Parkour in the Park (with links)

As is usual, when somebody shares a video on Facebook or Twitter, I automatically wonder whether I could use it in class. This particular video seemed ideal - the theme is relevant and motivating to teenagers and lots of language work could emerge from it. The video shows a group of young men doing parkour or freerunning. Despite the title of this post, the term parkour does not come from the word park but from the French parcours which means route or course. Parkour is a way of moving around a city by the shortest route possible, including jumping over walls, doing forward and backward flips and so on. It is a phenomenon that is taking the world of teenage boys by storm. It has possibly replaced skateboarding as the thing to do in the streets and I have actually seen lads on the street practising jumps from high walls. I plan to show the video to my teenage FCE group to start with, and possibly with a couple of other classes that may find it interesting. Below are some of the activities I have thought of doing.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

First, I plan to show the first 45 seconds, where the men are in the garage getting into their car. I want the students to discuss what kind of people they are, where they think they are going and what they are going to do. There is no indication at this point that they are going to do parkour, in fact, they look more likely to be on their way to rob a petrol station! 

Then the expression "Storm Freerun" comes up on the screen. What do they think it refers to? Have they heard this term before?

I may tell the students to write down the actions that they see in the clip while they are watching.

We will brainstorm obstacles that you can find in a city (walls, railings etc) and verbs of movement. This is a good opportunity to check student's knowledge of verbs of movement and preposition combinations, such as jump over, run through, climb over and more unusual verbs such as crouch, squat, leap, drop, crawl, land. We can then move on to nouns such as somersault, backflip, twist, body roll.

An activity that I thought they may enjoy and get to practise some of the vocabulary we looked at in previous activities is to get them design a route suitable for a freerun. They would draw a plan of a part of a city, including buildings, walls, fences, steps, railings etc or any other obstacles. They would then have to describe the sequence of movements of the runner. 

Another task, since they are an FCE group, could be to write a story about a freerunner describing his thoughts during a run. It could be written in first or third person and could be told in the present or in the past, as a dream or memory.

Oh, and one final point to make would be "Don't try this at home!" We could discuss the dangers of this type of hobby and possible consequences if safety measures are not taken.

Here is the link to the worksheet  I made for my FCE group.

I have also uploaded a magazine article kindly shared by Ceri Jones about local teenagers doing "tricks" in Cádiz, Sothern Spain here, which I hope can be downloaded and printed off in a decent size.

You are welcome to download, edit and use these materials in your own lessons. Enjoy!

Swap Shop!

For those of you who weren't around in late 70s to early 80s Britain, Swap Shop was a magazine programme presented by Noel Edmonds (Current presenter of Deal or No Deal - and he hasn't changed much!) where children phoned in to exchange their possessions.

This Saturday I will be attending a Swap Shop organised by TEFLdelSur - a new association for teachers in the Cádiz area of Spain, set up by Teresa Bestwick. We had our first event in October where we enjoyed sessions by Ceri Jones, Guido Europeaantje and Simon Pearlman. This week's session will be different, as instead of a few individuals giving presentations or workshops, all the participants will be sharing our ideas. I'm not sure exactly how it's going to be oragnised - whether we will all have to get up and explain our idea to the others, or whether it will be a kind of group session where each person gives their two-penneth worth as we go along. It sounds like it will be fun, though!

Anyway, I have decided to talk about writing poetry with young learners. I will be posting a summary of what I intend to talk about on here next week with a list of useful links.

The Next Step

Credit: Evgeni Dinev

Over the past six months I have been working on a "book". The idea came from a various sources: firstly from a personal lack of inspiration in using traditional ELT materials for specific groups, secondly from an interest in the methodology being implemented in local primary schools and thirdly, after reading last year about the ELTons award for new writers sponsored by MacMillan.

Ever since I started blogging I have had an interest in writing - after eleven years of teaching in basically the same situation, I felt that gradually moving in a new direction may be good for me. I was looking for a new focus, something slightly removed from the day to day teaching but also related to it. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy teaching, but sometimes I can't imagine doing exactly the same job, in the same place, for the same wages and even teaching the same families in ten or twenty years' time. Writing would allow me to do some teaching but also do something different. The ELTons offered me an opportunity - a reason for writing, a deadline for submission of three chapters. And in the summer holidays I spent a few hours every morning working on my proposal.

Now, being completely new to this, and not having any inside information as to what the judges were looking for may have put me at a disadvantage. However, I was really writing for myself. The book in question is the basis for the whole syllabus of one of my classes. And it is working really well! The children are having fun, learning lots (not just English) and I feel they are making much more progress than they would have if we had used a traditional course. The shortlist for this award is now out, and my proposal has not made it. Maybe it was that my proposal wasn't clear enough. Or perhaps it isn't marketable enough. Would it make much money? Would it be sold around the world? Is the idea just not appropriate for today's publishers? Am I just too new and unknown? Were there lots of brilliant entries that far surpassed mine? I think that probably the answers to all these questions play a part. It just isn't good enough.

But the motive for this post is not to talk about either the book itself or the awards. It is "What to do next?".
I plan on finishing my book over the next few months, so what should I do with it? Should I publish it for free online? Should I self publish and try to sell a few copies? Should I contact other publishers? Should I just stick it in my drawer at work and keep it for myself (and colleagues)?

What would you do? One of the main drawbacks I see in self-publishing is that I have little experience in page design or programmes other than the basics of Microsoft Word. How do I make it look good enough for people to want to buy it or even download it for that matter? I think that I should probably ask somebody with experience to look at it and give feedback since I haven't got the experience to critically analyse it myself. But who?

This then, is a call for advice. What would you do? Have you tried to publish anything? Have you published and if so how did you go about it? What should my next step be?

Trapped Underground! - a creative writing task

I have a small group of teenage FCE students who like to do a piece of writing for homework once a week. I usually set them an exam type task since they need practice in writing reports, articles, essays and formal letters. However, sometimes I set them something freer - there is nothing that dampens the imagination more than a FCE task to write yet another story that must begin or end the story with the sentence "it was the worst day of my life".

So after reading some fantastic stories they had written with the only instructions "write a story about whatever you want with no maximum word limit", I decided to give them another creative piece to do.

The piece they are going to write this weekend is this:

Imagine you are one of the Chilean miners trapped underground. Write a diary entry explaining your feelings, hopes and fears.

First we discussed the situation - what the students knew (very little since they don't seem to read newspapers or watch the news very often) and I explained basically what had happened and what was ocurring at the moment (the rescue operation). We then brainstormed vocabulary that we might need to talk about the topic. This involved words to talk about mining, escape and rescue, and started a discussion on how one might feel when trapped 700m below the surface.

I hinted that the students might like to look on the internet to find out what the freed miners have said about their experince to help them.

I am really looking forward to reading their accounts of being in the mine. I will post the best pieces here next week.