netend

• - it’s different
• - it’s interesting
• - it activates students
• - it motivates students

• print materials (like word clouds)
• download films from YouTube

• group work
• individual work
• higher homework doability
• projects
• worldwide communication

anything that you can make work for you

and ask questions

These are some of the activities I did with my students to see how well they can speak (and very well they can )

1. Three stories (14 yr-olds, B2 level)

After talking to the students about how to tell if the person is lying I asked them to sit in groups and tell the group three stories – 2 real ones and 1 made up. The other students can ask questions if they want and guess which is the fake story.

First I told them mine:

1. When I was a teenager I was learning to drive a car on a desert in Kuwait. Well, there was a flat hard area with a tree and I crashed into the tree.

2. When I was teaching a very nice elemntary group I fell asleep during one lesson.

3. I drove to school, parked the car, had my classes, went shopping and went to the bus stop, caught a bus home as I forgot that I had come to school by car.

Which one is not true??? They were quite amused to find out they actually stories 2 and 3 were true. But I had to give more background to nr 2

2. Questions to the teacher (14 yrs-old, B1+)

As I’m their new teacher I asked them to write 4-5 questions they want to ask me. No taboos, just had to be polite questions. Then I asked volunteers to come to the front and answer as if they had been me. So if the question was: “What’s your name?” They should say: “Marta”. Every student had top answer about 2 questions. They got points for correct answers and if the answer was wrong the question could have been asked again. Quite a lot of fun.

3. Make them say YES or NO

A volunteer has to answer questions from the students but he / she mustn’t say “yes” or “no”. Any other answer is ok as long as one phrase is not repeated all the time (like “maybe” as the answer to many questions). It worked great with one, more talkative group but not so great with another.

Well, I have this terrible habit of making resolutions. Twice a year – on the 1st of January and on the 1st of September. After a month or so I’m frustrated as I usually fail most of them… But this year I’ll try hard…

So these are some of my resolutions for year 2010/2011 for gimnazjum (middle school / junior high or whatever you call school for 12-15 year-olds)

- do some online or IWB activities once a week (this is whenever the classroom with IWB is available)

- have an educational blog for each class

- use peer grading (students test one another in pairs, give marks or points, pairs change every month and I take the average while giving the final grade)

- do student generated revisions and then use some of their activities in the test

- connect with other classes learning English worldwide

- use a new idea from my ELF shelf every week or so

- try to blog more often

Some hard ones but keet your fingers crossed. Have a great school year 2010/2011

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.