the end of school year. Therefore I haven’t had time to write anything. Preparing revision lessons, preparing and marking tests (I hate it). And now I’m preparing a workshop on using medern technologies in the languagae classroom. Planning to show Glogster, word clouds, writing class blogs and Twitter as the source of news and inspiration.
Take care in this busy time 
One of my groups (13 yrs old students, very smart and ambitious) were terrified when they saw in the book words: PASSIVE VOICE. “No, we don’t want to do it!!!! We won’t understand it!!! It’ll be too difficult!!!”
We did some examples, explanations and some activities, had some fun with the help of Jamie Keddie’s passive drawings lesson and it was better but I could see the energy level go down a bit so I decided to do something else. I found on YouTube a couple of short films with Mr Bean and decided to use Mr Bean’s Wedding. First we brainstormed for some wedding vocabulary with me drawing on the board (I’m terrible at drawing so they particularly liked that part of the lesson, laughing at me cruelly). Then I asked them to work in pairs and sit back to back with person A facing the computer screen. I explained that I would play a film and person A would have to tell person B what’s going on. As it is a comedy with lots of things happening, there was quite a lot of talking and laughing. After 2 minutes they changed, so person B was now facing the screen and talking, and they changed again and again. Then I gave them “a letter” from Mr Bean.
Dear Sir / Madame,
I recently attended a wedding and things did not go quite well. My friends wrote to my mother telling her about my behaviour and now she asks me for a report from another witness. Could you write such a report for her? And, please, try not to mention too many of my mistakes. I will be very grateful.
Yours faithfully,
Mr Bean
The students asked me if they could watch the film again so that everybody knew exactly what had happened. Then I encouraged them to discuss how they could do it: write about what Mr Bean had done without saying that he had done it. Passive voice was the answer, of course.
So in pairs they wrote a report using passive sentences whenever they could and they had to think carefully which things could be said in passive voice and which couldn’t. And in fact they produced some very interesting reports and the passive voice is not a monster anymore (let me hope).
Paper whispers
This is an activity from Teaching Unplugged by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury. BUT I’m a terrible instructions follower, I mean I usually read just the beginning and then make up the rest. Or I simply forget the rest even if I read it. That’s probably because if I like the activity I just start thinking how to do it in my groups and stop concentrating on the instructions.
Anyway, I’m not going to re-write the activity from the book (it’s worth having on your shelf, but I’ll write about it later when I finish reading it) but I’ll tell you about my lesson: 4 pupils, 10-11 years old.
As the activity is like Chinese whispers but on paper, after the usual small talk I asked the pupils if the knew what Chinese whispers were. They said they didn’t but (surprise, surprise) asked me if we could just play “głuchy telefon” which is exactly Chinese whispers So there we went… We played a bit, I was very boring as all the sentences I gave were functions and vocab revision but it was OK. Then we did some reading – telling the way dialogues and I suggested playing Chinese whispers again but in writing. I handed out little pieces of paper, one for each student, and I gave my piece of paper to the first student. There was a sentence <Go straight on, take the second left and the cinema is on your right.> on it. I asked the student to read it quietly and try to remember it then I took away my card and the student had to write the sentence on his card, pass it on to the next pupil who should read and remember it, give the card to me and write the sentence on his piece of paper. And so on… I also asked them to feel free to correct it if they notice a mistake. They ended up with somethink like <go straight, second right, cinema on left> but I could see them concentrate and laugh at the end. I gave them their cards and wrote my sentence on the board so that they could compare them. They actually asked me for more sentences so we practiced telling the way and Present Perfect and apparently they enjoyed it. I’m really happy about it as this group is difficult to please.
I also did the same activity with my adult group – 6 students, intermediate level. I gave them a difficult sentence <If I had known that it was your birthday I would have made a cake, bought some candles and a present for you.> They couldn’t remember it half way so we ended up with: <If I had known your birthday I would have bought vodka.> There was a lot of laughter. So thank you Luke and Scott
One of the things I like about this activity, especially with young learners, is that they write without realising that they are writing. And they like it although whenever I ask them to write they are unhappy. A bit like with the miming dictation – they were terrifed when they heard “dictation” but then they enjoyed it a lot.
What clothes did she wear?
I did it with my 14-year-old pre-intermediate students and with adult intermediate students
We had a-not-so-long-long-weekend last weekend (3 days) and as usual I asked the most boring question: “What did you do?” The answer was “Nothing”, obviously. So I asked “What is ‘nothing’?” so they started to tell me things like watching tv, meeting friends and so on. I asked them to talk in pairs and find out as much as they could about each other’s weekend in 3 minutes. In one group there was an odd number of students so I asked the best student to work alone and come with me outside. I explained to her that I would ask the others to talk about their partners’ weekends and her task was to ask very detailed questions which they probably hadn’t thought of asking. For example, if someone says “Tom was watching TV” she should ask things like: “What kind of program was it?” “What time did he start?” “Was he eating anything when he was watching?” etc. They did it great. Some of the students were making up details (as if it was true, no hesitation at all), some said things like “I don’t know, maybe…” the rule was that the student we were talking about couldn’t say aything, but usually was laughing. I also encouraged other students to ask questions.
In the group with the even number of students I started asking questions and then asked them to do it. They were really involved and did a lot of talking.
I also heard a comment on the last lesson that made me quite happy. Like in most language schools I have to use coursebooks. It doesn’t matter how interesting the coursebook is, after some time both I and the students don’t like it too much and when I ask them to open the books they make unhappy faces. So I cut and copy and paste. Last lesson we had Lou Reed’s “Just a Perfect Day” song. So I copied the lyrics and did a running dictation, then I asked them to listen to the song to see if they’ve got all the lines in the correct order etc. And then I asked them to open the coursebook and correct their dictation. One of the students said: “You always do that! You do some nice activity and later we find a text in the book”. Iasked if they liked it that way… the answer was obvious
Have great lessons
I’ve been tagged by Arjana Blazic. For the first time ever and it’s very motivating. I was really surprised, because I actually thought that I’m writing this blog for myself as reference (mainly because I keep losing my paper notes), anticipating a situation when a teacher might find it and perhaps might spot a useful idea. Thank you very much Arjana.
Now, if you are tagged you have to put the above picture on your blog and tag 10 blogs that are Worth Taking a Look at … Now, it’s taking me so long to write this post, because it’s quite difficult to choose 10 from my favourite blogs and I’m not supposed to repeat blogs that Arjana mentioned…
And here goes my list:
Teaching Village by Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto, a great source of ideas, thoughts and humour
I_missbossy’s ELT playground by Anita Kwiatkowska, a Pole in Turkey, with lots of ideas for young leaners and other interesting stuff
Carol Read’s ABC of Teaching Children an excellent blog on teaching young learners with lots of ideas and tips (by Carol Read of course)
six things by Lindsay Clanfield with lists of six things on various topics
the lives of teachers by Darren Elliot whose style of writing and ideas are very appealing to me
Specific English by Jeremy Day again with lots of practical ideas and lots of musings on English for specific purposes and lots more, a very good read
English Raven by Jason Renshaw with some practical ideas, interesting philosophy and lots of thinking on many topics
Jeremy Harmer’s Blog which I like for his style of writing as well as general ideas on teaching and life
TEFLclips by Jamie Keddie, a different kind of blog with video lesson, fell in love with it at first sight (and second and third too)
I’d like to think that I help people to learn English by Richard Whiteside again with interesting articles and ideas and I got interested after Richard posted about a great short film
And there are probably next 10 I would like to list here… most of them are in my blogroll and those which aren’t I’m going to put there soon
Recently I’ve done two dictation exercises with my groups. A long forgotten one and one new to me.
The long forgotten activity was a running dictation. In fact I wasn’t well prepared for it and it was “panic idea” as just when I was about to do a listening activity I found out that there was no CD in the box. What to do? I apologised and suggested the running dictation as no-extra-materials way as possible. I opened the book on the exercise I needed (9 sentences), divided students into 2 groups (of 2 and 3 people) and asked them to run to the book, read a sentence, remember it, come back to their desk and dictate the sentence to the group / partner. Then another person had to do the same. And so on. They had to dictate to each other 9 sentences and the first group to finish and have the fewest mistakes was the winner. This is a group of secondary school teachers. I’ve learned that the more kinesthetic and fun the task is, the more they like it. So this activity was really successful.
Miming dictation
This is another last-minute activity. Half of the group didn’t show up and I knew that if I did what I had planned I would have to do it again (Present Perfect). So I decided to make a fool of myself and do a little bit of miming. I made up a silly story in my head and mimed it to the students. I had to use a few drawings at the beginning but then it went smoothly. And it was an eye-opener: there were 3 students: one very shy, having problems with grammar and vocabulary, one very good at English, bright and fast, very confident, and one also shy, who joined the group only recently. And surprise, surprise, the best student at this was the shy one. She bloomed, her eyes were shining, she was clearly excited and highly motivated. I didn’t do the dictation properly, as I let them guess the words aloud and after my miming I allowed them a few minutes to put the words into a proper story in past tense. They did great and I was really pleased with the outcome. The other surprising thing was that the confident student didn’t like the activity and seemed to be irritated.
It’s happened to me a few times recently that some unplanned events made me do some very good activities which also showed (or remined) me a few things about students. I’ll have to keep it in mind.
Last Sunday I had an honour to be in the jury of Let’s Drama Festival in Nidzica. It is truly a great idea. School children from grade 1 primary school (7 yrs old) to grade 3 secondary school (18 yrs old) put into 4 age cathegories perform plays on the stage in Nidzica castle (the castle itself is beautiful). They are supposed to prepare those plays by themselves with some help from their teachers, the amount of help depends probably on the age of the players and on their creativity. Somehow I have a feeling that the perfomances were most successful when teachers hadn’t intervened too much. Most of the scripts seemed to be written by the students and in fact those were way better than the ones which used a ready script. Witty, amusing and, most of all, well understood by the perfomers. I think when they write something themselves they know what it means and how to say it. That’s the whole idea behind this festival: let them do something different and succeed. Yes, we tried to find something good about every performance (there were 10 plays). We had one diploma to give to each team but we could easily give 2 or 3 for various things: for acting, for script, for dialogues, for humour, for language, for music, for scenery, for costumes, for courage and so on, and so forth.
And I feel it’s a wonderful way to learn a language and some other skills at the same time.
I hope I’ll be able to attend the Festival next year.
Today was the first time I’d used word clouds in the classroom. A group learning for FCE, young adults (15-16 years old) quite lively, easily distracted and easily bored…
As we have to cover the grammar they need for FCE (use of English is their weakest point)(I hate exams) we did reported speech last lesson and today I decided I could make them think in a bit different way.
So I created a few “word cloud posters” each with a sentence in reported speech. As Word Clouds deletes all function words I ended up with clouds like this:
The head teacher explained that it was forbidden to smoke in the school premises.
or like that:
Emma wanted to know why Patric hadn't wanted to merry her.
or that:
Jean denied that she had stolen the money. OR Jean denied stealing the money.
I put five printouts on the walls of the classroom, paired the students and told them that their task is to make reported speech sentences from the words on the posters. I also asked them to identify 2 posters for which they can make 2 sentences (with deny and suggest). After a while they found 2 forms of the same verb. Then they wandered around the classroom in pairs and they craeted very decent sentences with “all those” the, why, a etc. We quickly read and compared the sentences and changed them into direct speech.
I was really pleased with the outcome. First of all, they got involved in the activity. They were cooperating instead of competing. I could see that they were really thinking and they succeeded. And they were walking instead of sitting still.
Thanks to Twitter and some of the people who blogged about Wordle.
Picture from http://www.shapingyouth.org:8000/
Easter is coming, soon it’ll be too late to prepare anything, so I’m getting ready. I have three simple ideas for egg hunt games in the classroom (or outside, if you prefer).
An idea for young learners who can read some simple words. You’ll need:
On each egg card write one word and make sure that there are enough eggs with the same word for every child. Place the flashcards in various places around the room and around the flashcard hide eggs with words different than on the flashcards. It means that the children next have to look for the flashcard for the word written on their egg. Tell the children to take only 1 egg from each flashcard.
To illustrate:
Let’s say that you want to revise 3 words (house, cow, dog) and you have 5 children in the group. You make 15 eggs, 5 with each word. Then you put the pictures (flashcards) of house, cow and dog around the class. You put 5 eggs (with different words) to a basket and you place the rest of the cards next to the flashcards BUT do NOT put around the picture of a cow eggs with the word “cow”. Now you let the children draw eggs from the basket, one for each child. Now they read the word on the egg and go to the picture with it. They look for another egg next to the picture, and look for the next flashcard until they collect all the words.
Then they can read aloud what words they have on their eggs and colour them.
Modifications
You can modify the activity for larger classes making less eggs for each child so that the children have only some words.
You can make pairs like for memory game – a word and a picture on two eggs, childen draw pictures and go to hunt for words.
For older children, revising vocabulary.
You’ll need:
Now make pairs of egg cards writing half of the word on one egg and the second half on another. Put the first halves of words in the basket and hide the second halves around the classroom. Let the kids draw one card each from the basket and then go and hunt for a matching pair. Depending on how many eggs / words you have you can have a race who collects more words.
Modifications:
This is an activity presented to me by DOS from my school. I just modified it to make it more Easter style.
You’ll need:
Cut the pictures in half so that it’s clear (or almost clear) what it is in the picture. Stick them onto the eggs (it’s important that the picture is smaller then the egg) let the students draw one egg each, tell them it’s a secret and they can’t show the egg to anyone and ask them to walk around the room and find the second half of their pictures just describing what they can see. If you have an odd number of students you need to prepare one picture cut into 3 pieces. It’s a good idea to be prapared for an odd number anyway in case a student is absent.
Have fun
Last Monday I was really surprised when I entered the classroom and received this:
a women's day card
From a small group of 9-10-year-olds. Wow!!!! But why I’m so wow? For a couple of reasons.
First of all, for me and my generation the International Women’s Day seems to be a bit of a relict of the past era (of communism). The way of celebrating it has changed considerably. However, it seems that the older generation and the younger want to celebrate it in a more traditional way. I think it is also encouraged in schools. And it’s nice, to be honest
The other reason was that all of us share the same native language, so there was no real reason to make the card in English. And the fact that they wrote it in English is absolutely fabulous for me. I don’t worry too much about the language. On the contrary, I’m pleased that they feel confident with their English and eager to show it (sometimes show off too . They wanted to sing Happy Birthday but decided that it’s not the right song for the occasion. That’s probably because we have a song Sto lat (live a hundred years) wich is sung for birthdays, anniversaries, name days and alike.
So it appears that the method I chose for them works fine. What method? Only carrots, no sticks And praising the language they produce spontaneously. I give them quite a lot of drills which they LOVE and every time ask for more. It’s also something I made out after looking at their reactions – most of the drills are done playing with a ball, a ballon and sitting on beanbags. That’s really funny how easy it is Not with all my groups, though.
One of the activities that work with most of my classes is dictation drawing. It’s not my invention and probably it has a different name, so if you know the real name, let me know.
First I used it to practise vocabulary and structures for discribing people (and monsters:)) with low-level, usually young learners groups and then I used it also to talk about houses, rooms and furniture, prepositions of place.
Students work in pairs. They sit back to back. Each of them has a piece of paper, one side labelled “My… (monster, room, friend, etc)” and the other side labelled “My friend’s / partner’s …. (monster, room, friend, etc)” . I give them a time limit in which they have to draw the thing (eg. a person) on their side of the piece of paper. When they finish, they take parts to “dictate the drawing” to their partners. The description should be as detailed as possible because the drawings should be similar. It’s also a good idea to set a time limit (might be some classical music piece played quietly instead of counting minutes). Then they can show their work (pairs of pictures) to the rest of the class. There is a lot of laughter, some drawings are very similar, some are really different. You can give points to the most similar ones or just display them somewhere in the classroom. You may also go on and ask the rest of the class about differeneces between the pictures.
This seems like an activity for children, however, again I found that adults often have a lot of fun doing it. With some of adult groups it is very clear that they want to learn but at the same time they want to loosen up a bit.
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