which, again, is a preparation for storytelling with visuals.
The illustrations above come from the YLE Cambridge sample papers and they can easily be used in class, not only as the actual exam practice activity and not only with the children who are actually preparing for Starters. The story is so obvious and funny (and it includes all there elements of a story mentioned above) and the visuals simple enough for the pre-primary students to use, too. If they are prepared for it and if the activity is properly staged.
In the beginning the teacher is the one to initiate the structure either by making incorrect sentences (Mummy is eating. Yes or No) or by proving the sentence starters (Mummy is…) but, with time, the kids get more and more independence and skills. Actually, this activity can start wtih kids looking only at one picture before they are shown the whole sequence. And, bearing in mind that the teacher is the one to select the picture (or pictures) for the activity, it is really easy to choose a particular focus, closely connected to the topic of the lesson, for example talking about toys, talking about clothes, talking about food etc.
A simple story can be created even if only one picture is available, like the one above that also comes from YLE and is, in fact, a reading task, this picture can also become the basis for a story. We can see a beautiful family scene, a Sunday afternoon and everyone is doing something and feeling something. The first step is a simple picture description. The second step is figuring out what all the characters do next. ‘Next, mummy is drinking tea’, ‘Next, daddy is sleeping’ etc and here the kids can become a lot more creative. Naturally, all ideas are good ideas.
One more way of using this approach would be using not the visuals but the sets of words, like the one we have in Movers Reading and Writing part 1 or in Flyers Reading and Writing part 1. The teacher would only need to add some introduction, just like in Movers and Flyers story speaking. Kids need to continue the story and they need to use the words provided. I came up with this idea only while preparing the webinar and I am really looking forward to trialling it out with my students. Above, you can see my example from the webinar.
Introducing linking words
Simple linking words such as ‘because’, ‘and’, ‘but’ and ‘so’ can also be introduced as part of the traditional curriculum for pre-school or primary students.
‘Because’ is the one that we start using in the first half of year 1. It can be included in the hello circle when the students talk about how they are (‘How are you today?’ ‘I am happy’ ‘Because…’) and start giving simple justification for their adjectives. ‘I am happy because it is sunny / because it is Friday / because I have a little homework’. It might happen that the kids will start to answer in their L1 or in a mix of L1 and L2, but it is perfectly fine. First of all, I like to know why my students are happy or sad or angry because it might have an impact on their behaviour in class. Second of all, it helps me to react to their news and to bond.
‘Because’ can also be used while describing pictures or while expressing opinion in a simple way (‘Do you like this story / song / picture?’ ‘Yes, because it is happy / funny / fast etc’)In the beginning, this has to be initiated and supported by the teacher, with the sentence starters or with offering a few options for the answer. It also helps when the teacher acts as a model (‘I am happy because my lunch was yummy’).
‘And‘ is even an easier linker to promote. First of all, it can be demonstrated and supported with gestures (i.e. fingers, to signal more than one element). Second of all, it can be used with any vocabulary, colours, toys, food or emotions (‘I am happy AND beautiful’).
‘But’, by comparison, poses a bigger challenge but it is not impossible. With some of my groups in the past, I used the song already mentioned here (‘What do you like to do’ by Super Simple Song) because its every verse is build around a simple contrast (‘I like dancing BUT I don’t like dancing with a bear’). With some other groups, I started to introduce it with a song, too, ‘Do you like broccoli ice-cream?’, simply by adding ‘but’ for some dramatic effect in-between the lines of the story (‘Do you like ice-cream? Yes, I do’, ‘Do you like broccoli? Yes, I do’ ‘BUT do you like broccoli ice-cream?’) and the kids simply picked up on that.
The most challenging of all of these for my Movers kids turned out to be ‘so‘ as they seemed to confuse it with ‘and’. I haven’t had a chance to implement it in the classroom since it was an idea that came to my during the preparation for this webinar, but this connection could be created in a natural way between ‘I’ve got a stomach ache’ and ‘I don’t eat ice-cream’ or ‘No ice-cream today’ which we use with my pre-primary kids while talking about health and health problems. Again, one more thing to trial and test when I am teaching level 2 of pre-primary again.
As regards the story sequencing linkers such as ‘first’, ‘next’, ‘in the end’, we introduce them through exposure while telling stories based on visuals. It is one more activity that starts with the teacher being responsible for providing those and encouraging the children to follow up with the events of the story.
Staging of the story
One of the biggest challenges that the students face while telling the story is the very genre and the way we tend to present it in class. Very often, children, when they hear the word story, they automatically raise the level of challenge for themselves and they approach the task in a very serious way, hoping to create something that will at least match the creativity and the success of Harry Potter. Which, of course, is not the case. When we start telling stories in class, we are expecting something with a character, a goal and some obstacles, something with a beginning, the middle and the ending and, if we are using the YLE Cambridge materials, something that describes the three or four or five visuals provided.
Our task, as teachers, is to show the students, how this task can be broken in and managed, moving on from a very controlled practice, to freer practice, and, perhaps, eventually, to a very creative story writing or story telling.
Here is one of the approaches that I used in class effectively, based on the Flyers speaking materials.
Step 1: Collecting resources to tell the story in a simple way.
Students can work individually, in pairs or teams. They make a list of all the things they can see in each picture, starting with the basic nouns that can be seen which later can be extended into adjectives, verbs, emotions etc, anything more abstract. Afterwards, the kids, in pairs, describe the pictures (aka tell the story) with all of the words on the list, crossing them out as they use them. This is how we can ensure a good length of a discourse, especially that the teacher will be monitoring the kids as they are creating the list and the teacher can add some of the crucial words if they are missing. The students can exchange their lists and tell the story again, with a different set of words and they can also write the story for homework.
Step 2: Crazy words aka freer practice
This step is a simple development on step 1. The words on the list on the right have been provided by the teacher and, as can be seen, they do not feature in the visuals provided. Since, however, the children already know the story very well, they can be invited to take part in a more creative task. We read the words together with the whole group and I tell them ‘These words are in the story but they are not in the picture’ and we make a few examples together about the first picture, for example: ‘Students are hungry. It is 10 a.m.’, ‘Students are looking at the flowers in the garden’ etc.
Afterwards, children work in pairs and create their own story trying to incorporate all the crazy words.
Step 3: Story and its framework
This is the most creative approach in which the kids use only the general framework of the original story. After the kids tried to tell the story and tried to tell it with a few new details, they have a chance to change as much as they want to within the framwork. I prepare the main events, in the form of questions and we reveal them one by one while the students are working in pairs, thinking and planning their story. Afterwards, we have a big, whole class, storytelling session and it an absolute joy and fun to see in how many versions you can tell the story based with the same building blocks. Here, in the post on the activities in the storytelling campaign, you can find the framework for yet another Flyers story, Charlie and the elephant.
A few bonus ideas
Vyacheslav – about one more, super simple way of setting up a storytelling activity
We have put together twelve 90-minute sessions. At the moment we run them online because it gives us an opportunity to reach a wider audience.
The 12 sessions include:
Introduction. The VYL student: about the child in the classroom
The VYL teacher: the features of a VYL teacher and approaching the material
Classroom management: all the techniques that can help organise the students and the learning process
Behaviour management: dealing with issues
Coursebooks and material development: how to approach the coursebook and how to design own activities
Flashcards: the basic resource for VYL teachers in the online and in the offline classroom
Craft: including and managing craft activities in the classroom
Music and songs: the settler and the stirrer, all in one
Storytelling: using different stories with preschoolers
Lesson planning: how to plan effectively
Games: why kids need games
Literacy: how to start developing literacy skills in the EFL pre-school group
Each session includes both theoretical and practical, with the basics to help us outline and understand the framework and the connection to the ‘adult’ EFL methodology and a lot of practical solutions for the every day teaching. We have also prepared our reading list, with articles, resource books and videos that can help each participant either prepare for the course or to develop further after the course is finished.
The course finishes with an obligatory assessment task which was designed not as a research assignment but as a written reflection task to give the trainees an opportunity to look back at the whole course experience and to summarise the main take-outs.
The additional course components
At the end of each course we always collect feedback from our participants and this is exactly how we got inspired to add these additional components to further improve our course. From summer 2023, these include:
Lesson planning sessions: this is an additional session, a group lesson planning session in which we work with the material from different coursebooks, usually provided by our participants, preparing together with a tutor for ‘a typical lesson’ with this material. This session focuses on selecting and formulating lesson aims, selecting appropriate activities, adapting the coursebook and selecting supplementary materials
Private consultations with the tutor: this is a session that can be used in any way the trainee chooses, for example lesson planning, questions related to course design, discussing classroom managment, professional development, materials and activities etc.
Optional homework written tasks: there are three tasks, as a follow-up to three of the sessions: lesson planning, storytelling, language production. The trainees that decide to submit any of these tasks receive a written feedback from the trainer.
Who this course is for
This course has been initially designed to support the novice teachers in the area of very young language learners and that is why the sessions cover all of the basic areas that constitute the everyday life on the EFL carpet. However, since many of the experienced teachers started their career in VYL in a way and in a situation that was far from ideal, with no pre-service training, with no support and just learning on the go*), for them this course is an opportunity to boost and to reorganise what they know already and to align with the principles of the communicative methodology and the child development psychology.
Every single time we run this course we have a beautiful mix of participants, some experienced teachers and some VYL novice teachers, teachers working online and teachers working offline, teachers from the EFL, from the bilingual education as well as teachers who are also mums of little kids who want to learn how to start teaching their own children. It is a lovely learning environment and everyone is bringing something that they can share. And, it no surprise, that we got a very positive feedback from all of our participants, the newly qualified and the experienced teachers.
Feedback from our trainees
‘I think all the sessions were very useful because we have found out more about teaching very young learners, in some cases understood the mistakes we did and found some ways to improve it.‘
‘I really enjoyed the lessons. The classes about craft, songs and storytelling were especially helpful. Thank you so much!!’
‘All of them were very useful. I love sessions about craft and storytelling. Big thank you, that was great !!!!’
‘All sessions were useful and contained interesting examples. Although, if I have to name those more useful that others, these will be sons, craft and storytelling, great examples to remember and use in my own practice.’
‘Literacy, craft and storytelling session were the most useful as they had direct and immediate impact on my teaching practice.’
‘I’d like to take this opportunity and thank you for this course. I don’t have experience in teaching VYL, so whole course was highly useful and practice-oriented.’
‘I loved the last three sessions because they were pratical and I could use the ideas and materials on my lessons! I can’t say, that there were any useless sessions, but in the beginning there was some information, that was obvious for me. Anyway, I’m happy that I was able to do this course!’
‘Classroom management (I’ve never though before why VYL classrooms are organised in a different way from the classroom devoted to teaching children of different ages as I don’t remember myself being in the kindergarten and later on my classroom at school were very bare; and I was not taught about VYL classroom design before).’
And a few words from the trainers…
I absolutely love teaching the course. It has become some kind of a joke that I start every session with ‘Oh, today we are doing my favourite session’ but it really is every session.
Every single time it is an amazing journey on which we embark together and I take a lot of pleasure in sharing my ideas and experience and to help the trainees see how they can become better VYL teachers. It does not always involve any new amazing materials, coursebooks and resources but only a change of a mindset and a different way of looking at what we already have at our disposal.
The mix and the variety of backgrounds mentioned above is another reason why I like being a trainer on this course. Regardless of what it is that we discuss and look at instantly gets to be seen and considered from a few different angles, such as a different environment for the early language learning such as a bilingual school, home, an EFL class, different time allownances or formats (online and offline) or even different institutional policies because not all the EFL schools are the same. It’s not just ‘the idea from the tutor’, that is the only truth there is. It is an idea from the tutor that gets automatically reflected in a variety different mirrors and that automatically undergoes an analysis and adaptation. Which we are all learning from.
Happy teaching!
*) I am saying this with a deep conviction, based not only on my conversations with my trainees and my mentees but also based on the results of the reseach that I did for my MA thesis a few years ago and my dissertation got its title ‘Left to their own devices?’ for a reason. I, personally, was one of these teachers, too, when I started my teaching and my VYL teaching many years ago.
Can you hear some desperation, dear reader, in the title of this post? Rightly so. I started to write this post after one of the sessions of the summer camp that I took part in. My kids were amazing, of course, clever and eager to learn and, really, we did have a lot of fun. At the same time, looking at how they interact with each other, I could not believe my eyes and my ears. Despite the fact that many of them were already eight and nine, their social skills were on a disastrously low level. Practically anything that involved taking the other humans in the classroom into equation was a huge challenge for way too many of them. I did sigh with desperation, once and twice, and then I rolled up my sleeves and started to introduce pairwork, even though these were not my permanent students.
You may wonder why it shook me so much and why I decided to fix it. One reason is, naturally, my professional obsession with maximising production in kids and, really, I cannot imagine teaching a group of primary school children with the teacher at the centre, all the time. It is a waste of time and a waste of opportunities because kids of that age are capable of working in pairs without constant supervision. And if they do, they automatically produce more language.
However, there is more to it, of course because kids who work in pairs are more independent and more autonomous as learners and they have an opportunity to work with a variety of partners and to make friends and to bond with the group. This, in turns, is a better prognosis for the general classroom and behaviour management because you are less likely to get into trouble and to disrespect someone that you actually like and respect. If only you had a chance to get to know them and to like something about them.
Pairwork, yes or no? YES. One, big, decisive YES.
Where the angels don’t fear to tread. Pair-work in pre-school?
Yes, absolutely yes! I have been introducing pairwork in my pre-school groups first intuitively, simply because I had a very big group of children and we never got to produce any language apart from choral, whole class production and that simply was annoying for me, as the teacher. My students had a lot of potential and I did not want to waste an opportunity. Not quite knowing what to do and how to do it, I started to move towards working in pairs. It worked and by the end of the second year of pre-school, my group was ready and I was able to do what I do with my teens or adults: ‘Together, together, together’ while pointing at pairs of students. By the time we got to primary, this was a natural part of our lessons and some of the children were not even seven at this point. It is possible.
Then, naturally, I decided to do it again, with a new year 1 group, but this time, in a more conscious way, in order to be able to share it with my teachers. We started the course in September, we started to shape the group and the routine and we started to introduce pair-work. I kept my eyes open, I kept our class journal and we did it. It took 13 weeks of a course, with classes that took place only once a week. I presented the results of this research at our BKC Conference in 2020. and you can read more about it in a post here.
How to do it: The choice of the activity
The choice of the activity is one of the most important elements contributing to the success of the whole process. I got a heads-up here only because I have been teaching for many years and I had a chance to bump into one of the older coursebooks for kids which, although it had a few disadvantage and which does not even come close to the level of the currently used coursebooks for children, it did include a few ingenious solutions and, among them, the one I am going to describe below.
The one that featured in every unit of the coursebook was the maze the example of which you can see below. Initially, it was a simple but effective listening game, to practise the target language, especially vocabulary. Kids would listen to a robot dictating the path through the maze, for example: START: red…blue…yellow…brown…grey…etc until one of the exits, A, B or C. The words were separated by a funny sound, something that I would describe as ‘stomping by a robot, marching’ that the kids absolutely LOVED but it also gave them a great advantage of getting enough time to prepare for the following step. In every activity there were about 6 or 7 rounds of the game.
This game can be easily turned into a speaking – listening game and, eventually, into a pairwork.
It starts with the teacher NOT using the audio and dictating the route through the maze, with the kids following it and reaching the final destination. Naturally, the following step is the teacher nominating the students to decide on the following step, one word per child. This stage can go on for as long as it is necessary for the kids to become familiar with the format.
Afterwards, either still in the same unit and with the same maze or in the following unit with the new vocabulary, kids are put into small teams and they lead each other, in teams, through the maze. Eventually, they are put into pairs and they do it with only one partner, with one student speaking and the other student listening and following from the start to the exits.
In order to make it more monitorable, for the teacher and for the students and, also, to make it more achievable, we started to trace the route with coloured pencils or markers, each round with a different colour. This way, the children could always go back in case they got lost and the children can also monitor each other, the student dictating could potentially see where their friends were going.
This way, in a relatively short period of time, the kids got used to the new format, to working together, with only a partial monitoring and support from the teacher. It definitely helped that the vocabulary range in each case was quite limited, namely, only single words, from the obligatory set of words introduced and practised before. The students were not overwhelmed and could focus only on the format of the game. At the same time, however, in the later units of level 2, there were also more complex mazes, for example one in which the kids had to listen to a brief description of an animal for example: it has got stripes, it is big, it can run (zebra). Obviously, that means that the level of challenge can be raised when the children are ready for it.
Julie Ashworth and John Clarke, I Spy 1, SB, p. 23, OUP
It is very easy to recreate the idea using only the black and white clipart visuals and a grid of the required size. Here you see a maze that I created for my preschoolers (rooms).
Below you can see one more type of an activity that features almost in every unit of the coursebook and this one is specifically designed for pairwork for the young students. It was always some kind of a guessing game, with the two spies (the theme of the book, duh:-) trying to guess what the other one is thinking about. I really liked it for the visuals specifically designed for that purpose and the target langauge beautifully displayed on the page to support the students’ production. Using these was a lot of fun and it was effective but I still think that the previous one, the maze, worked better as regards the first steps in working in pairs.
Julie Ashworth and John Clarke, I Spy 1, SB, p. 45, OUP
Contributing factors
There is a whole lot of things that a teacher can do in class in order to facilitate the whole process. They can be implemented throughout the course, little by little, bit by bit.
Seating: make sure that the kids are sitting in a way that faciliates pair-work, in some sort of separation from the other pairs, for example by pairing up the tables and chairs, putting the chairs and kids facing each other.
Resources: these need to be prepared with a lot of care and attention. Apart from the example based on the activity that features in the I Spy coursebooks, described above, the teacher can also use a set of mini-flashcards, as described in my post about pair-work for preschoolers. These cards are used in a game of simple riddles but the cards themselves are small (eight or six or four that fit on an A4 piece of paper) in order for the kids to be able to manipulate them with ease. What is more, a set comprises of an envelope, too that holds all the cards. This way, there is no danger of kids dropping the cards (or if they do, these will fall back into the envelope) and the secret, very necessary in that game, is easily kept throughout the game. Even if the cards are printed on a regular photocopying paper, they are not see-through, being in the envelope.
Roles and turn-taking: Another thing is that the teacher only needs one envelope per pair. This helps a lot with assigning the role. It is crystal clear to the kids who is speaking (the child with the envelope) and who is listening (the child without the envelope). Turn-taking is also more obvious since the kids are literally passing the baton here, the envelope or whatever is the set of materials.
Signals: Introducing the pairwork is a part of the routine and, naturally, it will take some time. To facilitate it, like with the other elements of the class routine in primary and pre-primary, it would be good to include some visual representation of the pairwork, such as gestures or chants, anything that will signal to the students what is about to be the following stage of the lesson. It can be for example a simple flashcard. I love to use a flashcard with a pair of socks for the younger kids and a two pears for the older kids who can get this pronunciation joke but a picture of two kids talking will do, too. Some more modern coursebooks have started to introduce those and that is great). Another solution can be a simple chant, for example ‘Let’s play together! Let’s play in pairs! 3…2…1’. As with all the chants, this will introduce the next stage and it will give the kids a chance to get ready or maybe even to organise themselves. The same applies to the end of the pairwork stage.
Pairing-up: In the early stages, I would recommend a teacher-led pairing up. It is perfectly natural that in a group of children, there will be some students who will be better prepared to work in pairs early and some who will need to more time, even if all the students are of the same age or level. Based on the knowledge of the group and the individual children to end up with the most efficient pairing. This might be necessary to do over a few first lessons, later starting to experiment with some variations. I like to use a set of cards with all the kids’ names and we have a pairwork (or project) draft when we need it. The cards can be taken out of a box or a bag by the teacher or by students, too.
Time: Thil will of course, depend on an activity but choosing an open-ended game, without an obvious grand-finale gives the teacher more freedom and flexibility to finish the game when it is best for the class, rather than having to go until the very end when some of the kids might already be getting tired and bore and when they can start losing their focus. It might be a good idea to set a timer on the phone or to choose a song as a timing tool. It is very necessary to tell the kids how long they will play for.
