#VYLteacher

A VYL classroom. Part 3: In a kindergarten

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@vectorpouch @freepic.com

Case C: Off-site classes in kindergartens

The off-site EFL classes, with the teachers arriving to the kindergarten and teaching their lessons there are quite common.

Advantages

  • The environment is by default child-friendly and safe
  • There are carpets, small tables, small tables or chairs boards and posters are hung on the level of the children
  • There are plenty of posters, toys, craft and stationery products that are child-friendly (ie crayons or safety scissors), books
  • Children feel comfortable in the place, they know where to find the toilet, the spare shoe, their shelves
  • Children already know their classmates
  • There will be plenty of people who already know the children from the day activities and it will be a great advantage as the EFL teachers can use them as the source of information or even ideas.

Disadvantages

  • Children are made to study English in a classroom that might be used for some other purposes, they might feel lost or confused when the room that they normally associate with playing will be the classroom in which they need to do some serious ‘studying’
  • There might be too many distractors such as toys
  • There might be some rules, routines and procedures in the institution that will also have to be taken into consideration, it is best to find out what these are and to try to combine them with the rules and procedures of the English lessons
  • Children might struggle with transitioning between the regular kindergarten activities and the English lessons, provisions must be made for that, for example special routines
  • Any kindergarten activities will have an impact on the flow of the English classes. There might be some specific holidays or trips that might influence the timetable or the curriculum but it is also quite likely that all the children might be tired or, on the contrary, excited on some days, due to the course of the day activities. They might also bring in their emotions and even animosities from the kindergarten.

Solutions

Where to look for ideas for the classroom

  • Have a look at the classroom before the lesson and figure out how you can make it fit your aims and ideas, adapt when necessary and talk to the directors or supervisors to find out as much as possible about the institution and their procedures. If you are planning to introduce some changes, first and foremost focus on explaining the rationale for them. They might not be quite clear to people who are not language teachers but when you provide a rationale, they might be willing to take your suggestions into consideration. Involve your supervisor if you have one.
  • Make the necessary decisions regarding the course such as the coursebooks, photocopying, homework and contacting the parents. These are not quite related to the classroom itself but a lot will be influenced here by the procedures and policies of the kindergarten and they might be different for one kindergarten to the other.
  • Decide where you are going to start the lesson. Ideally, it should take place in a circle, on the carpet but there are other options, too: at the door, in a circle standing. Even if it is a classroom with small desks, there will be some space in-between the board and the first rows or at the back, behind the last row.
  • Decide where in the classroom you are going to have the storytelling corner, the movement corner and where you are going to sit to work with the coursebooks or handouts.
  • Build up your routine and stick to it.
  • Remove the distractors if possible or as many of them as possible.
  • Find out which of the kindergarten resources you are allowed to use.
  • Decide where you are going to keep your things and resources such as crayons or markers for the lesson, handouts, flashcards for the lesson. Please use the same place and make sure you establish with the children that they are not allowed to touch anything that is on the table. It might help to keep everything in a box (as it can be easily lifted to keep it away from the children), it is easy to store and it makes cleaning easy. What is more, if you keep all your resources in one container, you gain a lot of flexibility as all your toys are there, in case you need to change your lesson plan. I have had groups with whom I had to keep all my resources in my rucksack, zipped shut in the begining of the course.
  • Talk to the kindergarten’s stuff and ask them to find a place for you to store your resources in-between the lesson. Otherwise you will have to carry all your resources with you all the time.
  • It is a good idea to talk to the kindergarten’s admin to find out whether and where you can put the students’ work on display. There might be some room in the classroom or in the hallway and it is quite likely that the administration will like the idea of assigning a noticeboard for you and the English classes work. They will also benefit from promoting the classes to the parents whom the teacher most likely is not going to meet in person.

Where to find more ideas?

Sandie Mourao and Gail Ellis ,Teaching English to Pre-primary Children, Delta Publishing

Vanessa Reilly and Sheila Ward, Very young learners, OUP

Herbert Puchta and a big group, there is a semi-circle of small chairs but the room is big enough for the kids to be able to stand up and play some movement games without actually moving too much around the room

A realistic preschool classroom, not quite EFL pre-school but real life.

And another one from PreKPages a great channel on youtube where you can find lots and lots of ideas for working with preschoolers.

A lesson and a classroom from WOW English

And a lesson from Japan from a big sports hall.

And another classroom from China.

Here are also the links to the other two posts in this mini-series, both devoted to teaching in language schools, in a classroom that is used only by the VYL students and the classroom that the little people have to share with other classes.

A VYL classroom. Part 2: Just a regular classroom

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Our hello circle in a big classroom

Case B: Just a regular classroom

The EFL settings, a private language school, a regular classroom adapted to the needs of a group of pre-school children. There are usually big tables and chairs or the foldable desks and materials such as posters that are not necessarily child-friendly.

Advantages

  • The classroom is quite likely to be big and that means that the adult furniture ( frequently the foldable tables) can be moved around to create the space for the hello circle, the kids tables, the story corner etc.
  • Using the big chairs and tables can be an advantage, actually, as the children are sitting far apart and they are not invading each other’s space which might happen when you use a small table. Plus, sitting at the big table is a clear sign that the serious work is about to begin.
  • You can involve the kids in arranging the classroom, that will make them feel responsible for it and it will help the teacher, too.
  • The children might feel ‘honoured’ to be studying in an adult classroom as this way they will become ‘real students’, especially if they are already 5 or 6 and start dreaming of starting school.

Disadvantages

  • The likelihood of sharp corners and not very child-friendly items is much higher.
  • The teacher has to unfold the VYL kingdom before each lesson and fold it back at the end of the lesson because there might be older children or adults coming. And all of that eats up the teacher’s precious break time.
  • The board might be too high up and the only person who can reach it is the teacher (but it is not the worst thing in the world, you can put up things in places where the kids cannot reach them)

Solutions

  • Have a look at the classroom before the lesson and figure out how you can make it fit your aims and ideas. Talk to the admin of the school (and the other teacher using the room) and request permission to move the things around and to rearrange things. It is always worth checking the other rooms in the school. Perhaps one of them is more suited to the needs of the little children and perhaps swapping rooms or furniture is possible. It is always worth asking.
  • Make sure that the classroom is safe. Look out for the sockets, sharp edges, anything that is not stable or sticking out. There are easy ways of making the place child-proof ie moving out the furniture, swapping the classroom, getting the socket plugs etc.
  • Decide where you want to start the lesson. I am a huge fan of lining up outside of the classroom but it might not be always possible.
  • The photo that you can see as the cover photo above is our hello circle that I created in one of the corners of our very adult classroom. In a regular lesson with my pre-schoolers, we would spend here about half or even two-thirds of our lesson. A regular lesson started here with a hello circle, songs, revision and the new langauge introduction. Later on, we would move to the big tables for the more serious work with the coursebook and handouts and we would go back to the small circle for the final game, story and song. This lasted a good few years, even after we moved to the primary and we stopped here only when my students, already A2 and as ‘mature’ as 8 and 9 y.o.
  • Think of the routine that you are planning to have and build it with your specific classroom in mind. Decide where you are going to do the hello circle, where you are going to have your storytelling, where you are going to sit during the focused task. After you have built it, stick to your routine.
  • Assign a corner or the area for the movement games. Perhaps the classroom is big enough and one of the corners can be kept empty. Perhaps it is not very big and you will have to move the small stools or the carpet out of the way to make room for the movement games.
  • The same applies to the storytelling corner. If the classroom allows for that, it would be great to have the space dedicated only to the storytelling activities. Ideally, that would be a carpet for the kids to sit on and a chair for the teacher, to sit slightly above the students’ level. If there is no carpet, the kids can also sit on cushions or on small mats or even the foam puzzle pieces which are easily stored and can be dealt with by the children themselves. Having said that, I have also been teaching in the classrooms where the only option was for us to be either sitting straight on the floor, under the board or sitting on the big chairs in a semi-circle around the teacher.
  • As regards the focused task, it is normally done at the big desks / foldable tables or at a small table that the teacher puts out in the centre. The small table means that we have all the students around us but it is not going to work for groups bigger than six. Everthing becomes very crowded all of a sudden, as soon as the sixth student comes. Using two small tables mean more work and time invested in setting them up and if they are round tables the teacher spends the entire focused task looking to the left and to the right, back and forth. With larger groups, it is almost better to use the adult seats.
  • Think how you are going to store your resources and your materials. Sometimes scissors and crayons will have to be shared with the other teachers at the school (and hence stored in the teacher’s room), sometimes you will be able to keep them in your classroom. Think of a safe space that is not within the children’s reach ie the higher shelves of the cupboard, a locked-up cupboard etc.
  • Decide where you are going to keep your things and resources for the lesson such as crayons or markers, handouts, flashcards for the lesson. Please use the same place and make sure you establish with the children that they are not allowed to touch anything that is on the table. It might help to keep everything in a box (as it can be easily lifted to keep it away from the children), it is easy to store and it makes cleaning easy. What is more, if you keep all your resources in one container, you gain a lot of flexibility as all your toys are there, in case you need to change your lesson plan. I have had groups with whom I had to keep all my resources in my rucksack, zipped shut in the begining of the course.
  • Decide where you are going to put all the kids’ stuff such as their bags and books (which you are not going to use at all times during the lesson and for that reason it is better to keep them in a special place ie on the window-sill, on a special table etc) or even the kids’ jackets and boots. Sometimes it is possible to hang them outside, sometimes they will be hanging in the corner of the classroom. Make sure you keep your activities away from that corner
  • It is good to have at least one noticeboard where you can display your students’ work. It can be a noticeboard in the classroom but it can be a noticeboard in the hallway, too. I have had classrooms in which the door was the only available space and we used to put up pictures there using blutack.
  • Try to make the classroom child-friendly. Perhaps it is possible to decorate one of the corners of the room with the colourful kids’ posters or to decorate the windows with snowflakes or colourful leaves in winter and in autumn. Even if there is cupboard or boxes with toys, by bringing just one puppet, your class assistant, you can create great atmosphere in the room and make a huge difference. If there are more toys, it is a good idea to have a container for them, a basket or a box, in order to be able to keep them stored (and out of sight) when you don’t need them.

Here you can find the other two posts in this mini-series: on the classroom that is used only by the VYL students and their teachers and about the classrooms in kindergartens. This last post also includes some bibliography, if you would like to read more.

Happy teaching!

A VYL classroom. Part 1: Our little pre-school kingdom

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This is my beloved classroom, mid-planning

I have decided to write this article inspired by my trainees on the IH VYL course and to collect, in one post, everything that I have learnt about a classroom that is appropriate for the lessons with the EFL preschoolers.

This post was meant as a short, one piece (emotionally-loaded, perhaps) description of a classroom. But then, as soon as I started writing, I realised that there is a lot more to say and that I myself have worked in so many different places that were made into VYL classrooms that, abracadabra, three posts came out of it. The other two can be found here: about the regular classroom that becomes a VYL classroom and about teaching in kindergartens

Well, enjoy! And if you have any other ideas to add, there is the comments box!

Case A: Our pre-school kingdom

This is a classroom in a language school that was set aside for the lessons with pre-schoolers. The furniture has been bought for the little people and there are no big tables or chairs. There are no other classes than those with pre-schoolers.

Advantages

  • The classroom is used only by the pre-primary students and teachers and all the furniture and the design can be adapted to the needs of the students.
  • The classroom is safe.
  • The room can be fully decorated in a child-friendly way, even if it is not all done at once, the elements can be added to it step by step.
  • There is plenty of room to display the kids’ work
  • It is easy to store resources and they are all at hand which gives the teacher a lot of flexibility while already in class.
  • The students feel comfortable in class and it is much easier to build up the routine.
  • With some investments, there is a lot of potential for some interesting solutions such as educational carpets (yes, in English!), lines painted on the floor that help to divide the classroom into sections (or just a hop-scotch grid that is always there, l saw it once in a classroom at IH Bucharest), wall hangings that now come with some of the coursebooks and can be left on the walls and so on.

Disadvantage

  • I cannot think of any, sorry)

Solutions

  • Have a look at the classroom before the lesson and figure out how you can make it fit your aims and ideas. Do not worry if at the start of the year you do not have a clear idea of what you want your classroom should be like. There is always room to experiement, to try new ideas and to improve the classroom, based your research, ideas or the group that you currently work with.
  • Make sure that the classroom is safe. Look out for the sockets, sharp edges, anything that is not stable or sticking out. There are easy ways of making the place child-proof ie moving out the furniture, swapping the classroom, getting the socket plugs etc.
  • The routine and the classroom go together and one can influence the other. They can also change through the year.
  • My dream classroom actually does exist and everything that I am going to include in this section of the post is based on a real experience.
  • My classroom is a rectangle and it has been divided into three sections: the carpeted area with a set of small chairs in a circle, a circle of small triangular tables arranged in a circle in the middle and another carpeted area by the window.
  • We start the lesson outside of the classroom. I am a huge fan of lining up. Kids walk in one by one, they put their books on the table, at their seats and then take a place on one of the chairs in the hello circle.
  • Afterwards, we move to the carpet by the window and this is where we study, we revise and play the flashcards games and this is also where we get up to do our movement games. We used to spend more time in the circle but then, last year, my students started to suggest, more and more frequently, to go to the carpet and that is exactly what we did. Now we spend there a lot more time. One of the reasons for that might be the fact that we got a big TV that hangs on the wall by the window. In order to make sure that we don’t sit too close to the screen, I put a piece of painter’s scotch onto the carpet and this is the line behind which we always have to sit while we are watching anything on the screen. Here we also do all of our movement games.
  • Afterwards we move to the tables in a circle and this is where we work with the book or the handouts. This is where we write and this is where we do craft.
  • The lesson finishes on the carpet that is also our storytelling corner. Sometimes our story is a video and in that case we sit in front of the TV. Sometimes it is a storybook with me sitting on a small chair and the kids sitting in a semi-circle on the carpet.
  • We finish the lesson on the carpet, too. We sing a song, talk about the homework and choose stickers.
  • In the corner of the classroom, there is a bookcase and on the shelves we keep the most immediate resources such as markers, scissors in a closed box on the top shelf, glue in another box, crayons, our notebooks and two big boxes with dice, blocks, plastic toys. I don’t have to share them with anyone else, these are just used by the little kids. Outside of the classroom we have to cupboards, too and a chest of drawers for flashcards and all the other things we might need.
  • My resources for the lesson, for my groups are kept in three different baskets. I keep there flashcards we are using currently as well as few other sets we revise as well as our favourite games, dice, etc. The children do not touch them, mostly because they are too big and we have learnt on developing the idea that this is Anka’s basket and we do not touch it. Keeping things in a basket also makes it very easy for us to be moving around from the circle to the carpet and to the table etc. In the past, we would move between two or three different classrooms in one lesson and the basket was superuseful then, too.
  • I have three little tricks, too. First of all, since our table is made of small triangular tables, I have some room in the centre and this is where I put a stool. This is where I leave all the materials for the focused task for the lesson. The small tables are also very easy to be moved apart which makes it possible for me to enter the centre and sit there, having all my kids around and all the resources at hand.
  • There is also a small cupboard under the table and I use it to keep a selection of storybooks, coursebooks and posters which I can use in class.
  • And since the same cupboard has a small section underneath, a section that I can close and that is why it is used to hide all the secrets and surprises
  • I display the kids’ work on two noticeboards in the classroom but also on the noticeboards in the hallway.
  • There are no toys in the classroom. We are lucky enough to have another small room where kids can play before or after the lesson and this where we keep all the toys.

Happy teaching!

For the love of…the adjective

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Our basic set of adjectives

Once upon a time…

This is how I daydream it: my primary kids go on to take their Starters (this is an old daydream, this year they will be taking Flyers), they are describing the pictures or telling the story. The examiner asks ‘How is this boy?’ and my kids answer ‘He is confused.’ and the examiner cannot believe her/his ears but she/he is, actually, impressed.

‘Confused’ is one of the many adjectives that my primary kids have learnt thanks to the sheep game that we’ve been playing for a few years now. We started with the normal adjectives, happy, sad, angry, sleepy but the kids noticed that I’ve been hiding some cards and they got curious. And because they were curious, they started to ask questions. Since the cards were wonderfully happy and funny, and since, together with some clarification from me, they did illustrated the concept very well (after all, they were created for children), we started using the ‘confused’ card (and with them ‘chatty’, ‘in love’, ‘crazy’).

That, in hindsight, was an excellent idea because this turned out to be a very useful words because I happen to be confused and my kids happen to be confused, too. Not to mention all the characters from all the stories. ‘Confused’ might be from the B1/B2 shelf, but, we found it very very useful, at the age of seven, in something that was the pre-A1 level.

‘OK’, ‘ill’, ‘in love’, ‘creative’

The coursebook and the curriculum

A disclaimer first: my comments in this section are based only on a very un-thorough looking through the coursebooks for pre-schoolers, only a quick glance at the contents page and the units. I acknowledge that fact that I might have missed something and that a proper research might be necessary and, for that reason, I will refrain from quoting any titles here. However, having flipped through five recently published coursebooks for pre-primary learners, I did not find much as regards adjectives, apart from colours (all), some of the weather words (depending on the title) and some random happy, sad and hungry (also depending on the title). With one honourable exception that introduces quite a few emotions as well as some other opposites, either through stories or through CLIL projects. Overall, however – not good at all.

I also had a look at the primary books and here the situation is admittedly better because all of the modern publications tend to align their content with the YLE Cambridge wordlist and that, in turn, means about 50 adjectives on the pre-A1 level, including colours and possessive adjectives.

As it happens, my school is now getting ready for the YLE mock exams and I am putting together a set of materials for our teachers and kids and that made me look at the said wordlist with a great more deal of scrutiny. Starters kids (pre-A1) are supposed to know about 50 adjectives, Movers kids (A1) – additional 50 adjectives and Flyers kids (A2) – 70 more adjectives on top of that. I am aware of the fact that these lists were not created on a whim, quite the contrary – they are a result of a large-scale research and the effort of a huge team of people. But there are all these questions there, too. Why do the pre-A1 kids need to know the adjectives such as ‘double’ or ‘correct’ and ‘right’ (as correct) and ‘its’ (also an adjective) and some other ones, although not adjectives (‘coconut’, ‘pineapple’, ‘flat’ and ‘apartment’ or ‘lime’)? Why would these be more important, useful and appropriate for primary school children than ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘easy’, ‘difficult’ or ‘loud’ and ‘quiet’, which are only introduced at the A1 level?

I do not have the answers but I have been introducing them (or some of them) much earlier than that. And effectively so. If you are interested why and how, please continue reading.

‘crazy’

Emotions and feelings

‘Sasha, how do feel today?‘ is one of the questions that we ask in every lesson. Why? Well, I guess, first and foremost it is for socialising. This is the question that we ask when we meet someone, just to make a conversation, at least with adults.

Since our students are children, however, there is a lot more to that. Children are growing, developing their social skills and learning about a variety of emotions available and, even more importantly, learning how to deal with these emotions and learning how to recognise these emotions in others. That is why giving them tools to do that, in their L1 and, naturally, in their L2, is absolutely crucial.

Ideally, all the Sashas in the world would walk into the classroom being happy, totally over the moon, brimming with joy and ready to conquer the world with us in the next 45 minutes. But it is not possible for every Sasha to be happy every day and, as a teacher, I want to know how they really are and during the hello circle I am, literally, all ears because if Sasha is sad or sleepy or hungry, or, sometimes, angry, I would like to know that. Not only to show empathy but also to look at the lesson and what I have prepared for today from the group’s and the individuals’ point of view. Maybe a bunch of sleepy children will not be able to deal very well with the story? Maybe it will be necessary to keep an eye on Sasha and accept that today she might not be able to focus as well as usually because she is feeling a bit under the weather. Maybe it is a good idea to start with this silly game of ours (although I did promise myself to ‘never ever’) because it might distract and cheer up this little human who walks in and announces ‘I am very, very, very angry.’

Having this range of emotions vocabulary is also very handy when it comes to behaviour management, even if in the simplest of terms.

Situation type #1: an unpleasant situation: someone draws on someone else’s paper, someone takes someone else’s toy /book / marker without asking, someone jumps the queue, no casualties, only a lot of unhappiness in the room and one person is on the verge of tears. ‘Look. Sasha is very sad now‘. Naturally, it might not be the case of ‘one size only’, one solution for all occasions but it is a good start.

Situation type #2: a 5 y.o. confrontation: both parties did have a disagreement, both parties are not very happy and, definitely, way too upset to just get over it and get involved in the lesson activities. ‘Sasha, are you angry?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘It’s ok.’ Again, some cases are more complex than that, but in many situations the very fact of calling the spade a spade and showing that it is natural to feel angry (and, by default, giving the human some time out to accept and recover) is the best solution. It applies also to all the negative emtions, as long as no comes to any harm.

To be perfectly honest, sometimes (only sometimes!) it feels like this brief and contained reaction, limited by the fact that extreme language grading is necessary, is the best solution. Anything to avoid a long lecture from the adult on ‘The negative impact and the long-term consequences of….’ that children sometimes receive from their teachers, baby-sitters, nannies, parents, grandparents…

‘ill’

Riddles

This is, by far, one of our favourite games: making riddles. The game is introduced in its simplest from, with a set of flashcards and with the students guessing the secret word which the teacher or one of the children keep close to their chest. That’s just the beginning, however, once the kids are comfortable and familiar with the format, a set of simple adjectives are added, first the colours (based on the visuals in the flashcards) and big / small. Then, depending on the topic, we introduce and play with the relevant adjectives, for example fast / slow / big / small / loud / quiet while talking about transport, big / small / friendly / dangerous while talking about animals, hot and cold while talking about food and big / small / soft / hard / light / heavy while talking about the everyday objects and so on.

The kids can either use the adjectives of their choice and affirmative sentences (It’s big, it is yellow) or they can react to teacher’s or kids’ questions (Is it big or small?).

A variation of this activity is also I spy with my little eye adopted (and limited) to the set of vocabulary that the students are familiar with, played with a set of flashcards or a poster.

Expressing opinion…

…or, rather, justifying your opinion, something that can become a part of pretty much every unit and every set of words. Not only does it create an opportunity to personalise the vocabulary by dividing it into the things we like and the things we don’t like but also to give more detail and to build a small discourse (I like it. It is beautiful) or even first complex sentences (I like it because it is beautiful).

Naturally, that will require a different set of adjectives but beautiful, ugly, easy difficult, interesting and boring to be the concepts that preschool children understand, even though the flashards and visuals will be based on some symbols.

Storytelling

Our storytelling has reached some new amazing levels since we started working extensively on adjectives, both with primary and pre-primary students. You can read more about in an earlier post on the Storytelling Campaign here and here.

‘confused’

In my classroom

In this academic year, I am working with three pre-school groups, level 1, level 2 and level 3 and I am happy to say that even my youngest level 1 students are familiar with the set of 12 different adjectives that you can see in the first photograph plus a few more that we have learnt through songs. Level 2 group have got the basic set, quantifiers ‘very’ and ‘a little’ and a few more adjectives lined up. Level 3 group have got a nice set to describe food, transport and animals (including ‘scary‘) and they have already started working on extanding that range.

The photographs that were chosen to illustrate this post all come from the set that I have created for my pre-school group.

I have decided to use paper plates because they are durable, easy to stock and they have a shape of a circle aka they are a face. In the classroom, we put them in neat rows on the carpet, in the middle of the circle, to support production. My younger students like to pick up those that are relevant and hide behind them, showing how they really feel. This makes this part of the lesson a bit more kinesthetic.

I have drawn all of them myself but before making the decision on how to represent each adjective, I like to look at different emoticons to get inspired and to find something that meets two criteria a) I can draw it and b) my students will be able to associate it with a specific concept.

In some cases, the symbol was pretty easy for students to decode (for example: an owl = clever), in some others, I had to follow up with a brief clarification (for example: lightbulbs = ideas = creative). After the first lesson, I decided to upgrade the ill flashcard by adding a real tissue for the poor sneezing person.

There is another thing that I am considering at the moment. With my preschool students we start with the adjectives that help us describe how we feel and it must have been out of sheer linguistic greed that I decided to add those adjectives that describe personal characteristics rather than emotions such as ‘strong’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘clever’. Although, to be honest, we adults know very well that there are days when we feel particularly beautiful or not and the kids responded well to it. At the moment, I am considering different ways of organising all the adjectives that we already know and building up on that, in each category.

Basically, the best is yet to come.

Where to find the adjectives?

Happy teaching!

EFL metaphors #2: Teachers about their first lessons with VYL

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1970 Brazil

This is definitely not the first post here on working with pre-schoolers and certainly not the first one written for the preschool teachers. If you are interested, you can find all of them here, and if you are looking for something written specifically for the novice preschool teachers, you can start reading about behaviour management, singing in the classroom, rewards charts, homework for pre-schoolers and lesson planning.

There is also this one here, The first VYL lesson survival kit, which for a very long time already has been one of the most popular and most frequently accessed pieces I have committed and published on this blog. A coincidence? I don’t think so.

I would like to think that the world is changing for the better and that the novice VYL teachers around the world are getting the help and support they need, either from their managers, from the methodology and resource books, or from the fellow teachers on the social media and blogs. But, even if they do, entering the room with a bunch of little children, whom you don’t know (yet), who do not speak English (yet) and who may not have any idea as regards why we have gathered here (yet!!!), well, this is not you typical ‘dream come true‘. And yes, with time, as you get more experience, you learn better how to prepare, what to expect and how to be, but there is no doubt that starting the course with all the other age groups is easier. No doubt whatsoever.

It is no coincidence, either, that my MA dissertation at the University of Leicester was devoted to teacher education for the first-year pre-primary teachers of English and that I decided to give it the following title ‘Left to their own devices?‘…

The time will come when I finally publish the results of my research in a real article (keep your fingers crossed!). Today, in the series of the EFL Metaphors, I would like to share a tiny little bit of it.

1931, Argentina

It started with…

Well, it started with an article which I talked about in the first entry in the series. The basis for my dissertation was a survey filled in by about fifty of my colleagues who had a chance to teach EFL pre-schoolers in Russia. It was a joy and a relief to find out that most of them evaluated their experience as ‘overall positive’, although, as one of them said ‘Literally, nothing was easy and everything was new’.

This inspired me to ask the participants of the study to try to describe their first year of teaching in one line (although, to be fair, I did not quite specify at the time that I wanted to get a metaphor). Here are some of them, accompanied by clipart library images selected by me.

1950 Switzerland

What was your first year in the VYL world like?

‘A ring of roses, a pocket full of posies, a-tishoo, a-tishoo. We all fall down (in a good way!)’ (Keely)

‘Positively challenging in terms of experience gained and stress dealt with.’ (Rory)

‘Pretty tough. I had to learn everything quickly and often had no time to properly reflect on my lessons. But the experience I got is valuable and helped me a lot afterwards.’ (Victoria)

‘It was like a roller-coaster. Sometimes you are enthusiatic and excited, sometimes frustrated and stressed’ (teacher 3)

‘Challenging, full of errors on my side, but at the same time joyful and full of great memories.’ (Vita)

‘Challenging but absolutely rewarding’ (Irina)

‘It was a beautiful mess’ (Cristina)

Just a few words

Apart from the fact that now, as ‘a researcher’ I am collecting these gems, I also like to use them in my teacher training sessions and workshops. They help to encourage participants to reflect on why the first lessons with the little people might be more challenging than those with any other group . They are also a great starting point in discussions between the less and the more experience VYL teachers or in discussions between the VYL teachers and the non-VYL teachers.

My dream would be to use metaphors at the beginning and at the end of a training process, in one specific area of teaching, to compare how we change our beliefs and attitudes. It is not my original idea, I got it from the same article that inspired the whole series. Maybe next time we are running the IH VYL course…

Instead of a coda

When I started to write this post, I realised that I do not have a metaphor for these first days, weeks and months as a VYL teacher. Nobody asked me then and, somehow, I forgot to ask myself when I was carrying out the research. Does it even matter what it felt like, this something that took place fifteen years ago? Probably not, but for the sake of this post and for fun, I made a promise that I would have figured it out, while writing. I did. Here we go:

‘It’s like a whitewater rafting, while you are trying hard to keep on smiling.‘

Happy Teaching!

P.S. Big, big thanks to all the teachers who agreed to take part in my MA survey! Those that I could quote in this post and all the others!

P.P.S. Please remember, even if your first lesson is not what you would like it to be, the second will be much better!

P.P.P.S. Don’t forget to check out the wonderful directory of all the useful things in the VYL world created by Sandy Millin. You can find it here.

1950s, Brazil

Dear Mr Bruner aka Exercises in scaffolding

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Dear Mr Bruner,

I am happy to inform you that, inspired by your article, I have decided to follow your example and to start experimenting in the area of scaffolding…

Oh, how I wish I could write a letter of that kind. Since I first read the article by Bruner, Woods and Ross on the original research and how the term ‘scaffolding’ started to mean what it does to us, teachers and educators, it has become a kind of a life mission to spread the word about it among my teachers and trainees, conference attendees and, of course, the readers of my blog. This is also the area that I choose to invesitage in my first classroom research project as part of my MA programme.

Of course, the most important things keep happening in the classroom, in the everyday when you observe and adapt your instructions, gestures, voice and actions to better suit the young or very young learners as regards demonstration, marking critical features, reduction in degrees of freedom, recruitment, direction maintenance and frustration control (the six orignal features outlined in the article).

This time, the starting point was the lazy teacher…

I started to plan the final lesson with my three pre-school groups that also happened to be our Christmas lesson. And it was out of this tiredness and the madness of the end of the year that made me wake up one day and decide: ‘I am going to repeat the lesson!’

Three lessons in a row, three different levels, three different age groups and the same lesson plan. Well, to a point, of course. We would all study the same vocabulary set and sing the same songs, but the activities would vary, depending on what the children are capable of.

Topic, vocabulary and structure

There were eight words in the set (Santa, a reindeer, a stocking, a Christmas tree, a present, a start, a snowflake, a snowman) and I wanted to combine them with the question that we all had been practising before: ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s a…’.

The level 1 kids (and the youngest group) have got as far recognising the words and pointing at the right flashcards and participating in the ‘What’s missing?’ game although most of the time they would guess the missing word in Russian and they actively produced only some of them in English, such as ‘a star’, ‘a snowman’ and Santa. We also watched the ‘Guess the word video‘ and it was a chance for us to drill the vocabulary in a different way. We also introduced ‘What do you want for Christmas‘ and it was a nice opportunity for us to revise toys which we covered in the previous unit. But only that. In the end of the lesson we also had time for storytelling and we used Rod Campbell ‘My presents’, again as a way of revising the key vocabulary.

With the level 2 kids, we did pretty much the same but the kids were able to remember and to reproduce all eight words really quickly. We played the same game (What’s missing) but they were all actively involved and producing. We watched the video and guessed the words, pretty much just the way the younger group did, although it was interesting that I did not need to encourage them to repeat the words and, as soon as the full picture and the correct answer was revealed, the kids said the word without any cues from me. It seems that due to their age and to the fact that they have been in class for longer, they are much better used to that kind of reaction to the content. We seem to have developed that habit already.

As for the song, we even managed to personalise the song and talk about whether each of the presents featuring in the song are a good idea (or not? ‘Not’, according to some students:-) and we sang a verse for each of the kids:

‘What do you want for Christmas, Christmas, Christmas? What do you want for Christmas? Santa is on his way…’

‘I want a…’

I did not use the storybook with the older children. I had planned it only for the little ones. For the older ones, we had a back-up of an episode of Christmas Peppa, but, in the end, there was no time for that.

The oldest group, level 3 kids, need only a quick revision of all the words and then we could play a variety of games. We did not even play ‘What’s missing?’ as they are too ‘adult’ and this particular game is not challeging for them anymore. Instead, we played a team game, ‘Tell me about it’, in which the players choose a box, open it and say something about the picture hidden in the box. And they collect the points.

We did use the video mentioned above but in this lesson it was not just a simple guessing game, we also managed to talk about whether each round is going to be easy or difficult and then to comment on what it really was. And, of course, the song was also personalised and followed-up by a proper chat. There was also another song, ‘Who took the cookie from the cookie jar?‘, in its life acquatic version (nothing to do with Christmas, but the kids were curious and this is the game we are playing right now). This group are already quite good at personalising songs (aka ‘The original version is good but let’s see what we can do with it and how can we make it better?’) so it was the kids to suggest that we start singing it when we pick up our surprise at the end of the lesson from the reception. If I rememeber correctly, the final version of it (as shaped up by the kids) went along the lines of: ‘Who took the surprise from the surprise jar?‘

I was teaching, having fun and keeping my eyes and ears open and trying to remember what was happening. It was already very interesting but I was really waiting for the most important part, the cherry on the cake.

The cherry on the cake

Surprisingly enough, this time round, it did take a long while to choose the craft activity but finally I settled on the snowman. I found something that I liked among the 25 Easy Snowman Crafts For Kids on countryliving.com. I planned the lesson, spent an hour cutting out the circles, the noses, the hats, the arms and the Christmas trees and orgnising the room. And then we took off.

It so does happen that although my children are divided into groups by the level and by the age, there are exceptions and special cases in all three groups.

The actitivity, the materials, the staging and the instructions were exactly the same in all three groups but the outcomes (visible in the photographs below) and the scaffolding necessary (not visible in the photographs:-) heavily depended on the age of the students.

The youngest students produced these beauties:

This was interesting, especially because this lesson came first and after a very short moment, I realised that, while preparing and planning, I gauged myself for a slightly older audience and I had to adapt on the go, especially for the almost 3 y.o. girl for whom it was the trial lesson and the first 45 minutes in our classroom.

It turned out pretty quickly that it is quite a challenge to glue the ribbon, to turn the circle over and to tie it and that the orange ‘carrot’ nose is actually very small. But we managed, with the pace really, really slow and the teacher keeping an eye and demonstrating everything twice. Plus, yes, the teacher had no other choice but to help with the ribbon.

The age of the students shows most obviously in the way that all the small parts were glued and how the eyes, the smile and the buttons were drawn, with a different level of accuracy and precision. Almost where they should be:-)

And it was because it took longer to produce the snowman that I decided to skip the little sticky arms. They were too thin, too fiddly and too risky. And the snowmen still look pretty without them.

The snowman created by the 5 y.o. hands looks like that

First of all, the five-year-old snowmen did not take as much time to produce and the little fingers were much more agile and ready. As a result, the teacher did not need to help with the ribbons, the noses were handles with much more efficiency and we did have time to add the arms.

It is interesting to see that at this age, the students did observe the teacher (the mentor / the expert) to do exactly what she was doing but they were observing to figure out what had to be done and to interpret it in their own way. Some snowmen were happy but not all. Some had the scarf tied on the neck aka above the arms and the others had it more where their snowman-y waist would be. Some had the buttons and some did not. Some snowman mouths were a string of dots, some were drawn with a line. Some of the Christmas trees were glued on the snowman’s chest (like in the teacher’s model) but then again, some were holding them in their hands (although this obviously involves even a higher level of precision).

The 6 y.o. snowmen look like that:

The older snowmen are even ‘neater’ (in inverted commas here because I adore all of these snowmen, even the ones that look as if they were created by Pablo Picasso) and the evidence of precision and accuracy as well as even a more detailed and a more personalised version, which were the students’ own additions as they were not modelled by the teacher such as the eyebrows, the hat decorations (not featured in the photos) or a bigger number of buttons.

And the oldest of them all, the almost 7 y.o.

This snowman was made by our oldest student, a girl who is actually in school but who is finishing the level with us. As regards the level of English, the development of the literacy skills, she is like the other students in the group, but her motor skills are more developed and for that reason she usually is the fast-finisher. That is not an issue and while she is waiting for the group to finish, she usually continues working on her craft or handout, adding details and decorations.

This time round, she decided that her snowman is going to be a snowgirl, with her and a bow, which was her own original idea.

Reflections of a small scale Jerome Bruner…

This was an absolutely fascinating experience and I would really recommend it to teachers who work with different levels within the same age group, especially within primary and pre-primary where scaffolding seems to be one of the most important factors deciding about the task completion and success.

  • It can be a great source of information, about the students’ skills and abilities…
  • …as well as an opportunity to trial something new, be it a song, a video, a game or a craft activity and to learn more about this type of a task.
  • It is a chance for the teacher to practise and to develp their scaffolding brain…
  • …and a great opportunity for a freer practice in the area of differentiated learning, not only within the group of learners (something that happens in every class) but on the level of different age groups and levels

Like in the original experiment, the design or the choice of the task and the material is crucial but the holiday lessons, not really closely connected to the coursebook curriculum, seem to be a perfect way out.

What else? Not much? Some curiosity on the part of the teacher, some willingness to experiment and some flexibility in order to be able to adapt on the go. Plus, the eyes wide open to notice all the little changes and proceedings.

These two, in the photo below, are my own interpretation of the original craft and a more complex version of it, here in the form of a card, made by an adult (myself). Perhaps this is what I am going to make with my oldest primary group in our Christmas lesson. If we do, I will let you know how it goes. That would be, indeed, a nice follow-up and an extension of our experiments. We’ll see. In the meantime:

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

Happy teaching!

The diary of a lazy (VYL) teacher: Five songs that have become games

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‘The hills are alive with the sound of music….’

Hello! My name is Anka and I am here to tell you how to be a lazy teacher. ‘Lazy’ here is to highlight ‘no preparation‘ although that does not mean ‘doing nothing at all‘. That never happens in the pre-school classroom.

All of the songs featured here are the favourites of my students and that is one of the two reasons why we turned them into games. The other one is the fact that all of them contains the most precious structures and an opportunity that I could not just miss.

One disclaimer that needs to be included here (and the most important one here) is that things do not happen overnight and these are not the games that we play in the same lesson in which the songs are introduced. The song games are the freer practice activity, the follow-up, the spontaneous production opportunity and the fun opportunity, yes, but we start playing them strictly only when the kids have become entirely familiar (‘borderline bored’ even) with a song. All due to the age of the students and the way they process songs and the world.

This post will be about our (mine and the kids’) Top Five Songs, those which brought us most fun. If you are interested in the logistics, please have a look at the older post in which I describe the stages of un-singing a song in more detail. You can find it here.

Do you like broccoli ice-cream?

If, by any chance, you are not familiar with the phenomenon of broccoli ice-cream, it is definitely time to catch-up. This is the song that my own personal ‘un-singing’ started with and I have safely say that since I found this song, this has been the only tool I have been using to introduce and to practise ‘Do you like…?’ with both my primary and pre-primary students.

We start with singing and talking about food, we created our own most random, disgusting and delicious, food combinations and then we slowly move towards the non-culinary questions, too.

What do you like to do?

When I was first introducing this song, I was in two minds. On the one hand, the song was very tempting – lots of useful verbs, a beautiful complex sentence with a linking word ‘but’ and lots of fun. On the other hand, my 5 year-old preschoolers, beginners and all these verbs…I could not imagine all of these being pre-taught all together. We would have to have a whole separate unit, flashcards, two weeks of practice and then the song itself. I didn’t want to do that.

And I did not. We turned everything upside down and inside out and we started with just watching the video, for the fun of it and for pleasure. The practice and the speaking, started with these few verbs that we did know already such as ‘dance’, ‘ride a bike’, ‘cook’. They were the main focus and everything else was acquired, bit by bit.

When we create our own ideas for things we like and don’t really like to do, the kids first tend to change only little details, for example ‘I like riding a bike but I don’t like riding a dinosaur’ instead of the original ‘shark’ or to use the ideas from other verses, for example ‘I like reading but I don’t like reading in the air’, instead of ‘upside down’. But the important thing is that they speak and the song helps them produce complex sentences. The really amazing thing happens later on – the more we play, the more creative and original these contributions become.

As a teacher, I am mostly interested in maximising production, of course, but there are some hidden bonuses here. The kids know that it is the creative part of the lesson and they are really looking forward to hearing their friends’ ideas (aka ‘we work on the focus and extending the attention span’), they listen (aka ‘we develop one more skill’) and they react either by just laughing or expressing opinion when their own view on riding dinosaurs or drawing on the moon differs from that of the author (aka ‘we develop interactive skills’).

As quiet as a mouse

As soon as I found this song, I knew that I would be singing it with all my students. After all, conditions are perfect: a yummy piece of a structure that wonderfully lends itself to language games, the theme of the animals, some great adjectives (a most recent obsession of a VYL teacher) and, last but not least, a few music genres that were chosen to represent different animals. What’s not too like here?

I liked it so much that I decided to introduce it ‘just because’, not waiting until the next animal lesson or the next adjectives lesson. Actually, at this point, my ‘advanced’ pre-schoolers got bored with all the hello songs (of which I was informed) and so this has become the new hello song or the piece that we start our lessons with now.

And then we play, making new sentences about the animals (‘as beautiful as a lion’), ourselves (‘as happy as Anka’) and all the impossible and sarcastic combinations (‘as big as a ladybird’ and ‘as little as a giraffe’). With lots and lots of laughter.

I’m rocking in my school shoes

This is the only song in this set that does not come from Super Simple Songs and which we owe to Pete the Cat.

Here, the story took a completely different turn – I did want a module on school (it was the start of the year) and on the Present Continous (which would help us later to get the kids involved in the telling of the stories and in the describing the pictures) and so I wrote it for my kids and the video and the song, of course, were the basis for it.

The contents of the module included: rooms in the school and a set of Present Continous sentences, but the original set from the song was later extended by the set of places which the kids studied before (such as ‘the cafe’, ‘the volcano’, ‘the park’) and the other verbs which we have been using for two years in our movement game. Now they came in very handy.

This particular song is the song that we have modified the most and our key structure, sung and then spoken, went according to the formula ‘what I am doing’ + ‘where’, for example: I am reading in the garden.

What’s your favourite colour?

I have mentioned it before, in one of the previous posts, that I utterly love this song. Not only is it a very dynamic way of practising colours (we sing it, touching and pointing at everything green, blue and yellow around us) and, as such, it can be introduced even with the youngest beginners, but it also has got the advantage of introdcing a superbly generative and adaptable ‘What’s your favourite…‘ together with an equally superbly generative and adaptable (and straightforward) answer ‘I like‘. We sing it first with colours but, as soon as the kids are ready, we start singing (and then talking) about our favourite colours. And then, as we progress through the unit, about our favourite fruit, pets, toys, weather, food and animals. If there is any structure that can be and should be introduced as the first five ones…

In class, I sing the verse for each student, using their name ‘Sasha, Sasha, What’s your favourite colour?’ and Sasha is expected to answer by choosing a flashcard from the pile of colour flashcards as she answers. Which is a procedure that we repeat later on with all the topics. To make it more managable, I have also created a set of special flashcards which have the question on one side and a selection of items in each category on the other side. This way I do not have to keep a huge pile of flashcards from all the categories to practise this question.

With my older students we have managed to take this activity one step further and turn it into a pairwork activity. At this point, we have a beautiful selection of categories (sport, hobbies, lunch, dessert, transport, toys, jungle animals, farm animals, ocean animals) and the kids are good at accepting the flashcard of a tractor to stand for the entire category. We put our ten categories of the day (aka ten flashcards) on the floor, we sit around it in pairs. One child in each pair gets five counting sticks and they ask their chosen five ‘favourite’ questions to their partners and, as they do, they put one stick on the relevant flashcard. After they are done, I collect the sticks, divide them into the packs of five and redistribute and the other child in each pair asks their chosen questions.

As a follow-up, they ask me a question each, as we collect the cards of the floor. A beautiful, personalised pairwork activity that started a long while ago with a Super Simple Song.

What are you waiting from? Have you got a song that you have been singing for a while now and that your kids know very (very) well? Are there any interesting structures that could turn this song into a game? Go on! Use it to maximise production! It will be fun! I guarantee!

Happy teaching!

All the reasons to use stories with YL

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The classroom before the IH VYL session 7 devoted to storytelling…

Writing this kind of a post about songs was a lot of fun. Here’s hoping to the same results with stories.

Storytelling (a definition for the purpose of this post): story-everything in class: telling stories, reading stories, listening to stories, writing stories, making-up stories, watching stories…

All the reasons to use stories in class when you teach children…

  • Stories, storybooks, traditional stories are a part of the child’s world
  • Stories help children learn about the world and the concepts
  • They also provide models of behaviour
  • They introduce children to other cultures
  • Telling stories and listening to stories is a social event
  • They help to develop focus and concentration
  • They can be a starting point to developing learning strategies such as predicting or making hypothesis
  • They expose children to different illustrations and they help to develop visual literacy
  • They help develop imagination
  • They help to develop kids’ memory
  • Stories help children to know the sounds, rhymes and this way to develop early literacy skills

  • Working with stories helps children learn about the value of books
  • They help children learn about the real and the imaginary world
  • Stories help faciliate interaction between adults and children
  • Children who read and listen to stories find it easier to understand other people
  • Kids who read stories are likely to have higher confidence levels
  • Stories are a natural way of teaching children
  • Stories help children relax
  • Stories help children understand their own feelings
  • Reading and stories can develop critical thinking skills
  • Storytelling and story reading can be a source of fun and pleasure

All the reasons to use stories in class because you teach a foreign language…

  • They create the context for the language
  • They help to build and develop the vocabulary
  • They can be used to introduce the langauge
  • They can be used to practise the langauge
  • They can be used to revise the language
  • They help develop listening skills
  • They expose the children both to dialogue and to narrative
  • Listening to stories is the first step to producing the language
  • They help develop literacy skills
  • Stories are a wonderful opportunity for integrating skills ie reading with listening or speaking with writing.

  • The stories created specifically for the EFL / ESL context have the graded language and they are built closely around the vocabulary and structures that they are already familiar with
  • Traditional stories have the advantage of being familiar to the children already and this will make their reception in a foreign language much easier
  • Storybooks are a source of the beautiful and natural language that can be made accessible to children. Some of them might be known to children (for example Gruffalo or The Very Hungry Caterpillar) and this will make the L2 version more easily understood and easier to use
  • Visuals accompanying the stories can also be used as a resource to introduce and to practise the langauge
  • They are an intergral part of the Young Learners Exam so using stories in class from early on will be contributing to preparing students for them
  • They can help connect studying English at school and studying English at home
  • They can motivate the children to learn the language
  • Using stories in class can encourage children to read for pleasure
  • Storytelling can be used as a classroom management tool as they are natural settlers
  • Some of the concepts in stories can be used to manage children’s behaviour in the EFL/ESL classroom ie ‘Boris goes to school’ is a story about making friends

  • Telling stories or reading stories can be an introduction or a follow-up to song lessons or craft lessons
  • Many stories have a set of structures and that makes them easier for the EFL/ESL students to learn
  • A story is usually used in more than one lesson. This repetition is also beneficial for the students as they can get more and more involved in the retelling or the re-reading of the stories
  • Telling stories can be an introduction to role-plays and drama activities
  • Even the lower level students can be encouraged to create stories. They will use their ideas based on the vocabulary they have (Wright)
  • Storytelling activities appeal to children with different intelligences and learning styles (Read)
  • Stories can be used to supplement the coursebook
  • Or they can be used as the basis for a curriculum
  • Reading and listening to stories can help with pronunciation in L2, too.
  • Stories encourage the kids to contribute ideas and to express themselves

Have I forgotten anything? I must have. Although 50 is not a bad number to start with. More later…

Happy teaching!

Bibliography

I will give myself a permission to be slightly reckless about referencing everyone since it is not a very serious research article. While preparing this post, I have consulted:

Sandie Mourao and Gail Ellis (2020), Teaching English to Pre-primary children, Delta Teacher Development Series

Opal Dunn (2012), Introducing English to Young Children: Spoken Language, Collins

Reading and storytelling with babies and children, raisingchildren.net.au

Why is storytelling important to children? BBC Teach

Why are stories important for children? The Writers Bureau

Why is reading so important for children? High-Speed Training

11 Reasons Why Reading is Important for Children, EdArabia

Andrew Wright ( ), Creating Stories with Children, Resource Book for Teachers

Carol Read (2007), 500 Activities for Primary Classroom, Macmillan

The importance of storytelling in the EFL classroom, The EFL Academy

Some Tips on Using Storytelling in the EFL Classroom, EFL Magazine

Karen Saxby, Using Pictures and Stories in the EFL Classroom, HLT Mag

Teaching English to Young Learners Using Stories: The Ultimate Guide, The ELT Guide

How to use storytelling in language teaching, Yur Topic

Teaching English Through Art: Why you might want to start

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An introduction to an introduction

Teaching English through has been something that I have been playing with for quite some time now and it started in the most selfish of ways, namely, I simply wanted to bring my favourite things to class. You know, have these beautiful Georgia O’Keeffee’s skyscrapers hanging by the whiteboard or practising prepositions of place not with the description of the classroom but of everyone and everything in one of the Chagall’s villages. My favourite things, nothing else.

I wanted and I did. Only once I started (and once I started to read about it, to research it, to experiment with the younger and the older, and to read even more and to reflect), I realised that there is a lot more to it, for me and for my students.

Somehow, once you start, it is difficult to stop because new ideas and new projects emerge and there is a lot to write about. This is not my first blog post about combining Art and EFL so if you interested, please have a look here (How to see a city through Art), here (How to hear Stravinsky, although the format can be adapted to any piece of music) and here (How to read storybook illustrations, a lesson not for kids) or here (if you are interested in using realistic and not realistic visuals with children).

With this post, I have decided to take a more organised approach to teaching English through Art, going a little back to the basics, to tell you why you might even want to think about it.

A bit about me and my background

My name is Anka, I am a teacher of English as a foreign language but I am also interested in Art. My first degree is in History and as a part of that adventure many years ago I did have a privilege in taking two terms of History of Art with one of the most amazing teachers ever but I still consider myself only ‘a human interested in the visual arts’, not a professional.

First and foremost I am a teacher of a foreign language and the main aim is always teaching them vocabulary and grammar, the four language skills development and, sometimes, exam preparation. However, I do believe, that there is always room for a bit of Art, here and there, smuggled, hidden and used to develop the language skills.

At the moment, I am taking part in three different projects which, to some extent, involve Art Etc.

  • my regular classes at BKC IH Moscow, classes which have a clear focus, a curriculum, a coursebook in which I use Art Etc to supplement what we do, for variation
  • my Art Explorers lessons, a bonus, free-of-charge once a month class for the students of our branch, a project that we are launching only this month
  • Kids in the Avant-Garde, a cooperation between BKC IH Moscow, Fun Art Kids and the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, which gives the kids a chance to express themselves creatively in a variety of ways.

In the long-run, I would like to share here some ideas and activities which we used in all of these projects, but before we get there, here are some of the reasons why including Art in the EFL lessons is a good idea. Let’s go.

The alphabet book based on the animals from the paintings at the Tretyakov Gallery

Teaching English Through Art: all the reasons why you should at least consider it (in a rather random order)

  • Paintings used in regular EFL lessons as flashcards to introduce or to practise the language are a wonderful tool and a source of variety, to compliment the drawings, cartoons, illustrations and photographs. They will be especially appropriate while teaching animals, clothes, transport, activities, food, the city or the natural world.
  • Using painting also means exposing children to different styles in Art will help develop their visual literacy skills, even without any special lessons on the theory or the artists’ biographies.
  • Teaching English through Art with younger children, preschoolers or primary, usually involves some creative activity. This gives the children an opportunity to interact and to experiment with a variety of artistic materials such as paints, watercolours, crayons, fingerpaints and techqniues, for example collage, prints, scratch art and so on.
  • Kids, of the age, are learning to make decisions, choosing their own composition, lines and colours, not only attempting to become a five or a fourteen-year-old Walhor, Mashkov, Goncharova or Rousseau but personalising it and owning it every step of the way.
  • Since this creative activity is only an add-on in the regular English classes, it might help children discover a talent and interest in the artistic world, something that might not become obvious otherwise.
  • Just like any content-and-language-integrated lessons (CLIL), also the Art lessons give the students an opportunity to use the language to access other subjects and areas of knowledge and, especially in the case of the older learners, to see the real purpose of learning a foreign language
  • Interacting with the world art can be a springboard to discussions which generally generate a lot of language for the students, in relation with their level of English. Since ‘all ideas are good ideas’ (one of the mottos of our classes) and since all interpretations are welcome, students feel free to express themselves and to share what they think.
  • Art lessons especially lend themselves to learning and practising the language of expressing and asking for opinion, agreeing and disagreeing, talking about associations, possibilities and hypothesis.
  • Somehow (and this bit is really beyond me) during the Art lessons students, juniors and teens alike, are more likely to use the beautiful English. All of a sudden they realise that there are other adjectives than ‘beautiful’, ‘nice’ or ‘interesting’ and so the language they produce is of a much higher quality than what they normally during the conversations about the everyday topics.
  • Art can supplement lessons on practically any topic and they will help to ensure that the curriculum and the programme is diverse and engaging.

All of these are simply my reflections based on what I have observed in class. The real research will follow.

If you are interested you can continue reading here:

7 Amazing Benefits of Art for Kids That You Might Not Know Of from the artfulparent.com

Art Techniques For Children nurturestore.co.uk

Teaching English Through Art from Jorge Sette

Art in the classroom, blog from the British Council

English Through Art by Peter Grundy, Hania Bociek, Kevin Parker

Bonus titles: lots and lots of resource books – in the photos accompanying this post.

There is more to come!

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.

Hence the survey.

Crumbs #20 Тетрадка Love*)

by

Or about my favourite resource in this academic year, hands down.

Ingredients

  • A notebook for each student and a box to keep all the class notebooks. These notebooks don’t travel home, they live in the classroom.
  • Some writing materials: pencils, markers, crayons.

Why we love it

  • For all of the students in all the groups where I introduced notebooks (and that’s everybody, pre-primary, primary, juniors and teens, apart from my pre-primary level 1 and 2, who are still only 3 and 4 years old, they are going to get theirs a bit later in the year), this has become a surprisingly wonderful way to express their personality and to become even more present in the classroom. When I gave these out, many of my students of all ages were inquiring what they should write on the front page or on the cover page. I suppose it is because there might be some specific regulations at their schools regarding what needs to be and what can be written there. When I just shrugged my arms and said ‘I have no idea. It is your notebook. Write what you want‘, many of them looked at me in disbelief and then started to write some elaborate names in Russian or some made-up names and nicknames or just their names, in a variety of fonts and styles.
  • Equally, the format of the note-taking is highly personalised, too. There are certain activities that we use these notes for (see below) and sometimes they involve a structure or a format which is the same to everyone but, at the same time, the kids are in charge as regards the choice of the writing materials, colours or the ratio between text and the drawings.
  • It is the students’ personal space in the classroom, too. We share what we have written but I hardly ever look into those notes, unless they ask me to or unless they need help with some vocabulary or structures. Since this is a new project and since I am just developing it and discovering its potential and its potholes, I have just realised that I will have to include some kind of delayed error correction in the process, for instance by reading the entries and contributions to fish out some of the spelling or grammar mistakes.
  • It give the students an opportunity to write and to read more.
  • It is an opportunity to keep all the notes and all the ideas in one place and to go back to them, to review, to remember, to reminisce or to recycle.
  • Notebooks for the high level students (C1) are our way of breaking into the least favourite skills ie writing. After we have finished a receptive skill task such as exam reading and exam listening, we follow it up with a 50-word (plus) summary in the notebooks, steering away from any specific genre or format, just simple note-taking that now compliment our regular ‘What do you think?’ speaking sessions. We go back to these notes in the following lessons, to check whether our views have changed in any way, whether they have developed but also, very importantly, to edit and to improve, when possible.
  • Notebooks for juniors (B1) have been used in a variety of ways related to the vocabulary we study. First of all, they are the opportunity for the students to reflect on the vocabulary they have learnt. At the end of the unit, we look at all the phrases, structures and words and categorise them. The categorise we use change all the time and have included the following: easy words and difficult words, useful words and not-so-useful words, interesting words and not-so-interesting words and I am hoping to add more to this list. In the future I would also like the kids to use their own categories in the future. This kind of an activity also involves a discussion and sharing the rationale for our choices (and that is my favourite part of the whole activity). We use the notebooks also to work on the additional vocabulary, not included in the coursebook but still worth knowing. Sometimes we create the lists ourselves (ie while describing the objects, we also revised a list of materials) or we work on the lists that I prepare (ie a few weather idioms that we discussed while going through the topic of ‘extreme weather’). Last but not least, this is also where we take note of the emergent language, in the section at the end of the notebook called ‘Our special words’. I keep track of these on the whiteboard (the left margin) but I encourage the students to take a note of these (or some of these) in their notebooks.
  • Notebooks for primary (A2) are probably the most multi-functional among all the age groups. First of all, we use them to complete our portfolio tasks that are included in our coursebooks, one task for every two units. For these, each student gets a pre-prepared template, a notebook-page size, which they glue in and then use for whichever task we have such as the personal file (used in an interview) or the list of the adjectives to describe animals (used later in Our Big Animal Quiz) and so on. We use it also to personalise the vocabulary that we learn, for example after we have learnt the jungle vocabulary, the kids were asked to arrange all the new words in the order of their own preference, number 1 being their favourite word, number 9 being their least favourite. As with the older students, we later talked about the reasons for our arrangements. Last but not least, we use the notebooks to prepare for any student-generated games that we play. They are especially useful in all the guessing games and are much better than any small cars because the notebooks are not transparent and, because of their format, they help the kids to keep their secret words really secret. You can find out more about this game here.
  • Notebooks for pre-primary (pre-A1) is a serious step towards developing reading and writing skills. Now, I am not sure whether it is going to fit all the pre-primary classes (because some children are not ready and some programme do not even include any literacy elements) but this is what works for us. My students are 5 and 6 at this point and we have been doing a lot of literacy activities for about a year now. We started relatively early simply because the kids showed interest in the written word and I realised they were ready. We went slowly but with great results and I can safely say that now it is their favourite part of the lesson. Last year we did a lot of writing on the laminated erasable pages, with whiteboard markers, this year we moved on to notebooks. We use the notebooks to copy the words that we learn, in two or three batches, with only four or five words per lesson, not to overwhelm the kids. Kids usually choose to add little drawings to these so our notebooks are slowly becoming picture dictionaries. Our notebooks are also used in pairwork, for example in a survey on the food we like and we don’t like in which the students used a pre-prepared chart (printed, cut out and glued in by the teacher) to interview their partners and to ‘take notes’ in the form of pluses and minues. I found out that the notebooks really help to set-up and to run a pair-work activity. The notebooks are also going to help us to maintain continuity with the longer-term projects such as the reading of a phonics story such as ‘A fat cat on the mat’ by Usborne and all the related activities. They will be completed over a series of lessons but thanks to the notebooks we will be able to get back to them and to revise in a more SS-centred way. Or so I am hoping.
  • There is no other way of putting it is: it is a proper Notebook Love (or Тетрадка Love) and it is almost ridiculous that such a tiny and irrelevant thing, at RUB 40 a piece (about 50 cents) could have such an impact on our lessons with its potential for creativity, reflection, personalisation…And, mind you, it’s been only two months. Something tells me, the best is yet to come.

Happy teaching!

P.S. Of course I have forgotten to take proper photos in the classroom, of all the cool things in our notebooks. I will try to make up for it, at one point. For now, just some cool notebooks that are kicking about the house.

I did not ask them to write my name here. I feel honoured they decided to include me here))

*) Тетрадка – a dimunitive of the word тетрадь (notebook)