Creative Writing with Young Learners - Poetry

By Enokson on Flickr

Many teachers are reluctant to spend time on extensive reading or writing in class. There are various reasons for this, some being:

1. I don't have enough time to get through the syllabus as well as doing extra work.
2. My students want/need to learn how to speak English, not read literature.
3. I would rather teach my students how to function in real-life situations.
4. I don't know much about literature myself.
5. My students don't like reading.
6. My students don't like writing.
7. This is a language class, not a literature class.

These are some of the possible reasons that I can imagine would prevent teachers from introducing poetry into the classroom, though I'm sure there are many more. I myself have been guilty of the first answer - I have been teaching for eleven years and I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have used poetry or literature for any other reason than to introduce a new structure, to focus on forms or as an intensive reading task.

Time is extremely valuable and the fact that doing creative writing in class is time-consuming is an important factor. However, if you can spare ten to fifteen minutes each lesson over several days, it does not have to run too much into your heavy schedule. Below is how I introduced poetry with a group of nine and ten year olds, with the final objective of having my learners take part in an international poetry competition.

Lesson One: Reading Poetry

We discussed poetry - whether the learners ever read  or wrote poems, at home or at school. They seemed to have the opinion that poetry was something very difficult to both understand and write. In Spain it is very rare for children or teenagers to do much creative writing, and if they do it tends to be very structured and limited by the teacher. When I told them that we were going to look at some poems in English before writing our own poems, they seemed gobsmacked. "We don't know how to write poems in Spanish! We can't write them in English!" So I gave them the following poems written by children to read, taken from The Poetry Zone.  First, I gave them a copy and read it aloud myself, twice. This was so the children would get a feeling for how the poem sounded, instead of concentrating on what each word or line meant.

When I look at the sky,

I remember a bird in the air

It came on my finger,

but now it isn't there,

after I looked in the sky

it was exactly where it was

I looked at the clouds

and my bird was flying around in the air

and it was always there.

By Madeeha Saher, age 8

The Poem about an Insect by Joel Oram, aged 12

I am really small

I wish I could be tall

I get covered in leaves

From the huge, huge trees

One side of the wood to the other takes forever

Climbing over mountains which to you are weeds

When the strong wind hits me I fly over the trees like an aeroplane

When I get really cold, I hide under fallen branches

Wherever I go I have to try not to get lost

I don't want to get stepped on

So I shoot off and then I'm gone

I am so small, you will not find me

Hiding in the woodland.

These poems are written by children of around their age. For each poem, we then created actions to go with each poem, focussing on the meaning of the lines. I then asked them to look at the poems and asked them what they noticed about punctuation (there wasn't any in the second poem) and if that was ok in a poem. We discussed that normal rules like punctuation and capital letters aren't necessary in poems (this didn't stop them from using punctuation in their own poems). I then asked them if the poems rhymed and if they thought rhyming poems were better or not. We decided that making poems rhyme is difficult, and for our first poem we would not make it rhyme.

Lesson Two: The topic, preparation and first drafts

I told the learners that the poems they were going to write would be entered into a competition. I had printed off a copy of the poster that can be found, along with lots of useful information and resources, on the British Council's Teaching English Website. We looked at the poster and I explained the rules of the competition.

I then told them that the topic was HOME. I told them to think about what the word HOME meant to them and what they imagined when they heard the word. We brainstormed some vocabulary relating to the topic on the board. Because they were concentrating on their own idea of home, I then asked them to think of the homes of other creatures. We discussed the homes of fish and insects amongst other animals. I made sure that they were aware that it wasn't necessary to write about their own home, if they didn't want to. They could imagine they were somebody or something else and write from their point of view.

Each learner then had a blank sheet of paper on which to write any words that they associated with HOME. They could write whatever came into their heads - as long as it had something to do with the topic. I encouraged them to focus on one aspect of home - Whose home is it?  What is it like? What is there? Why does it feel like home? As they were working, I monitored helping with vocabulary and ideas for those who were finding it hard to get started. I also made my own  personal brainstorm, trying to stick to words that the learners would understand.

When everybody had written what they could, I wrote my words on the board. Then, as a class, we wrote a poem using my words. I started it off by choosing one of the words and writing the first line, and we built it up bit by bit. Here is a Wordle of the words I chose:

 Unfortunately, I didn't make a copy of the poem we created and I don't remember enough to reproduce it here, but you can get an idea of how I imagine home (nothing, in fact, like my real home but a fairly common British idea of the word, I think!) Of course, the students' words were nothing like mine - since it was September and we had recently com back from the summer holidays, many of them wrote about the beach, which is their second home.


The children then drew a picture that represented their idea of home and the words they had written. This was to get them focussing on the different words, and grouping them together to form complete ideas. For example, with my words, I would draw myself sitting in an armchair with a cup of tea, reading a book in front of the fire. Having a disorganised list of words, they would need to bring together their ideas. They could draw circles around groups of words that went together, or that talked about the same thing.

The learners then started working on their first draft of their poems. Luckily, I have found the rough copy of Violeta's work, including her notes. Here is a Wordle of her ideas:

 

I will be including a link to the children's poetry, but I'm having some formatting problems with the document. I will share the link as soon as I can.

Lesson Three: The finished product

It can be useful to view a first draft with fresh eyes, so we came back to them after the weekend. The students re-read their drafts and made any changes they felt could improve it. I helped correct spelling mistakes, and revised verb forms and agreement (more for the competition than anything else). The learners then copied up their poems and drew pictures to illustrate them. They also had to think of a title that best described their poem.

I entered their poems into the competition that evening. One of the students was eleven and was too old to enter the competition, so I decided to have a parallel competition within the class. My colleague, Stephen, who is actually writes novels when he isn't teaching, was to be the judge. He would choose the three best entries. I then made a booklet on the computer which included all their poems, and gave each student a copy to take home, whilst displaying another on the wall for everyone else to see.

The learners were really proud of their work. The competition element helped motivate them into doing it well, but I think they enjoyed the writing process too. Spelling and grammar were important, but not the be all and end all. The important thing was the content. The poems were judged on content and sound, rather than accuracy. I think it is essential to have students, whatever their age and level, sometimes work on tasks where their ideas are what matters, rather than how they express them. If we constantly focus on form, they will pay much more attention to grammatical accuracy and vocabulary than the planning process and ideas, and to be honest, for a piece of writing to have the desired effect and to be "successful", the ideas and points made can be more important than the way in which they are expressed.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, you don't have to spend full lessons on this. You could do a little each day for several weeks. I wouldn't drag it out too long, as the learners may get bored, but it could be something they could work on if they finish their work early.

I hope you have enjoyed these ideas and found them useful. They worked for this particular class, but may not work so well with a different group of learners. I will get the link to their poems up ASAP.

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?

Brick By Brick the Tower is Built

 

Last night some friends and I were having a nice game of Jenga® which is always good for a laugh. If you've never played it, the game consists of removing blocks from anywhere in the tower using only one hand and then placing them on the top. The tower gets bigger and more unstable as you play and the objective is not to make the tower fall. Some players are more strategic and try to make the tower as unstable as possible for the next person whereas others tend to play safe. Why I am writing about this on my ELT blog? Well, I was thinking about making some New Year's Resolutions related to my teaching and most of them require a step by step approach, doing a little every day, recording and reflecting over time and this made me think of the game we were playing last night.

In fact, Jenga® has quite a lot to do with teaching and learning. One of my objectives for the rest of this year is to work on building up my students' knowledge and use of English, encouraging them to do a little each day, whether this is revisiting vocabulary, doing some grammar reinforcement exercises, sending me an email or watching a video on Youtube. I would also like them to reflect on their own progress, taking time to decide what each individual needs to work on - a bit like thinking carefully about which block to remove in Jenga® and then placing it on top of the tower of knowledge in order to move onto the next block (sorry about that cheesy metaphor there!) My point is that I need to try and make my students understand that in order to be successful at language learning, they must have realistic expectations of what can be achieved before working out what they can do daily to achieve these objectives. And that a little every day often goes much further than a three hour marathon session on a Sunday night or a frantic cramming session before an exam.

As for my other resolutions, they are related to both the classroom and my own professional development outside it.

1) Try to make use of more emergent language and allow the lesson to develop and evolve by itself. I need to loosen the reins a bit. That is not to say that I am going to go full-dogme and abandon the course book or the exam prep, but I would like to extend those dogme moments I have had towards the end of 2010 and let them take over longer parts of the lesson, if relevant.

2) During and after lessons, make a note of any problems, difficulties, and thing that didn't go so well and reflect on possible reasons and solutions or changes that could be made. This refers to materials themselves, the manipulation of those materials, dynamics, individual students, my own behaviour... and probably lots more! I intend to look closely at any problems and try to find logical solutions to them (something that doesn't come very easy to me - I am somewhat lacking in critical thinking skills!) I will try to take up Dave Dodgson's challenge, where he invites us to blog about things that haven't gone too well as well those that do.

3) Try to find the time to create more materials and to organise them properly on my computer... one day maybe I will have a small library of materials in which to dip into and adapt. Again, this is a slow and steady activity that I need to begin and keep up (another characteristic that seems to evade me quite a lot - especially where the gym is concerned!) and regularly update.

4) Continue working every day on my CLIL course (I will blog about that at some point), and when I have finished this particular set of materials, start working on the next age group. Yet again, a little every day is best, allowing my mind to rest in between - unless I have a particularly creative and productive morning. I need to be constant and make myself work on this every weekday, with no buts!

5) Go swimming twice a week. Yes, I know this has nothing to do with teaching, but I do have to try to fit it in with all the other things on my list, AND teaching of course! Also, if I publicly announce it on here, I might just feel an obligation to go! Please feel free to ask me if how many times I have been swimming each week, and don't accept all the excuses I will come up with!

I'm sure there were a few more things in my head before I started writing this post, but I think the ones I have mentioned are enough to be going on with. I really don't want to overwhelm myself with objectives and good intentions, after all, they do need to be realistic and accomplishable (is that a word?) just like those I want my students to set themselves.

Going back to Jenga®, if you think carefully about the blocks to remove and where to place them, if you take your time, you will build a decent tower. If you rush in and try to build up the tower too quickly, this is what will happen.

I'll leave you to think about the analogy with teaching and learning.

Happy 2011 and may you and your students all have a productive, creative, successful and fun year!

Me, panicking during our game - and no, I didn't knock it down once!

Merry Christmas Everybody!

From Summerhill to ELT: Promoting Democracy in the Classroom

Anarchy!

Autonomy, democracy, happy children and play are some of the themes of an article I wrote last year, now published in the latest version of HLT Magazine.

The article is titled From Summerhill to ELT: Promoting Democracy in the Classroom and can be found in the Short Articles section.  It outlines some of the principles of "free" schools such as Summerhill and how we can implement them into our language classrooms.

If you are interested, take a look and comment here on my blog if you have anything to say.


Thanks :)

Open Book Tests Part 2 - How it went

Before you start to read I have to warn you that I don't yet have the results of the tests and therefore I don't know how the students have done or what problems they may have had. I left the tests at work yesterday and will be marking them this evening.

What I can say is that the students all appeared to be thinking hard whilst doing the test - I was actually writing some report cards but I had one eye on them all the time (I don't know where I've managed to learn the ability to write without looking at the paper properly!) and they were all concentrated on their work, sometimes looking up to think about something.

Funnily enough, a couple of the students didn't seem to open their books at all. I don't think this is because the test was easy for them but because it was actually harder and would take longer to find the appropriate section in the book than to think it through themselves. This was really one of my objectives for doing the test this way - they would have to think about the answers, using the material available to help them. In a state of such high concentration (as opposed to the usual fun and chatty atmosphere of the class), they would perhaps be more likely to take in and internalise the information and language they were reading about in the book and using in the test exercises.

Most of the learners used their books at some stage, but it seemed to be after thinking about a question that they opened their books, to check the answer they had already formed in their heads. In any case, as I had warned them before we started, they would not have time to look up everything.

One of the problems I had foreseen would be whether or not the tests would actually do their purpose and show me what the students know and what they don't. However, I think that if somebody really didn't know, for example, when to use "will" and "going to", that this will still be apparent in their answers. If they have been looking up individual examples in their book, there are likely to be mistakes in their test. In any case, the point is that even if they weren't sure about something before doing the test, it is quite possible that now, after looking in their books and doing the test, that they understand it.

I will be looking carefully at the test papers this evening. Rather than the number of correct answers, I will be focussing on the areas where the students generally did well, and those that seem to need more work. I will check for consistency within the same grammar point or lexical area for each student.

I think that even if the circumstances of the test turn out to not be ideal, something postive will have been taken from it. The learners felt that there were being some concessions made to them and they felt more confident having their book in front of them, like a kind of security blanket. The latter I believe to be important because it means the affective filter was higher than in a traditional test situation and hopefully this will have provided better working conditions for the students.

I will be asking them next lesson if they thought doing the exam in this way was a good idea, if there could be any improvements, how they felt during the test, if they used their books much etc.

I will report back on their opinions and my conclusions after marking the tests.

Thanks for reading :)

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After marking the tests I can say that being able to use their books has not actually helped the students do the test - to be honest, they haven't done as well as I had expected - it is possible that looking in their books may have confused them on some points, but the general impression I have is that they haven't taken advantage of the situation. They don't seem to have looked up the rules for the grammar that was being tested but have relied on their own knowledge, and they ecrtainly haven't used to their books to find examples of collocations that appeared in the test since the questions they got right are of examples they have come across many times.

As I mentioned in the original post, I think I will have to show them how to use their books to find relevant information. Just as they would need training in making notes, they need training in using reference materials.

This has been an experiment, and I am not going to take their test results into account for their end of term reports, because I don't think they are accurate enough. What is clear though, is that if I want to give a test in similar conditions in the future, I am going to have to show the students how to look for information. We will need to do some practice on looking for specific information (scanning) and transferring rules and examples into different types of exercise.

I do think that having their books available for consultation was comforting for the students, but it is clear from the results that they found the test difficult. This obviously isn't very motivating - doing badly in a test is one of the worst things that can happen to a language learner - but I think it will show the learners a need for a change in attitude (they can be particularly lazy). The test was difficult and I will make sure this is clear to the learners, and I plan on going over the exercises and asking the students to find the appropriate pages in the book, encouraging them to find similar examples and rules that they needed to do the exercise well.

The most important thing I need to do today though, is reassure the students that they are making progress, they are improving their English and that their test result isn't so important. What is really important is the work they do every day in class and this is what will be reflected in their reports.

Open Book Tests

By ccarlstead on Flickr with Creative Commons licence

In October I wrote a post about allowing students to take in notes to exams. The idea was students would hopefully spend some time before the test preparing their set of notes, at the same time revising the content without even realising it. I was planning on using this method with a group of thirteen year olds, who are at an age where they need to understand the importance of doing a test properly because for the next five years at secondary school they will be having tests more often than they actually have a proper lesson, such is the educational system in Spain! However, these kids are actually this - kids. They may be taller than me but inside they are just beginning to step away from childhood. For this reason, I don't think allowing them to prepare notes would be of any help. They know what grammatical structures will be in the test, but do they know how to make notes? Has anybody shown them how to make a good set of revision notes? No. At school nobody teaches them study techniques. They mostly just have to memorise facts and even large chunks of information word for word. Unless I show them myself how to create a set of notes and how to focus on the most important parts, they will have difficulty in doing so successfully.

So, I am going one step further. We are having an open-book test.

The test they have is fairly long and is based on the grammar and vocabulary we have been learning this term, with a writing stage for early finishers. As I said in the other post, I'm not a big fan of tests, but this class is quite lazy (I know, it's their age) and I'm hoping that having a test will help them focus more. They are so used to testing that if we don't have one they seem to think that the class is just to doss around in (for those of you who didn't live in the UK in the nineties, "to doss around" means "to spend time doing very little or being unproductive").

Anyway, they will be able to use their books to help them do the test. However, they won't have time to look up everything in their books. In any case, the test questions are not reproductions of tasks in the book, so they will have to find the approriate section. If they have to choose between the Present Continuous and Will to talk about the future, they can read the grammar section (in English) on that to remind them of their uses before doing that particular exercise. If they can't remember the spelling of a vocabulary item, they can find it in their book to double check.

One of the other reasons why I'm doing this is to reduce stress. I didn't want the learners to be worrying about the test, or hurriedly studying five minutes before the class and getting all nervous. Allowing them to use their books means that everyone is relaxed about doing the test and sould hopefully be more successful - essential with this age group.

I do plan to allow notes as mentioned above in the future, but with older students and when we have some time to discuss how to create these notes.

I shall report back tomorrow on how today went!

Festive Fun!

The festive season is now upon us and only two more weeks of the term to go. This year's holidays begin quite late compared with previous years - I won't be truly on holiday until 10pm on the 23rd December. All the students will have two classes in that final week before Christmas, and I'm trying to decide what festive things we can do.

In previous years on the last day, there has always been some Christmas craft type activity with the young learners, games or parties with the teens and a drink in the bar with the adults! However, I'm changing things round a bit this year. I haven't yet decided what to do with the little ones but it won't be a craft as we are doing one in our Winter topic the lesson before. Maybe a Christmas song? A nativity play? That would take up too much preparation time, we just don't have the time for a proper play but we could do a bit of acting out - they always love that! We could write a letter to Santa. Maybe we will watch a bit of Dora the Explorer Christmas Special and maybe we will have a party. In any case, with the youngest ones you can make fun out of anything. The main thing is that they go home for the holidays happy, feeling successful and looking forward to coming back in the new year.

What about the older children? Well they all enjoy singing, so I'm sure we will be performing a Christmas song. But which one? Not wanting to do the dreadful "Jingle Bells" yet again, maybe we will go for something a bit more comic such as When Santa Got Stuck Up The Chimney. One class will be having parties that they themselves have organised. Maybe we could try a traditional Christmas Parlour game like Charades. There are lots of good ideas on the BC Teaching English website.

Now, the tweens are a bit harder to engage, especially at this time of year when they have finished their school work. It can be hard to find materials suitable for their age that actually interest them - they don't want to watch a cartoon as it is too babyish, but adult films and shows are not suitable. I have a copy of the Mr Bean Christmas Special, but it seems so dated now! I think the best think to do is to ask them to suggest several ideas of things to do, put them in a hat, and luck will decide! Either that or have a democratic vote. Maybe it won't be so Christmassy, but they could bring in things they'd like to share such as songs or videos. One idea I have is to do a kind of Christmas Top Ten. I would play ten songs (they could be past UK Chart Number Ones or current songs) and get the students to choose the number one.

That leaves the older teens and adults. My group of adults have suggested having a Christmas party on the last day, with typical local festive treats and English songs and carols. I was thinking of doing something with the Mr Bean episode in the previous lesson - having them write down what Mr Bean would say if he spoke properly, making a note of all the typical British customs the can see in the video.
The teen groups are very small and a party would not work - unless we joined up with another class. Any ideas for a really fun last lesson with the 16 plus?

Sometimes I have just completely ignored Christmas with the adults. They sometimes actually prefer to have a normal lesson. This year they have suggested having a party themselves and they seem quite into the spirit of things, and I'm going to take advantage of this and have a bit of festive fun myself!

Barça - Madrid

 

Barça vs Real Madrid. 

That's what threatens to mess up next Monday evening's lesson. A class full of "madridistas" means that from 9pm there will be little, if any, concentration in our classroom. One or two have decided not to come to class, others have suggested a kind of Christmas radio party where we listen to the match in the background whilst singing Christmas carols (yes, that was really a suggestion made by one of the students!). If we could get the match in English I wouldn't mind, but I don't think that's going to be possible. Anyway, as we were originally going to be looking at verbs followed by the gerund or the infinitive, I decided to make up a dialogue about football in which lots of these forms were used. You will find the end result below. I tried to make it sound natural whilst including an inappropriate number of gerunds and infinitives! After getting the students to concentrate for ten minutes (before the match starts) and look for the verbs, we will practise the dialogues in pairs. I am hoping that this will be fun...

 

Watching the match

John:    Alright mate! How’s it going?

Tom:    Not bad, John. I think we’ll win this game.

John:    Yeah, I hope so. Do you want a drink?

Tom:    Just a coke, please. I don’t feel like drinking tonight. Anyway, I’ve got to finish studying for
            Wednesday’s exam later.

John:    Oh right. I love having a beer watching the footy. Don’t you
            miss drinking when everyone else is having one?

Tom:    Sometimes, yeah. Oy! Penalty!........
            Nice one! We’ll score from this.

John:    Yeah, Ronaldo’s been practising taking penalties all week.

Both:    Goooooooooaaaaaaaaallllllllll!

Tom:    Anyway, fancy coming to the match on Saturday? I’m taking
            the kids.

John:    No, I’d like to but I can’t afford to go. My brother suggested
            going and he offered to get the tickets but I refused to accept
            them. He’s not working at the moment.

Tom:    Well, if you change your mind, I don’t mind giving you a lift.

John:    Cheers. Hey! That’s not a red card! He was diving! He can’t deny cheating there!

Tom:     Oh I know. They just can’t help cheating, can they?

John:     Well, I still don’t think they’ll avoid being relegated at the end of the season.

Tom:     No, they certainly deserve it.

Five little ducks.. erm pigs...erm... whatever!

As I was getting ready for work yesterday, I made up a little song. You may be thinking that I get inspired whilst doing some rather mundane activities like doing the shopping or getting ready for work, but to be honest, since these activities are not mentally taxing, I can allow my mind to wander and this is how I come up with ideas. (I suppose I'm not a very methodical kind of person).

My six-year-olds and I are looking at the story of The Three Little Pigs and I thought singing a song about them might reinforce some of the language we have seen. Now, finding it difficult to remember and sing a song in class with an original tune, most of the ditties I make up are sung to the tune of another, more traditional, song. In this case, the "little pigs" fit in very well with the "little ducks" in the song Five Little Ducks Went Swimming One Day (over the hills and far away...). Everyone know that one? Here are the lyric to my piggy version:

Three little pigs left home one day

Said "Bye Bye" to mummy and went away

Pig number one built his house of straw

Wolf blew it down and it was no more.

Two little pigs left home one day

Said "Bye Bye" to mummy and went away

Pig number two built his house of sticks

Wolf blew it down and it fell to bits.

One little pig left home one day

Said "Bye Bye" to mummy and went away

Pig three built his house from bricks of clay

and the three little pigs could play all day!

What do you think? I haven't tried it on the children yet but I think they'll like it. I doubt I'd make a career out of songwriting but it suits my purpose alright!  Feel free to use it if you are doing something similar.

And if you've been singing along while reading this post, I bet you won't be able to get the tune out of your head all day!

Party Time!

We have just finished a unit on birthdays in our course book, where party food had been the main lexical input and I wanted to do something a bit more creative that would relate to the topic. This particular class sometimes have some problems getting on with each other and there are often silly little arguments and tale telling, so I thought it may be useful to do some group work, in the hope that they would bond more if they had to work together to complete a task.

The idea I came up with was to organise a class party. Now, there are twelve students in the class - too many to work in a group, so I decided to make it more competitive (they just love competition) and to divide the class into two. Since there are six boys and six girls, this seemed the most practical way to split them up. I don't normally allow them to work in single sex groups, unless they are groups of three, as I prefer them to change partners every so often. However in this case, I thought there would be fewer differences of opinion and therefore quarrels if they were allowed to work with their friends. It was very likely that the girls would prepare a completely different kind of party to the boys.

Each group had a supervisor who I appointed. The supervisor's job was to make sure everybody in the group knew what they had to do and to make sure they were doing it. The others would each be responsible for a task, being able to help the others if necessary. These are the tasks that they had to complete:

• Make a guestlist
• Make invitations
• Make a list of food and drinks
• Make a list of games to play
• Decide what decorations you will need

There will be two different parties that we will hold in December, when we finish our current course book. The children really got into organising their parties and making beautiful invitations. We will be finishing things off this afternoon, and deciding who will bring what, as each child will bring one item of food to the party.

Precious Moments

It may not look much, but with a lot of dedication and care it will become something wonderful.

On a day when some classes seem like an uphill struggle, when it appears that some students are just trying to make life more difficult for you, when you find it impossible to get the to children stop shouting and sit down, and all because it is raining outside; there sometimes comes a glimpse of light in that dark, heavy ambience; a ray of sunlight or a rainbow to brighten up your day.

This happened to me yesterday. Not that my previous class had gone badly, but the bad weather along with the ever-present challenge of trying to help some students to learn had started to get me down slightly. It is November, one month til the Christmas holidays and just over two months since the new term began, when things have settled down enough for people to start complaining and demanding things from you. Demotivation starts to creep in to the souls of learners and colleagues. There is a reason why in the UK they have a half-term break!

Then, a six-year-old changed everything.

With this particular class I decided to take a kind of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) approach. I spent the summer designing a course for them, and I am working on the finer details as we go along. Really, what we are doing is learning about and doing lots of different things, of the domains of various school subjects. We learn about living creatures, do projects, make things, do experiments, listen to stories and so on. Yesterday, we were discussing the story of The Three Little Pigs. I hadn't yet read them the story, but as it is a well-known tale in Spain too, we were discussing what the children knew about it. Of course this was being done in Spanish - the children have very little productive English at this stage- and I was providing them with some vocabulary trying to encourage them to use it. This meant that their Spanish sentences explaining the story went something like: "Pig construyó una casa de paja". I could see Lucía was thinking about something, and when she put up her hand she said that she had something to say in English.

Slowly, but confidently, she exclaimed: 

"The wolf up the house!" 

Well, this was something new! A six-year-old trying to make a full sentence in English. On her own. With no encouragement or elicitation. I was taken aback. Of course the sentence needed a verb for it to make real sense, but her sentence had meaning and could be easily understood. Lucía was communicating in English!
And she knew exactly what she was saying because she made a gesture for "up" so that we would know what she meant. For me, this is a really important step for Lucía. I have been exposing the children to more English than they are used to, in the hope that they will eventually understand me and pick up some of it themselves. I focus on important vocabulary and repeat it a lot while we are doing things, and then wait for them to use it without being prompted. It takes such a long time for this to happen usually, and so I was shocked to hear something that included new vocabulary along with vocabulary we learnt in October, and in a coherent sentence.

My reaction may seem over the top, but I almost had tears in my eyes when this little girl said what she did. I felt so proud! I praised her effusively for her efforts. It gave me the feeling that maybe what I am doing is working, maybe this way of learning is effective.

Thank you, Lucía. You really made my week!

Don't Shoot the Bear!

Don't Shoot the Bear is an interactive commercial for the brand of error correction products Tipp-Ex. Watch it:









I have used it today with a group of ten year olds and a group of thirteen year olds, and I am now going to use it with my Advanced class.

With the younger ones, I got them to write a list of action verbs on a piece of paper. I had not told them anything about the video. I then wrote on the board "A hunter shoots a bear", and elicited its meaning. I went on to rub out "shoots" and asked them if any of the verbs in their lists could go in its place. I told them that if necessary, they could add "with" so that the sentence would make sense, for example: A hunter plays with a bear. They then had to tick the verbs on their list that would be suitable in the sentence in question.

I then played the video and asked them for verbs with which to complete the sentence. It's really good fun and it gets them practising 3rd person singular "s" (although the sentence does not need to be grammatically correct for the videos to work). It also activates vocabulary as they try to think of as many different actions as possible to try out.

With the advanced students, I'm hopefully going to get something a bit more complex out of them. I will only accept grammatically correct sentences, and demand synonyms of really basic words. Maybe we could hypothesise about what will happen. We can discuss why the same video comes up when different verbs have been entered. We can look up different and alternative meanings in the dictionary. I haven't really decided exactly what we are going to do, I thought I would see what they came up with first.

I do think that this video has endless classroom possibilities though. It could be used as a stimulus for speaking or writing, the students could create a collaborative story about the hunter and the bear. Surely there must be plenty more ways in which we could use this video, so please add your ideas to the comments section to share with us all.

And whatever you do, DON'T SHOOT THE BEAR!

Autumn Days

Those of you who were at primary school in the eighties will probably remember the following assembly song, especially if you were in the recorder group like I was:

Autumn days when the grass is jewelled

And the silk inside a chestnut shell

Jet planes meeting in the air to be re-fuelled

All the things I love so well

So I mustn't forget

No I mustn't forget

To say a great big thank you

I mustn't forget.

Along with harvest festival celebrations where everyone took in a tin of Spam (when it was something to eat, rather than junkmail) and sang songs about crops and giving and thanking the Lord, autumn was a time for putting on your wellies and jumping in piles of leaves and puddles, smelling bonfires and playing conkers and doing leaf rubbings with wax crayons.

I wanted to allow my class of six-year-olds to feel the magic of those days, and relate to it. I wanted them to imagine they were in a park covered in fallen leaves, to run around and jump and play. To smell roast chestnuts, to feel the chilly autumn wind on their faces. To collect leaves and touch them, feel them, smell them. I wanted them to have a multisensory experience with sights, sound, smells and sensations. And all this in the classroom!

This is all part of the CLILing up of my youngest students. This summer I started working on a project to bring Content and Language Integrated Learning into my classroom. After trying out different course books for this age group and trying a materials free approach, I have come to the conclusion that neither is ideal. So why not do things that the children are really interested in? Topics that will motivate and engage. Tasks that are challenging not just because of the language involved but also for their content. This is what I am trying with one class of six-year-olds and at the moment it seems to be working.

Autumn is a mini.project that we have been doing over three lessons. The final lesson was dedicated to creating a display for our classroom. We had already done the leaf rubbings in the previous lesson and we spent yesterday deciding where to stick each leaf and recognising the written forms of the words we have learnt. Here are a couple of pictures of the display:

Creating a display can take some time and effort on the part of the teacher, but it gives the children a real sense of achievement when they see that their work is the backbone of a beautiful wall display. You can involve the children at all stages, in the planning of what to include and where, in the sticking, in handing out pins and adhesives and so on. The display is ours, we have created it as a class and it shows what we have been doing and what the children have been learning. It shows our progress and it is fun.

Peanuts!

Teaching grammar to young learners is no easy task. Is there even any need for it? I'm not going to discuss the whys and wherefores right now, but if you want to read more about whether teaching grammar is necessary for young learners, read this post by Dave Dodgson on his blog Reflections of a Teacher and Learner.

In my school we use course books with young learners and in this case I am using Kids Box 2 by CUP, which is actually quite a nice course, with some fantastic songs, although it does present some vocabulary that may seem out of context (who eats water melon at a birthday party?). This is because the course is tailor-made to suit the Cambridge Young Learners' Exams (see this post of mine.) Yesterday's lesson was supposed to present learners with object pronouns - something that they don't even understand in Spanish. Of course, they use the object pronoun "me" without realising it, but I feared, actually explicitly explaining how to use these pronouns was not going to get us very far. The exercise in the book was a very flimsy affair which would be done wrong by all my students if I hadn't shown them the "grammar" beforehand. So how could I get the students using object pronouns correctly without writing lots of boring example sentences on the board and having them write their own?

This is what I did:

After showing them the forms of the object pronouns on a lovely colourful poster with children pointing to each other and speech bubbles saying things like "Give him the ball" I got out a bag of peanuts. Unsurprisingly, everyone started asking me for peanuts in Spanish, to which I replied that they would have to ask me in English if they wanted something. "Can I have a ......, please?" is the phrase they know for asking for things, but that wasn't going to help us with object pronouns, so I provided them with the not-so-polite "Give me a peanut, please!"

They all began shouting for peanuts using "Give me..." and I gave one to each child that asked for one.

I then wrote ME, YOU, HIM, HER, US, THEM on Post-It notes and stuck them along the edge of my desk, where they could be seen by everyone. I then placed several peanuts by each Post-It. I told them that if they wanted more peanuts they would have to come to the desk and ask for one, but they could only take one if they used the word on the note and used the peanut accordingly. For example, if they took a peanut from the HER pile, they would have to say "I give the peanut to her" and proceed by giving the peanut to a female friend. If they chose US, they would take two peanuts and keep one for themself and give one to a friend. And so on.

They loved the game and wanted to carry on playing when we had run out of peanuts! And they were all using object pronouns correctly! When we came to the exercise in their activity book, they had no problems.

It may have taken much longer than a simple explanation, but all the children were involved and engaged, and I think that they will remember what they learnt. I may even have created a cognitive cue with the peanuts - every time they see a monkey nut, will they be reminded of object pronouns?

You could do this with other personal pronouns, possessive adjectives and pronouns, or to practise teh possessive "s". You could use sweets or stickers or anything else instead of peanuts. One hint - if you do use peanuts, make sure nobody has an allergy to them first!

Young Learners Video Challenge!

As everyone seems to be busy completing various challenges (see Jason's Wandrous Whiteboard  and Karenne's Dogme Challenges ) I thought I would come up with my own!

One of my classes is a group of ten year olds who have been in our school for approximately two years.
Over the past couple of lessons we have been looking at different sports and their characteristics as well as how to express likes and dislikes. They wrote about their favourite sports, but I wanted them to practise speaking too, so I asked them if they would like to appear in a video that other children in different countries could see. This particular group are quite outgoing and very enthusiastic, and they love doing drama activities and projects to supplement the course book.

I wrote some prompts on the board to help them remember what kind of things they could say, such as:
I like... I don't like ... Most popular sport etc. They practised their speeches without the camera first, and most of them needed a couple of tries with the webcam recording as they got nervous and started laughing.

Here is the merged video:

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

They really enjoyed seeing themselves speak in English and I have suggested they try it at home too, so they can listen to their pronunciation.

What I would like to suggest is for those of you who teach young learners to do something similar. All you need is a computer or laptop with a webcam. I used the basic software that came with the webcam and then merged the videos online with a free application which does not allow editing or downloading but offers the HTML code for you to embed the video into your blog, and a link you can email to students, as well as being able to upload to youtube if you wish.

My students would love to see other children talking about their favourite sports. If you do decide to record your students, send me a link to the video and I will show it to my class. This could be a great collaborative project!

A Call for Advice

This is a cry for help to my PLN.

                                          Photo by Simon Howden

It is not a nice feeling, after so many years of teaching, the one you get when you have no idea of how to help a student advance. It is a feeling of complete and utter exasperation. A feeling of uselessness and hopelessness. Thoughts of incompetence run through my mind. Why don't I know what to do? Why have I run out of ideas? It is so hard not to lose patience and blame the student as well as myself for not knowing how to overcome the problem. This is why I am asking you, my network of knowledgeable friends, for help.


The Student: a one-to one student in his early forties working for a company recently taken over by a British firm. Started in February as a False Beginner, had three months off over the summer and has started lessons again in October. Two hours per week.

The Course: using an elementary level course book as a source of general vocabulary and grammar as well as skills practice.

The Problem: The student has an elementary level of vocabulary and grammar structures and can understand written texts on a wide range of topics, however his listening skills are at beginner level. He can only comprehend spoken English at sentence level (on a good day) and freezes whenever a recording is played.

The Situation: The student has face to face contact several times a year with British visitors to the factory with whom he is expected to communicate. He needs to be able to understand and respond to native speakers socially whilst showing them around the factory.

How can we improve his listening skills in a short period of time? What kind of tasks can I give the student? One of the main problems is nerves. However much I try to get him to relax and just listen, this seems impossible. We have been working on pronunciation issues such as elision and sentence stress in order to make listening easier but at the end of the day, when another teacher comes into the classroom and asks him a basic question he just freezes.

So, please if you have or know of any ideas, tasks, links, websites or even books that may help, please let me know. How can I rid my student of the sensation of being thrown into a black hole whenever he hears English?

The Halloween Spell Hunt

The Halloween Spell Hunt is an activity for children of elementary level upwards and requires relatively little preparation. Similar to a treasure hunt, the children must solve clues in order find each ingredient of a spell. I actually got the idea from the British Council's LearnEnglish Kids website  where you will find a game in which the children have to find each ingredient in a haunted house. Having no internet connection in the classroom, I wondered how I could adapt the game for my class of nine and ten year olds.

What you need to do before the lesson is prepare a set of clues. Choose five spell ingredients such as a lizard's tongue or a frog's eye and write descriptions of these creatures such as:

I am a reptile. I have got four legs and a long tongue. I live in hot places. What am I?

You also need to write a list of hiding places around the classroom or school, e.g. You can find me under the table. All the clues and hiding places should be photocopied and cut up into slips of paper (one for each team).

Divide the class into pairs or threes and give each team the first clue. When they have decided on the answer, they should come and tell you, and you give them the hiding place. For example, the answer to the clue above is LIZARD. When a team comes to you and says "lizard", give them the clue for where to find it. In this case, there should be a picture of a lizard or a lizard's tongue under the table. Make sure there are enough pictures as teams.

They then come to you for the following clue. The first team to find all the parts of the spell will then perform the spell for the rest of the class, choosing victims on whom to cast the spell from their classmates.

As well as being fun, the learners are also practising reading skills and language points such as prepositions of place and verbs in the present simple.

You can follow or preced this activity with spells from Boggles World's Spellbook or Potion Book

Unplugged Moments #2

Having asked my FCE class what skill they wanted to practise in the following lesson, we were going to do some reading yesterday. However, I had had a very busy morning and didn't have a whole lot of time to find a suitable text and create a task for them to do. I then remembered that somewhere, hidden among all the folders, papers, toys and props that fill my classroom shelves, I had a bag full of sets of leaflets acquired from my local library/tourist information centre in Newcastle-under-Lyme several years ago! Great! I would just have to root them out and then try to think of a suitable task for FCE level - What? Think up a challenging task or set of questions for Upper-Int students on the spot? Hmm, not as easy as you may think, however many years experience of teaching FCE you may have.

The solution? Have the students help create the task themselves! What could be more unplugged that using student-created content? Of course the texts themselves were not created by the students, but they were real, authentic texts that are ideal to practise micro-skills such as skimming for gist and scanning for specific information.

I placed sets of leaflets, which all advertised tourist attractions, on tables around the classroom. I then wrote on the board "A day out" and asked the students to write on the board (a kind of wandrous whiteboard but on a specific topic). We then discussed what they had written and what kind of days out they preferred and why. Thanks to Cecilia Coelho for the idea of staying at the board for the discussion.

I then asked them to think of groups of people who may go together on an excursion. I started them off with the first two and they came up with the rest:

1. A family of four with two children aged between 5 and 10
2. A playschool trip of children aged 2 to 5
3. A group of foreign tourists, adults and children
4. A group of senior citizens
5. A group of teenage friends
6. A group of patients with psychological and emotional problems (!)
7. Schoolchildren on a trip, aged 12 to 14
8. A group of physically disabled children

They the had to look at all the different leaflets and decide which day out would be the best for each group of people. They would later have to explain their reasons.

The lessons was very successful, and much more interesting than a typical FCE reading task. It got the students skimming and scanning, reading lots of short texts (probably in total longer than an individual exam text) and they had to explain their reasons orally. We almost ran out of time, but I would have encouraged them to persuade each other to change their mind, had we had more time.