Back again

I haven’t written a post for 3 years now as I was too busy with admin work (Deputy Director, DOS and YL person in one).
Now I’m back to normal, which means I’m still the ADoS for YL at IH Brno but can breathe again. Funnily I’m also ging back to my initial blog idea. Again I’m teaching a group of children aged 7-8 without a coursebook. It’s my challenge for the year – so I’d like to share my ideas and thoughts with whoever is interested.

What to do with a shoe box

This year I have a 6-year-old one-to-one student, who lived for some time in England. Now back in the Czech Republic her parents want her to keep her English. She’s into stories and arts and  crafts, so I decided to combine the two things.

In the first lessons we read ‘Winnie at the seaside’ together, and talked about what kind of holidays Anna likes and what she thinks Wilbur (Winnie’s cat) might like doing in his holiday. At home she drew a picture of Wilbur on holiday and in the next lesson she told me about it.

Then our little arts and crafts project started. The idea was to make a theatre which she could use to play out stories of Winnie the Witch. She brought a shoe box and I asked her what she might find in a theatre. She came up with some ideas including curtain and stage. Then I explained that we could make this with the shoe box and how to do it.

Anna's shoe box

So here the instructions for all arts and crafts fans out there:

Material: a shoe box (adult size), some coloured paper, crayons, felt pens, pencils, scissors, white carton, skewers, glue and sticky tape, Stanley knife

Instructions: Make a cut in one of the long sides of the shoe box and along the bottom, so that you have two flaps (which are your curtains). Decide what you want to have in the scene, colour the box from the inside or glue coloured paper onto the back and sides of the box. Cut out shapes for a house or trees and glue them to the bottom. And there you go, the little stage is ready. Just use your imagination, all my little shoe box theatres differ from each other.

But what is a theatre without actors, in this case paper figures. Draw the shapes of the characters you need for your play on cardboard, colour them in, cut them out and with some sticky tape fix them at one end of a skewer. Be careful, as you play from  the top the skewer should stick out from the top, otherwise all your figures are upside down. Something Anna and I tried out, but then changed it quickly again.

As we only have 60 min a week, we needed two weeks to complete the theatre. We started off with the theatre itself and Anna decided on the scene and the characters. We finished the box itself, but didn’t have time for the characters. So her homework was to come up with a story including all characters.

So in the next lesson she brought her story, written down by her older brother Adam And this is how the story goes:

We finished the characters, which took quite long as we had to play with them of course as soon as each of them was finished. At the end of the lesson we packed everything into the box, closed the lid and a very proud Anna took it home to reveal her ‘secret’ to her family.

Any ideas what her homework for this week is? Playing out the story with her family!

The third lesson

Giant Spanish Donkey

This is another post about teaching my pre-teens class. I’m not writing about every single lesson but will pick just some highlights and also things I’ve tried for the first time. In this lesson I included ‘Find 10’ from David Riley’s ‘Triptico’ http://www.triptico.co.uk/ for the first time in my lesson.

The topic was comparatives and superlatives, and I wanted to have a challenging and also engaging practice activity for my students. As I know my kids quite well by now, I knew that they like facts about animals so I decided to challenge them with 1o true and 5 false facts about animals. I started off with asking them which animals are their favourites to get a lead in. They were quite talkative and some of them added why they liked their animal most.

After that I needed to pre-teach and elicit some of the animals I used in the challenge. In this part they were actually allowed to give the Czech word, as I needed to make sure they all knew the animals. It was interesting to see how many they knew. Then I put them into two teams (there were only 6 kids – 3 boys and 3 girls), let them each get a piece of paper and a pen. I demonstrated the activity on the board, drawing the squares on the board and showing an example sentence. I didn’t want to show them the game itself at that moment, so the board was the best solution.

And this is what the challenge looked like:

Find 10 animal facts

Then they started a running dictation, running up to the computer choosing one sentence, dictating and writing down the sentence in the correct form etc. When they had all finished, we checked if the sentences were correct and each team got a point for each correct answer.

I gave them another 3 min after that to decide in their teams which of the 15 facts were false. They really loved this part, and when we came to the end of the challenge where they were allowed to check their answers, we had a heated discussion going on.

Overall the activity worked very well, they were enthusiastic, they enjoyed the competitive element and they learned even some new and interesting facts about animals while practicing comparatives and superlatives. I’ll definitely will use this and some of the other resources from ‘Triptico’ again.

By the way, can you guess what the 5 lies are?

The English Raven Halloween lesson materials design challenge!

I’ve taken up Jason Renshaw’s Halloween challenge (http://jasonrenshaw.typepad.com/jason_renshaws_web_log/2011/10/the-english-raven-halloween-lesson-materials-design-challenge.html).  I’m aiming at a group of pre-teens (10-12 year olds), and have included a lot of speaking activities as this is something my students really need. Hope you’ll like bits and pieces of my ideas.

And this is what I came up with: halloween-1-worksheet

The first lesson

Last week the new school year started for me. This year I only have very few classes as I got stuck with a lot of admin work for the school. Still, it’s exciting to see old faces again and lots of new faces. Some of our kids have been coming for lessons for up to 5 years, so you have of course a kind of bond with them. Some asked why I wasn’t their teacher this year, but seem to accept easily to have a new teacher. One of my pre-teens classes I kept; they were beginners last year and it was fantastic to see how much they actually remembered.

We started off with talking about the summer. One of the kids I met at a circus performance he took part in and one of the girls actually chats with me sometimes on facebook, so it was nice to share with the whole class and I hope this will encourage all of them to take part in some ideas I want to try out this year with them.

As there are a few new kids in the class I had the ‘getting-to-know-you memory’ (see one of the previous post in this blog) activity prepared for them. I used the activity but gave it a nice twist. After they had put all their papers on the floor I told them to crumble them into balls. Then I asked them what they like doing in winter (and that in the last days of summer…). After they shouted out some ideas one of them came up with snowball fight. And that’s what we did; two groups opposite of each other (here it was boys and girls) throwing paper snowballs at each other. I gave them about three minutes for that. They loved it! Then we collected all the papers again, unfolded them and they started matching. I saw the snowball activity last year for the first time when I observed one of my colleagues (thanks Zdenek!) and it’s one of my favourites, as it is active, get’s them out of their chairs, it’s fun and fulfills the purpose of mixing papers for matching activities. I will definitely use it more often with them.

We then worked on classroom rules. They had to come up with rules they thought are important. This is the list they gave me:

Don’t speak Czech.

Don’t eat in class.

Turn your phones off.

Don’t be late.

Do homework.

I then marked the sentences with smiley faces and sad faces and asked them to tell me why I like some rules and don’t like the others. I actually had to give them a hint to look what’s similar in the sentences. It took some time but then one of the girls got the idea that I don’t like negative rules. So I put them into pairs and let them rewrite the rules so that they had the same meaning but were positive. After that they decided on the best sentences and made posters for the classroom. I have to thank Kat Kinsalla for this idea, as she was showing it in a seminar I attended some years ago. Since then I’ve used it in every group where I had to create classroom rules and it has always worked. It’s also nicer to look at a set of rules that are stated positively then having all these DON’Ts shouting at you, there are already enough don’ts in our lives.

Looking forward to my next class with them and will keep a record here of my ideas and the activities I’ll try out with them.

Vocab Revision

It has taken me quite a lot of time, but finally I’ve found a moment to add a few new activities. These are 3 activities I came across when training for drama teaching, but work fantastic with my English students (children and adults alike) when revising vocabulary. So here it goes:

‘What are you doing?’

All students stand in a circle, two students go in the middle, one miming an activity (e.g. washing his/her hair), the other asks ‘What are you doing?’  The answer should then be a new activity e.g. mowing the lawn. The student who asked the question has then to do this activity. If someone can’t think quickly enough of another activity, a new student goes into the circle and takes over. Or they can take it in turns without the competitive element.

‘God, are you stupid’

Students imagine that they haven’t seen things like a spoon, a camera, a teabag or anything similar, in their life, so they have to find out what these things are for. In pairs one student either gets a card with an image or word. He/she then has to tell his/her partner about it starting: ‘Look at my new camera.’ The other student replies: e.g. Camera? What’s a camera? What are you doing with it?  Which means they need to get an explanation form their partner: ‘I take pictures.’ Then the next question: Pictures, what are pictures? Pictures are …. etc. You either stop the activity after some time or challenge them to see who can keep the conversation going the longest.

‘Angels and Devils’

Divide the students into two groups. One group has to write down as many vegetables as possible, the other fruits. The vegetable group are the devils and they can only talk in vegetables while the fruit group are the angels who can only speak fruit. Get the students to stand in lines in their groups facing the other group, so that each devil and angel has got a partner from the other group in front of him/her. They then have to try to persuade their opposite to become an angel or a devil. They should talk them into it with only using fruit and vegetables to communicate with each other. If a devil uses any fruit he automatically becomes an angel and vice versa. It’s a quite noisy, but fun game and can be used with different lexical groups.

Be quick

This is a great activity you can use any time in your class. It gets your students speaking and is a great stirrer when you feel that the energy level gets low. Put your students into two groups. They take it in turns and compete against each other. Make a list of 20 to 30 topics. One group chooses a number and you read out the topic. Then they have to come up with as many ideas connected to their topic as possible in one minute. After that the other group gets its chance with a new topic. The tricky part is that each student in each group has to say something. If one of them can’t come up with an idea wait for 5 seconds till the next one in the group can say his/her idea, and they can’t repeat what someone else has already said. For each idea they get a point.

Example: Group 1 says no 12; you read out: ‘What can you do to make you look better?’ The first student in group 1 starts with an idea e.g.’ put on make up’, then the second students says ‘wear a nice dress’, the third student says ‘pull a bag over your head’ etc.

Here some topics:

1. What you can do when you want to meet new friends.

2. Where you should go on holiday not to meet your teacher.

3. What didn’t exist 200 years ago.

4. What you can do not to write the next exam/test.

5. What gets on your nervs when watching TV.

6. What you can say when you haven’t done your homework.

7. What you wouldn’t eat again in your life.

8. Things you could collect.

9. The worst thing about boys/girls.

10. What you can find in a bag.

11. What you’re looking forward to in winter.

12. What can you do to make you look better.

13. What you shouldn’t do during meal times.

14. The best ways how to annoy your teacher.

15. How you can make people laugh.

After you have played it with your students for the first time they can actually come up with more ideas for questions/topics for the next time you want to play the game.

My favourite storybooks part 3

‘Clown’ by Quentin Blake is a book  I came across several years ago. It’s a book without text which tells the story of a clown who is dumped in the rubbish, and his search for a new home for himself and the other toys, in fantastic pictures. What I really like about the book is, that children can invent the background to the characters, e.g. Where does the clown come from? Why do you think he was thrown away? Do you think the child who he belonged to is happy about it?

It’s also great for children who lack the courage to come up in class with own ideas, as they can just retell the story using the pictures as a guideline. So even these children can have their star moment. Also describing the pictures and guessing what will happen next are possible ideas.

Another topic this books might start off is talking about feelings. There are plenty situations/pictures where different feelings are depicted. Often it is difficult for children to talk openly about their feelings (especially when they get to the pre-teens age), so here they have a medium to speak about different feelings they might have in different situations. As they can hide behind the different characters of the book, it might make it much easier for them to speak out.

And then there is the topic of a single mother, raising her children by herself, with her daughter having to look after her little brother etc. This can be a great initiator to talk about families and how different families can be, and what it actually means for children.

These are just some ideas I came up with, but here is another great idea from the authors official website  http://www.quentinblake.com/tp/class_clown.html

Carrots and Sticks … or the little tricks we use to keep our teens on track

Carrot and Stick

These are ideas from different teachers from IH schools around the world. All of them are participating at the moment in the IH workshop ‘Motivating the unmotivated’. The focus of the workshop is on teaching teens and how to get and keep them motivated. I designed the workshop after I ran a successful seminar on the topic at this year’s P.A.R.K. School International Conference for Teachers in Brno.

1. James Harland

As for limiting L1 use, I had a real problem with this in a pre-intermediate teens class, where L1 was stopping them from using English. My ADOS advised me to use a system which I now see from the reading is behaviorist like the money, but is very much stick instead of carrot. The basic idea was that if someone used L1 they would get an object (in my case an eraser, but it could be anything). If someone else used the L1, the object would pass to them. Whoever ended up with the object at the end of the lesson would get extra (boring) homework. This homework was displayed on the board at the start of the lesson.

2. James Pattinson

Basically the official IH Opole system is a ‘points system’ where each student has 3 points to start with and if a student has 3 points left at the end they get a sticker. This worked well at the beginning of the year but then we had some really bad problems with ‘rebellion’ against the system where some students started to not care about it anymore. In fact the boys started rebelling on purpose and it became a kind of ‘macho’ thing to have points coming off so we decided to start trying something more positive.

… I bring in a small cuddly toy every lesson and call it the ‘… of shame’. The most popular one is currently the ‘hedgehog of shame’. We have ‘the rhino of shame’, ‘the ball of shame’ and so on. Anyone who speaks any L1 in upper intermediate and above gets the toy and has to sit with it on their desks. When they hear someone else talking Polish they have to throw them the toy. For levels lower than this I use it at my digression. When I first introduced the system I said ‘the person who holds it the longest has to come to the front of the class and do a little dance!’

3. Anette Igel

Another idea which I use with my teens is that I write 1-10 on the board. When they work hard they can start in class with homework and will have a max of 10 min at the end of the class for it. On the other hand they can lose minutes when they play up and/or speak L1. I found this worked quite well, as none of them is keen on homework, so they try to keep as many minutes as possible.

4. Shay Coyne

At our school we have different reward systems set up for teens. Some teachers reward their students with DVD time, they earn minutes each class that go towards a DVD at the end of term. That way it is not an instant reward, but something that has to be maintained over the term. It also encourages co-operation on a whole.

Another idea is to have “lives” on the board and if the lives are still there by the end they can choose the final activity. Once again this is aimed at the group. It also gives the students a sense of control, because it isn’t the teacher deciding what they are doing all the time.

To focus on the individual, you can reward students who speak English by letting them bring in a song for the class (checking appropriacy beforehand) and working on that. The student gets their moment to shine in the class.

Regarding L1 in the class, one thing that I find that works quite well is if you think they are going to speak a lot of L1, then give them 2 minutes to speak L1 and check understanding / ideas. After the 2 minutes is up they are to speak in English. Some students will automatically use English, but those who need a bit more time or confidence tend to use L1 first and then switch to English with greater confidence. I don’t do this for every speaking activity though.

5. Lisa Phillips

We have an English only policy here and I use either carrot or stick, depending on the individual or class. Some things which I’ve either tried personally or heard used successfully are:

• Explaining the benefits of speaking English only.

• Spanish corner – 3 strikes means extra homework.

• Stickers or sweets for those who don’t speak L1.

• Keeping behind the repeat offenders to ask them why they continue to behave in this way and that they aren’t maximizing their time and are in fact wasting others.

• Making it a full class punishment so that their peers become monitors, not just the teacher.

• Penalty systems, where the offender draws a task of some kind that the students have chosen e.g. sing a song.

• A minimal fine which is collected (like Homer’s swear jar. I find that using the Simpsons as a context never fails!) and given to a charity at the end of term.

• Repeated nagging and/or pleading!

6. Zoe Page

There are two things I have tried. When we are doing revision, e.g. before an exam, I go through all the topics we have covered and do a game for each. Rather than win points on the board to tally at the end of class, they win chocolate after each game. It´s nothing much – either mini bars or mini footballs / eggs, but it´s crazy how competitive they get (in a good way) to win these. I always do it so they´re not against each other – if they all get their questions right, they all get chocolate. Obviously I can´t do this every class! If that´s the ´carrot ‘then my ´stick´tends to be that they won´t get homework that day IF they go the whole lesson without speaking in Spanish (L1)…the problem is, once they slip up then they stop trying for the rest of the class. And it is tough since it´s a 4 hour class with just one break.

7. Julia Ivanova

I’m using a money system as well. I’ve printed 100$ banknotes on green paper and at the beginning of our lessons my students get 300$ each. If somebody uses Russian or their mobile phones in class, they give me 100$. That means everyone has three chances. If at least one student gives me all 300$ in the course of one lesson, all the class does a writing task in class (they’ve chosen it themselves, as usually they get writing for homework).

When mobile phones become a problem in my class, I bring an empty decorated A4 paper box with me at the beginning of the lesson. I start with switching the sound off on my phone and putting it in the box, then all my teens do the same. They get their phones back at the end of the lesson.

8. Mark Hutchinson

Another option might be to take the phone/iPod and switch the set language to English.

9. Andrew Scott

A little trick I use to reduce L1 is to penalize the learner who LISTENS to someone using L1, rather than the learner who uses it! This is a very effective way of introducing peer correction and it’s also entertaining to watch a learner shouting to his classmate, “Nooo! … speak to me in English!”

10. Ian Threadgill

I found this year that the end of term tutorials after the first exams were very helpful. First I made them fill in a form with their estimate of their exam marks in each section, plus their idea of what I should write for their reports. (This exercise is amazing, because they want to display self-knowledge and be correct, so they seem to just write the painful truth without any hesitation) Then just a chance to talk to them individually in an adult we’re-all-in-this-together kind of way: “You don’t really want to do this year again, do you?” Or “I know you enjoy being funny, because you’re good at it, but you can see how it distracts the others, can’t you?” I found that they can be quite different people talking 1-2-1 and my relationship with the class improved thereafter

11. Rosie Hilder

I find that full class punishment works really well, my advanced class have 3 lives and if anyone in the class speaks Spanish then a life is lost. It means they get really annoyed at anyone who does speak Spanish, as if they lose all 3 the whole class gets extra homework. You could turn it around though and do it as a full class reward system, if no one speaks Spanish for the whole lesson then they get a 5 minute chat break at the end, or sweets or something.

12. Darshika Saxena

Full class punishment really works. I cut a minute each from their break time if I hear anyone speak in Vietnamese. After the break, I add on a minute each if they speak L1 in class which depicts the number of minutes they have to stay back after class. It really works and they tell off students who use L1.

A different type of a memory game

Just another game to revise vocabulary, it’s similar to the classic memory game but with a twist.

First of all you need 5 yogurt cups. Colour them in different colours (e.g. one in green, red, yellow, blue and pink). Then choose the vocabulary you want to revise, glue or draw pictures of the words on round cards which are slightly smaller than the yogurt cups (with about 15 to 20 cards it works quite well, not more!). They need to fit under them, so that the  children can’t see them. Next you’ll need a dice which has the same colours on it as the cups have. Either you buy one and colour the cups accordingly or you make your own one. You can find a template here http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/thumbs221-225/sb223prev.html On one sight of the dice you draw a smiley, or there is already a colour which isn’t used. That’s all you need to prepare.

How to play: Go once through all the words so that they remember them, then cover 5 cards with the cups. Make sure that all have seen what’s under the cups. Then the first player throws the dice. He/she says what is hidden under the cup with the same colour. If he/she throws the smiley he/she can choose any of the cups. If the answer is correct, the child keeps the picture and puts the cup over a different card. If he/she doesn’t remember or makes a mistake, the cup remains over the card where it was. By the way, this is a great game for the teacher to join in as well, as it is quite difficult to always remember which card is where, and the kids love to beat the teacher.