Wrong Trousers Day

School ends tomorrow. By this I mean that "real" school ends but we, in the language school, still have another ten days to go. Tomorrow will be the last day for many of our younger students, but others will come on Wednesday or Thursday, and a few (poor kids!) will be made to come next week. For these last few lessons something special is required - games, a video, an ice-cream, is common for the very last day of the year, but what happens when there are two or three lessons to go? Well, in my inbox this morning there was a nice surprise from The Guardian Teacher Network - Wrong Trouser Day!

Apparently, Friday 24th June is Wrong Trouser Day. People will dress in a pair of unusual trousers and go about their normal routine. Each participant pays one pound and the benefits go to children's hospitals and hospices around the UK. Organised by the Wallace and Gromit's Children's Foundation, you can find a promotional video on their website which is great for classroom use.

The Guardian Teacher Network has lots of resources for different areas of the curriculum but most are suitable for primary or early secondary learners of English. You will find the most useful links here, in my Delicious bookmarks. Activities include a reading comprehension about the fund raising event, drawing and design tasks, and thinking about how to describe trousers using adjectives. On the Guardian Teacher Network you can find more activities related to numeracy and literacy. You need to be registered to download the worksheets, but I recommend doing so as there are hundreds of useful resources on the site and you will be sent a regular newsletter summarising new or timely content.

I will be using some of these ideas with nine to eleven year old learners, but you could use or adapt them for younger children.

Introduction:
See who is wearing trousers in the class (here shorts are more likely due to the sweltering weather we are having) and describe them. For example, say: "This person is wearing long grey trousers. They are part of a school uniform." or "This person is wearing white short trousers". The others have to guess who you are describing. 

Watching:
Play the video shown on the Wallace and Gromit Foundation website. Ask the children what people they have seen. This is a good opportunity to teach or revise some professions. What was strange about these people? Were they wearing their own trousers? Whose trousers was each person wearing?

Reading/Listening:
You could use the text as a listening task instead of reading if the children don't feel like reading. In any case, the text and questions will probably need to be modified to suit the level of your students.

Describing:
Choose one of the students wearing trousers and ask the others to describe them. What colour are they? Are they long or short? What are they made of? Have they got a pattern or picture? Have they got pockets? Are the smart or casual? Write all the adjectives on the board and tell the learners (or elicit, if they have some knowledge of grammar in their own language) that they are adjectives and we use them to describe things. Write some examples of phrases e.g long, black trousers/ short, yellow trousers/ white cotton trousers/ short blue jeans. Now elicit where we put the adjective in English. It may be a good idea to underline the adjectives or use a different colour. Hand out this worksheet and show the students how to complete it.

Drawing/Designing:
There are two worksheets you can use for this activity. The first is All Sorts of Trousers where learners think about the different kinds of trousers you can wear for different activities. In the second, they Design a Pair of Trousers for Wallace.The first activity is more suitable for younger, lower level learners.

Watching (film):
Now show the film The Wrong Trousers. There is a special ELT version published by OUP and divided into six parts.

I plan to do these activities over the next two classes.

If you are brave enough, you may wish to go into school that day actually wearing the "wrong trousers" yourself! Or if it would be too embarrassing on the commuter train, take a pair of trousers in and get changed before the lesson!

100th post!

I thought I should do something special to celebrate my 100th post on this blog - 100 posts may not sound like many in an 18 month period, but it's still a landmark! I made a Wordle of both my 2009 and 2011 (so far*) entries and have added them to the glog below. I have made several glogs for young children before, but I am quite useless at it and it takes me hours even to create a simple glog like the one below! Click on "full size" to see it properly.

*I actually wrote this quite a few weeks back, due to Blogger counting non-published drafts as entries - I thought I had made 100 when really I was only up to about 94! So I had to wait a while... The Wordle, therefore, doesn't include my more recent posts.

I hope you like it :)

Dogme McNuggets?

McNuggets by Calgary Reviews  on Flickr

I have a new student. She's twenty-eight and is in the armed forces. I decided to try and take a dogme approach with her lessons, as she's having individual classes. During our first two lessons this has worked well because we've been doing quite a bit of talking about familiar topics such as family and our typical day, and lots of language has come up, but nothing unusual - in fact, the language that emerged was actually the typical grammar and vocabulary you would find in a coursebook lesson on those topics. This makes me feel that I haven't been doing dogme at all! Is it that after so many years of traditional course book lessons, I have it all so strongly etched into my brain that I automatically encourage certain language items to come up? If so, that can hardly be called dogme! But am I really directing the language so much? Or is it that when you talk about your daily life you automatically use certain Mcnuggets? Hmm, I'm getting a bit confused.

In any case, this student has a grammar and vocabulary exam next month, so our short term goal is actually to brush up on all those Mcnuggets. This is student-centred learning - the student's priority is to try to pass her exam, rather than be able to communicate in English. That will come later.  Sometimes, I think we forget about our students' priorities because we were trained in the Communicative era and have some kind of need to help our students communicate. However, as I mentioned in a recent post on jigsaw puzzles, this is not necessarily whar our students want or need.

So, assuming that I have to help my student remember (and in some cases learn) the grammar and vocabulary she needs to pass her exam, can I possibly take a dogme approach? If I do, we will certainly miss out some important Mcnuggets. Again, I'm slightly perplexed.

These are just some thoughts that have been running through my mind, anyway. Sorry for rambling. Take no notice!

Rainbow Colours

In several of my previous posts I have talked about my class of six-year-olds, for whom I designed a syllabus based around content from other subject areas such as literacy, science, art and crafts, drama and P.S.H.E.

Today I'm going to talk about an activity I did last week, which the children thoroughly enjoyed. At the moment we are looking at the world around us, and in the previous lessons we had been talking about the weather. In the lesson in question we were looking at primary colours and the other colours that can be formed by these. Some of the children were aware that mixing colours formed new ones, but others were finding it hard to guess which colours would be created. So we did an experiment to see how by using only three colours: RED, BLUE and YELLOW, we could make others such as orange, green, purple and pink.

What you need:

• A bowl
• red, blue and green food coloring
• milk
• washing-up liquid

First, I showed the children what we were going to do. I mimed pouring milk into the bowl, and then adding a drop of each food colouring at the edges of the bowl, about a third of the way apart.  I then pretended to put a drop of washing-up liquid in the middle. As I was doing this I explained what I was doing in simple English.
I then gave the children a worksheet where they had to predict what they would see.

Worksheet 5

We carried out the experiment twice, in order to see if there were any changes between the two bowls.

The children were fascinated by how the colours moved around the bowls, mixing and changing shade and form. We left the bowls for a few minutes and then came back to note any changes.

The children commented on the new colours that emerged and even compared the second bowl to a planet!
These pictures show how the two bowls developed:

The children then completed the second part of the worksheet, by choosing one of the two bowls and drawing what they had seen.

The final activity was noticing which colours merged together to form new ones.

The children had lots of fun and were really engaged - one of the few times I have managed to get them all standing still around the table quietly!

Baggy Trousers

How many of you teach teenage boys? Or lads in their early twenties?
For those of you that do, this may well be a common sight in or around your classroom:

By Lebatihem on Flickr

Always on the lookout for interesting and unusual non-coursebook topics to use with some of my teenage students, I was glad to find this article in The Guardian.

I will use the unmodified text with my advanced students, but may come up with a graded version for my younger teen group. Here are some quesions to get the discussion going before introducing the text, for Upper-Intermediate or Advanced learners:

Introduction to the topic
1) What kinds of clothes do you usually wear?
2) Do you wear the same style of clothes all the time? e.g. at school, hanging out with friends, at a disco etc
3) Do you prefer your clother to be tight and fitted or loose and baggy?
4) Does your style belong to a particular trend or group? e.g. emo, goth, mod, rocker, hippy, preppy, hip hop, gangster etc
5) Do your classmates wear the same types of clothes as you? If not, how would you describe their outfits?

After seeing the picture above:
6) Have you ever worn your trousers like this?
7) Would you consider dressing like this? Why (not)?
8) Why do you think some boys wear their trousers in this way?
9) Does this style say anything about their personality or views?
10) Should they be allowed to dress like this at school?

Tell the students that the council of Florida is considering banning men from wearing trousers that show their underpants.

11) What do you think about this proposal?
12) Why do you think they are considering making this law?
13) Do you think we should have the right to dress how we like? How important is this to you?
14) Do you think that some ways of dressing are unacceptable in public? If so, which?
15) In France, the wearing of a face-covering veil in public has been banned for Muslim women. What do you think about this law?
16) Can we compare Florida's law and France's law?

Students now read the article.

17) Are "saggy trousers" only worn by one group of people?
18) Where did the look originate?
19) Does "showing your pants" have the same consequences for girls and boys?
20) What do the "saggers" say are their reasons for dressing in this way?


With very small high level groups (at the moment I only have 2 or 3 in the class!) I tend to take a more relaxed approach and allow the discussion to move on in whatever way is appropriate in that lesson. These questions are just a guide to fall back on. With a larger group I would hand out the list of questions to students in groups of three or four. I would then look at any language that comes up in the text and any that emerges during the discussion. The text is used as a basis for discussion rather than a reading comprehension, as my students have more trouble speaking (and coming up with things to say) than reading and understanding a text.

You could do lots of other things with the article, or as a follow up. For example, you could create some rather interesting roleplay scenarios with a "sagger" and his grandmother! The students could write a composition about different styles and fashions, or they could write a diary entry for a boy who has been told he must not wear saggy trousers. If you have any more ideas, share them in the comments section.

I am now wondering if there are any "saggy-trousered" TEACHERS out there!

Not A Real Post!

In case you were thinking that I had miraculously written a second post today, just a few minutes after the first, this isn't a real post! I just thought I would mention that this humble blog is in the Top 200 list of Language Learning blogs created by Lexophiles. There are another 199 fantastic blogs on the list, so I don't expect I'll get many votes, but if you would like to vote (for this one or any other blog) you can do so here.

I won't be voting for my own blog this year either! (Thought doing that was a bit cheeky!)
Good luck to all those other bloggers on the list!

How do you do a jigsaw puzzle?

Sorry the text is so small - I've tried to change it but nothing happens! The spacing has gone mad too!

Thanks to liza31337 on Flickr

I wrote the title to this post sometime ago and then promptly forgot about it. I have just found it amongst the drafts that I never got round to finishing and posting. At first, I didn't even remember why I had decided to write a post entitled "How do you do a jigsaw puzzle?" and what it had to do with learning or teaching English, but then I remembered - I often get these flashes of parallels between day-to-day occurences and language learning methods, as in these older posts: Queuing in the Supermarket and Brick by Brick the Tower is Built. Having received a new jigsaw puzzle as a Christmas present (and taking ages to do it!), I got thinking about the different ways in which people approach things like jigsaws and how this is a reflection of a person's character, and consequently, their learning style.

I hate Science and Maths and Logic and anything else where you have to follow a procedure, step by step, methodically - boring! Now, I'm not a particularly creative person either, but I have always found it hard to think in a logical, ordered way. This is probably why I never really enjoyed Maths and Science at school. (By the way, you must read Brad Patterson's post Etymology and Dogme flies, 

where he talks about Science, Humanity and Coursebooks!) I prefer to do things in a slightly more random and ecletic manner. If I do have to solve a mathematical problem, for instance, I would try to work it out (in my head or on paper), but I wouldn't methodically work out the equation that could probably solve it much more quickly. I don't "do" equations! My partner, however, works out absolutely any problem with an equation - he believes this is the most practical, and the easiest way.

So, back to the jigsaw. Just as my partner methodically separates all the pieces - first the border, then all the other pieces according to colour (yes, in lots of little plastic tubs), I would rather do it more randomly. Ok, I do the border first, but I would rather not spend hours putting pieces into separate piles. On a larger section of colour, such as the sea in a map of the world, my partner puts all those pieces in nice lines, separated according to gender (in Spain jigsaw pieces are male or female, depending whether they have holes or sticking-out bits) and methodically tries each one in the space he is trying to fill. A jigsaw is supposed to be fun and for me there is no fun in this. In the past, we have done jigsaws together, and it's much better as we both have our own style. We complement each other in this way. However, I had to do this last jigsaw alone, and I found myself having to do some of it in exactly the way he would have done - trying out each piece one by one. This was mainly because I was fairly sick of it - it takes a long time to do a 2000 piecer on your own, and I really wanted to finish it.

Ok, you are wondering what on earth this has to do with anything. (Again!) Well, I think this can say a lot about how a student learns. As a language learner myself, I hated memorising lists and verb conjugations, and grammar rules. In fact, I never got to grips with the subjunctive at university - there are far to many rules to remember. And in any case, knowing the rules doesn't mean that you can actually use them. I learnt how to use the subjunctive by using it, by listening to people and reading. I picked it up. And I think this is reflected in the way I do jigsaw puzzles and solve problems. Other people prefer a more methodical approach.

So here we have two types of learners, although, of course, there are many more, especially if we look at Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. I think, as teachers, we need to be aware of this - that some of our students feel the need to know rules and have direct translations, and others don't. We often tend to stick to a methodology which encourages discovery and sometimes even glosses over the grammar, keeping everything in context (well, one context), but we always get at least one student who keeps asking "Ok, but what is the rule?" and "How do you say that in Spanish?". In many cases, I have seen teachers (and I have done it myself), try to keep explaining something with examples, refusing to either state the rules or translate, just because it was not the "in" thing to do. But if we really are trying to make our lessons learner-centred, surely we need to do things in the way that best suits our students? 

I think my main point here is really that "no one way is the right way". Depending on the students in a particular class, you may need to cover areas of language in more than one way. We could have reading and listening texts, even extensive reading, for students like me, who "find" language automatically with exposure. But we could also have more drilling and controlled exercises for those who need to separate their learning into categories. This is obviously very difficult to do in class, but for homework we could give the students several options. On occasion, we could divide the class up into two groups (according to learner type) and give them different actvities to complete. Or even, in pair work, put two different learners together and have one concentrate more on form and the other on the ideas.

So, how do you do a jigsaw puzzle?

Imaginary Trips - Let's go to the fair!

It's Feria time again and I thought I would link to last year's post in which I outlined a way of encouraging (very) young learners to talk about the fair.

At the Fair by Dominic on Flickr

 When creating my own lesson ideas for young children I always try to provide a variety of activities that include movement and drawing or colouring, in order to change the dynamics - after a noisy game that includes running around, an arts and craft activity can be ideal in order to lower excitement levels and successfully sustain a quiet period during the lesson. I also try to make the lesson multi-sensory, which means using senses other than sight and hearing (which are the predominant senses used in an English lesson), such as touch and smell. This may mean bringing in real or toy objects for the children to handle.

In the lesson above, I used pictures to present the vocabulary, but another option would be to play recordings of the sounds as well. There could be a horse trotting or galloping, fireworks going off, "sevillanas" music, the sound of a rollercoaster, the siren of the dodgems etc. Using the sense of smell can be more difficult to organise, but you could try to bring in some typical foods of the fair, such as candy floss, caramelised nuts. Taste would be a better option maybe - you could have a blindfolded tasting session of toffee apples, candy floss, lollypops, crisps or whatever else is typical. Try not to give them too much sugar though!

With young children I always try to tap into their imaginations, as they have not yet begun to doubt their own creativity. Children left alone will naturally start to play and imitate situations they have seen in real life or on TV. All little girls have played "house" and all boys "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and indians" and we have all pretended to be superheroes like Batman or Superman. Children know that these games are not real, but this doesn't stop them from having fun - in fact, it is much more fun to be a superhero than a 6 year-old boy!
I really believe we should be taking advantage of this in the classroom. Too much lesson time is spent on drilling with flashcards or large pictures - I'm not saying this is bad, but the same language can be "presented" and practised in a much more fun way. Instead of having the children sitting at their desks pointing to flashcards around the room, take them on a pretend bus to wherever you want to take them (with animals you can go to the zoo or the jungle), in this case to the fair. Put them in a line holding hands in twos, just like on a real school trip, and point things out to them. I usually have the pictures of the vocabulary placed around the classroom and I point to them, saying "Ooh look! There's the big wheel! Can you see it? It's very big! Shall we go on it?" In this way the children are being exposed to a lot more language than if you just say "big wheel" and they point to or touch the flashcard. You can involve the children even more by asking them where they want to go next. All this makes it more special - the children can really imagine being at the fair!

I have done similar "physical" visualisations with the topics Autumn, Winter and Spring, as well as Animals. We pretend to do lots of the activities we associate with those seasons, such as making snowmen or jumping in puddles. The children have lots of fun and just as importantly, all the children have the opportunity learn, whether they remember more things they have done, heard, drawn or written. In short, this kind of lesson is VAK because it includes activities that activate the different senses and therefore encourages learning from all types of learner.

Consequences

Another activity that older children love is the traditional consequences game. It's very old game and there's nothing new about it, but I think it's worth reminding ourselves of some of the older activities that get put away and forgotten about. The only materials required are a piece of A4 paper and a pen for each student. The activity is carried out in lockstep and practises listening and writing. It is very simple and can be adapted in many ways to suit your purpose and the level of the students. As in Flash the picture, this activity allows each student to work at their own level - starting off very simply but allowing more detail from faster students. One of the best things about it is that the learners see it as a kind of game, but really they are doing a writing task!

The version that I did last week with my teenage group and with a group of ten-year-olds is one found in the same book as Flash the Picture:

It is called Fake Biographies and in it the students each write a piece of information about an anonymous member of the class. The procedure is as follows:

1) Give each student a piece of paper and tell them to write at the top "My name is ..." with their name. They should then fold the top of the paper back twice, so that the name is hidden. I also do the same - students love it when the teacher takes part in something a bit silly, too.

2) Take in all the papers and randomly give them out. They are not allowed to open the paper!

3) Say "I am ... years old" and the students complete it with ANY number. It is important that from now on, the students use their imaginations. Encourage them to be inventive and even slightly outrageous - this will make for funnier results.

4) Carry on doing the same, making up a new piece of information each time. This will, of course, depend on the age and level of the learners. Some of the "questions" I used were:

I was born in... (place)
I have ---- brothers and ... sisters.
My favourite TV programme is ....
My favourite singer is ...
In my free time I like to ....
Last year, I went on holiday to ....
I met ... and we ....

You can also ask actual questions if you think the students are capable of writing complete sentences by themselves: What's your name? How many brothers and sisters have you got? What's your favourite TV programme? etc

5) The students then opened their paper and read the description. I got them to copy out the information onto a piece of paper as a paragraph. They had to correct any spelling or grammar mistakes as they did so.

6) They then gave the biography to the person whose name was at the top and each student read theirs out to the class. They also had to say if anything was true.

We have also played the same type of game with a story (as in the orginal consequences game) - this is always good preparation for story telling and writing. You start with a main character, introduce another character, and go on to write about where they went, what they did and said and so on. I usually do this with introductory sentences such as:

His name was...     He was... years old.      He was from ...    He was .... (physically).
Her name was...    She was ... years old.    She was from ...   She was ... (physically).
They met in/at ....    He said "..."    She said "...."    They went to ....    In the end they ....

This kind of activity can be used with any age group and level from elementary upwards. For younger children or beginners, you could pre-print out the beginnings of the sentences for the students to complete.

Another version, good for higher levels,  is to mix sentences with drawings. Each person writes a sentence and passes the paper on. The next person reads the sentences and draws a picture illustrating it. They then fold the paper and pass it on. The following person can only see the drawing, and must write a sentence summarising the picture, and so on.

By evalottchen on flickr

One of the good things about it is that everybody wants to listen to each other (something very rare with teenage groups!) at the end, and everybody ends up laughing - it's a real feel good activity that's perfect to use at the end of term when something more relaxing is required but you don't want to just play games all lesson. Highly recommended!

Flashing and Mapping: getting teens to speak

I've noticed that on this blog I spend half the time moaning about how nothing I ever do with my teenage group is very successful - well in this post that's all about to change as I actually enjoyed our last lesson and I think the students did too! I based the lesson around a very simple activity that appears in Language Activities for Teenagers by CUP, called Flash The Picture.

The first time I heard of this activity was during my first TEFL experience (not counting my time as a language assistant), during a TEFL taster course in my final year at university. I attended a weekend course, which actually included a kind of teaching practice, run by Jim Wingate. It was a fantastic course, based on humanistic teaching, and had lots of practical ideas, some of which I still dig out from time to time.

The idea is that you show a picture for only a few seconds before asking students to talk about it. This is great for mixed-ability classes, as learners can use more complex or simple language to describe what they say, according to their level.

Starting off with something very simple is, I think, ideal for this age group, who are self-conscious and not willing to take risks in front of their peers. They can start with basic sentences, and gradually try to use more language to express what they want to say.

I decided to do "Flash the Picture" with the whole class, before asking them to do something related in pairs. In this way, the lesser confident learners would be able to listen to some of the stronger students before speaking. For the picture I used one from an old giant flip chart of illustrated scenes. The particular scene I chose was in some kind of office with lots of customers waiting. Some of these customers were daydreaming or thinking about things in cloud bubbles above their heads. There was plenty to talk about, and speculation was also possible. Here is the procedure:

1) Flash the picture for 1 second. (Yes, only one second! It gives them time to see something, but not much.)

2) Ask the class what they saw in the picture. Allow everyone to say whatever comes into their heads and don't make any corrections, unless students ask for it (we want to encourage them to speak - we can leave accuracy for later).

3) Repeat stages 1 and 2.

4) Show the picture for 3 or 4 seconds (ooh, we're really going for a good look now!) and ask students what they saw.

5) Display the picture for everybody to see, for as long as they want. The students will now be able to look more closely and add details they had missed previously. I asked the students what they thought was going to happen next, and if they could see any problems in the situation.

6) Ask each student to choose a person from the scene and talk about them. (This worked for me because there were about ten people in the picture and eight students) I also had each student talk in front of the class, but you could do this stage in pairs or small groups if you prefer. I asked the strongest students to speak first, allowing the others to listen before they would speak.

I asked the following questions to prompt more information:

What is this person doing?
What does he/she look like?
What is he/she wearing?
How do you think he/she feels?
What is he/she going to do next?

These questions are useful for students who are preparing for the PET speaking paper (Part 3). This particular class is not yet studying a PET course, but will probably begin to do so next year.

There are plenty of follow up activities you could do, depending on what your lesson objectives are. In this case, I wanted the students to be able to describe a picture in detail. So, based on another idea from the book above, called "Mindmap the Text", I decided to do "Mindmap the Picture".

This is what I did:

1) I asked the class to choose another picture from the flipchart. They chose one where lots of sports were going on. I wrote the word "Sports" in the middle of the board, and then branched out from the centre with sub-topics such as PEOPLE, EQUIPMENT, PLACES, ACTIVITIES, FEELINGS. I asked the students to shout out a few things they could see in the picture and to write it in the correct place on the board.

2) Having shown them how to make a mindmap, I gave each pair a sheet of paper and asked them to copy the map. They then had to continue adding as much information as they could to it.

3) I then told them that they were going to speak about the picture for 1 minute, using the words on their map to help them. I chose a different picture and demonstrated the task. However, they wouldn't have to talk individually, but within their pair, taking over from the other student when he/she had nothing more to say.

4) In pairs, I gave them a minute to talk about the picture, all working at the same time. This way, nobody would get embarrassed and, as accuracy was not my objective, it didn't matter that I couldn't hear everything that everybody was saying. The students were actually quite good at taking turns to speak - from what I heard, one student would say a sentence or two and pause, and then the other would jump in with something else. Because they only had a minute for the two of them to say as much as they could, and the picture was very complete, they didn't run out of things to say.

They seemed to enjoy this activity, so I chose another picture and repeated stage 4, but this time they couldn't make a mindmap beforehand. This time they had to think more quickly, as they hadn't had time to prepare or organise their thoughts.

I was very pleased with the outcome of this lesson and these very simple activities that require no preparation. All the students had recycled, to some extent, some of the verb tenses we had looked at earlier in the year (present continuous, going to), physical description, clothes and sports vocabulary. They had all participated and had all had some speaking practice. They had practised turn-taking and speaking under the pressure of a time limit. And most importantly for me, they were all on task and fairly motivated.

Overall, a great success!

Wiki Waste of Time?

This year I set up a wiki for one of my classes. The class in question is a group of six year old children, mostly in their second year of English, and with whom I have been imparting my own content-based syllabus instead of using a course book.

The purpose of wikis, generally, is to encourage the sharing of information, allowing members to edit and add to the entries. This was not my objective in this case, but I preferred the look and navegability of the wiki to a traditional blog, like this one. In a blog, entries are in chronological order, making it difficult to find older posts if those posts are not tagged adequately, or if the user is not aware of how blogs work. In the wiki, there would be a menu of all the pages I created, in the order that I wished to publish them, and a home page with links to every single page.

Home page of our class wiki

The other main reason why I chose an Edu Wikispace, free at the time, was that I could make it private. Personally, I would love to share with the world everything that we have been doing, but I wanted to have the possibility of posting photos and videos of the children for their parents to see, and therefore privacy was a big issue.

Wikispaces makes it really simple to embed almost any kind of multimedia content including Youtube videos, Glogs, documents which can be downloaded, RSS feeds, slideshows etc.

At the beginning of the year, I sent a letter out to all the parents explaining that we wouldn't be using a course book and for this reason, I had set up a website where they would be able to see all the topics we were covering in class. They would be able to look at the page with their child to practice the language we had been learning. On the wiki I include all the songs and videos we have seen in class, so that the children can see them again if they want to. I explained that the webpage would be completely private and that each child would receive a username and password that would be necessary to access the site. The parents seemed to think it was a good idea, and they all filled in the consent slip I added to the bottom of the letter. I proceeded to create bulk user accounts and gave each child a copy of their username and password.

I regularly update the wiki with new content, as you will see from the screenshot above. I assumed that most of the parents were visiting from time to time. On a couple of occasions, parents had asked me for another copy of their access details, which they had misplaced.

So it was to my surprise, this morning, when I looked at the wikis stas and saw that it had hardly been visited at all. Five different users (although this could include anonymous users from search engines that had tried to access the site) entered the wiki in the first month, but after that only an average of two or three users had visited per month. There are ten children in the class, so my impression is that only a small number of them have seen the wiki more than once or twice.

My priority now is to find out why there has been such little interest in the wiki. I actually thought parents would be interested in what their young children were doing in their lessons, and would take this opportunity to find out. I hoped that they would sit down with their children and go over what they had been learning in their two weekly lessons. How wrong I seem to have been!

I am thinking of sending out a questionnaire towards the end of the year, on how useful they found the wiki and what problems they had. They all seemed to find the idea attractive, but few of them seem to have done much more. I imagine that time is a huge issue here, but it would only take a few minutes every week to see what's new. I'd like to know if you have any experiences of using wikis/blogs with very young learners as a wasy of encouraging them to interact with English outside of the classroom. Has anybody come up against any lack of interest, as I seem to have? Any ideas for questions to include in my questionnaire to parents.

This just goes to show that, although everybody uses technology in their day to day life, this does not automatically mean that they want to use it related to their own or their children's learning, especially if this requires more effort on their part.

And, thinking of the time and effort I have spent on this project - is it really worth it?

THE BEST ACTIVITY IN THE WORLD... EVER!!!

Ok, before you all start accusing me of outrageous lies, this ISN'T the best activity in the world. Those of you who were in Britain in the nineties (and noughties) will recognise the title as a take on the countless pop music albums that appeared, named The Best ... Album in the World...Ever!

Some fantastic songs from some of the best "indie" artists of the 90s

The activity I'm going to share with you is certainly not the best in the world, and it's probably not very original either, but it is one of the easiest activities to set up as well as being suitable for a wide range of levels and age groups.

The main focus can be changed to suit level and needs - in this case (and the most obvious) I have used it to practise superlative adjectives. All you need are lots of small pieces of paper (Post It size is good), enough for each student to have one for each question. You can prepare the questions in advance or make them up as you go along.

Here is the procedure, as I carried it out with a group of ten to twelve year olds who had recently been looking at superlatives. It is carried out in "lockstep", but if you prefer you could write the questions on the board or on a handout and have everybody work at their own pace.

1) Hand out the pieces of paper.

2) Tell the students that you are going to ask some questions, and to write down their answer to each question on a separate piece of paper.

3) Have somewhere the students can place each paper as they complete it. Alternatively, have students number each paper, so that later it is easy to tell which question it answers.

4) Ask each question. The students should write down their OWN PERSONAL answer.

Sample questions:

Who is the best footballer?
What's the most interesting school subject?
Who is the most beautiful woman?
Who is the best singer?
What's the funniest TV programme?
Who is the fastest motorcyclist/F1 driver?
What's the most difficult school subject?
What's the nicest food?
What's the best book?
What are the coolest clothes?
What's the most dangerous animal?

There are plenty of alternative questions but these are some the ones I posed because we had been looking at these particular adjectives. With higher level groups you could use a wider variety of adjectives.

5) Everybody should now have answered all the questions. Collect in the anonymous answers. Younger students often like to fold up their papers, like in a secret ballot.

6) Announce each "nominee" and elicit the category. For example, "Maths, Science, English, History. The category is ..." (most difficult subject) and then announce the "winner". (The winner is the answer repeated the most times. If all the answers are different, or there is a draw you could have another vote.) My class wanted to take it in turns to come out to the front and read out the nominees. I would then say, in a grand voice, Oscars style "And the winner is..."

And that's it! My kids really enjoyed this activity and even asked to play it again the following day with different questions. With older students and adults you could use it as a basis for discussion, a way of practising expressing agreement and disagreement, language of persuasion etc.

Belated April Fool!

This post should have appeared earlier but I have only just got around to writing it... for some reason I've not had the energy to write anything this week - blame the clocks going forward/a cold (but hopefully not hayfever!)/ my beginning running (a funny mixture of jogging and walking at the moment but I'm getting there)/this long, long term or whatever, but the fact is that I haven't even felt like going on Twitter or reading my usual blog list, let alone writing on my own. I haven't even particpated in ELTchat for the past three weeks! I hope it is not some kind of social networking burn out. However, having just read, albeit quickly, all the posts that were waiting for me on Google Reader, I thought it was about time I jumped back in!

Friday, as you know, was April Fool's Day. In previous years I don't think I have even remembered to pay special attention to the date, but with all the hours I spend on the internet at the moment it would have been hard to miss. As with one class we had just finished a unit of work, I decided to spend Thursday's lesson talking about April Fool's Day. There was actually a page in their book about this unusual day, so we had a look at that to see what it was all about, and role played the two situations that were illustrated (1- swapping salt for sugar, 2 - a whoopee cushion). I was very surprised to hear that very few of the nine to eleven year old children had never played (or received) a practical joke on anybody. Although the 1st April is just a normal day here in Spain, they have their own Día de los santos inocentes on 28th December where people play pranks and jokes on each other. I then played my the trick "The Severed Finger" on them. Of course, these kids were to old to actually fall for the trick, but they found it fun and all wanted to make one for themselves. You can see the video of the trick here.

I also have a class who hate using their course book and so more often than not we do alternative activities. I have written about these students before recently here and here.  These teenagers like to see a personal side of their teacher - they never stop nagging me about going swimming after I told them that my new year's resolution was to go swimming two to three times per week! They like to have a laugh in class, so I thought it might be nice to try an April Fool on them too, but this time a more sophisticated one. For the most part, it went down well, but one of the students actually got quite angry when he discovered that it was all a joke! I'm sure he'll have forgotten all about it next week, but it just goes to show how sensitive this particular age group can be.

In the previous lesson the students had been discussing uniforms (it wasn't part of the lesson) and I told them that we could talk more about that on Thursday - very un-dogme" of me, I know, but we were talking about something completely different and I decided to draw on this sudden interest for a topic in another lesson.
In the lesson in question, I asked them about their uniforms, what they liked about them and which of the uniforms they thought were nicest (they go to two or three different schools). They asked me about uniforms in Britain. I then handed out the attached document and we read through it, together. The document explains how our English academy is introducing the concept of a "uniform" for the students and that we would be running a design competition where the best design would be chosen by the school's head. You can read it for yourself here:

Tshirt Competition

The students worked in groups to think up their designs for the t-shirt. Skills practised in the lesson included reading, speaking (although quite a bit in L1) and developing a sense of humour! They seemed quite impressed with my word processing skills "If it's not true, where did you get this handout?" and I think they see me as quite a serious person, which is why they never suspected a thing! I just hope that they can bring themselves to trust me again...

And just a quick link here to Richard Whiteside's treat for us all  and Teresa Bestwick's lovely joke, both of which I enjoyed immensely.

And copying Richard himself, here is  of classic comedy video:

Dave's Wordle Challenge

Dave Dodgson has set us all a challenge named "Every blog has a silver lining". The idea, if you haven't already heard about it, is to create a Wordle of your blog by pasting in its URL and looking at the results. Wordle will take all the content from your recent posts and show you which words you have been using more often, by increasing the font size. The bigger words are those you have used more often. Below you can find the word cloud of this blog. I have removed  people's names, as they don't really tell us much - they are only there because I wrote two posts about the TESOL Spain conference recently. (Oops, just realised that I missed one!)

As you can see, the most popular word by far is CHILDREN. This is hardly surprising, seeing as the majority of my students are children and that my blog focuses on them. Other important words come from my last post on story writing and the previous posts on the conference I attended.

Things I have noticed:

I seem to use a lot of nouns! The words that stand out most are nouns, and there are few adjectives - I don't know whether this is normal or not, but I think it illustrates the fact that I don't have a particular writing style - I write in a similar way to the way I speak and I think this makes my blog easy to read.

Like many other bloggers taking part in this challenge, I seem to use the word ONE quite a lot! I would imagine that this comes from "one of the ..." type phrases, but I am just guessing here. I haven't noticed any unusual words on the Wordle.

As this word cloud seem to only use the last four or five posts, I think it would be very interesting to look at the "all-time" word stats. I suppose the only way of doing this would be to literally copy and paste each post into Wordle, although there is probably a limit to the number of words you can include. As Dave suggests, it could be something to do every now and again, to see how your blog is evolving.

Our Very Own Superhero!

As some of you may know, I have been experimenting this year with a CLIL approach in one of my classes. I wrote about my reasons for doing so on Ken Wilson's blog. Our latest unit of work has been on the topic of heroes, and over the last couple of weeks more specifically on superheroes. When we began discussing the topic in the first lesson, the children automatically started naming superheroes. I wanted them to understand that we have real life heroes in our society who do not have special powers and magic swords, so we first looked at heroes in our families and their characteristics; and in the following lessons, heroes in the community. This gave us the opportunity to look at vocabulary for several professions, as well as reinforce some of the postitive characteristics that we may associate with heroes.

This was all very well, but the children are six years old, and what really interests them is superheroes! So, we moved on from more traditional heroes to Superman, Spiderman, Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four and so on. We discussed what makes a superhero and what powers he/she can have. We reviewed vocabulary such as climb, run and fly, and I introduced new phrases such as "seeing through walls", "invisible" and "super strong".
Each child then had to design their own superhero. They drew a picture of their hero and his/her powers and gave him/her a name, and in the following lesson they presented him/her to the class. We then had several rounds of voting to choose our favourite superhero. This character would be the protagonist of our very own superhero comic book!


We ended up with a character with several powers - he can fly, he can climb walls and he is super-strong! We then made suggestions for his name, and another voting session until the unanimous decision was to call him Spiderman. I must make it clear that this is not the Spiderman, but our very own character with the same name. I then told the children that in Spiderman's city, there is a big problem. We disussed various suggestions as to what the problem could be, and we ended up choosing a tsunami (even six year olds watch TV and see the world's important events). I divided the board into ten sections (there are ten students in the class) and we began to decide on how the story would develop. As the children are learning to read in Spanish, but not yet English, I tend to shy away from the written word and use pictures, at least until they are familiar with the vocabulary and its pronunciation. I drew a quick sketch of each event in the story as we came up with the ideas. Each child had one page of the story to draw. They had to try to copy the original drawing (that I had copied and whose colours we had chosen as a class) so that the story has continuity.

In the next lesson, I told the story (I had written one short sentences for each picture using language they would understand) several times, with the children's help. We played a couple of recognition games where I would read out a sentence from the story and they would have to find the appropriate picture. I gave each child the sentence describing their part of the story on a piece of paper. I went round drilling individually, and then they practised their sentences in pairs, with me helping and prompting. Their homework was to practise their sentences ready for the following lesson.

In the final lesson of our Heroes topic, I uploaded the photos of the pictures to Voicthread and recorded each child saying his/her sentence. We now have our very own comic book - on paper in the classroom and in digital format online. I have embedded the slideshow into our class wiki so that the parents can see it. The children had great fun in the whole project - they actually really enjoyed learning their sentences and then recording them and listening to each other's voices on the computer.

Here is the finished product. Be patient as the voices can take some time to load. I hope you like it!

TESOL Spain: Young Learners Part 3

This is my final post on the Young Learners talks I attended at TESOL Spain last weekend. The first two talks by Carol Read and Nina Lauder were very informative and given by experienced speakers. Both Carol and Nina are professional educational consultants whose jobs include giving training sessions and presentations about their areas of expertise. The two sessions I am going to talk about today were by classroom teachers, who wanted to share their ideas. I am going to provide an outline of their talks and say how useful (or not) their ideas were for my own teaching context.
The first session was entitled Writing Instructions - Where? How? Where Does It Fit In? by Elizabeth Forster and Richard Stenhouse, from the British Council Primary School in Madrid. Elizabeth talked about reading (following) instructions with lower primary learners and Richard with upper-primary.

By atibens on flickr

One of the main points was how difficult it can be to give effective instructions. We experienced this for ourselves, trying to make a "snapdragon" by following Richard's oral instructions, and most of us failed miserably! We then had to work in pairs where one of us would give instructions to make a paper aeroplane and the other would follow. This didn't work for me as neither my partner nor I could remember how to make one! These two tasks did illustrate very well the complexity of giving clear instructions, whether oral or written, and I think this is something we need to pay more attention to in our classroom language. Demonstration is also equally as important as the instructions themselves. Elizabeth explained why it can be useful to practise writing instructions with children and how this ought to be done. Some relevant real life situations include: Making things for festivals such as Halloween and Christmas, playing a game and recipes. She also showed us an example of the instructions she had given her class for how to make a jack o' lantern. She had written the instructions onto large pieces of card and had used these as reading prompts (even with non-readers who would pick up some of the key words), doing activities such as sequencing, run and touch the instruction card etc.

Richard then talked about how to gradually make the instructions more complex by using different connectives, imperative verbs and by evaluating the instructions of their peers.

Overall Feedback: Although both presenters highlighted some important points and gave us practical ideas, I'm not sure this was enough to warrant a whole session on writing instructions. This talk may have been more useful for primary school teachers in a CLIL or bilingual setting.

The final session I attended on Young Learners was the last talk before Herbert Puchta's Closing Plenary. This was called Classroom Management for Primary by Helena Kennedy. I decided to go to this talk because it is always useful to find out how other teachers successfully manage their classes of young learners and pick up new ideas.

Helena teaches both extra-curricular and curricular primary children at the Hyland Language Centre in Madrid. Her session was relevant for all teachers of primary-aged learners. The talk focussed on how to maintain control in the classroom. Some important aspects she mentioned were:

• Coming up with a fixed routine
• Obeying responsibilities (learners)
• Not only work but also play
• Tell the learners how well they are doing
• Reprimand when necessary
• Give an overall behaviour mark
• Leave the last class in the past.

What can happen in the classroom if you're not careful! Photo by Aislinn Ritchie on flickr

Lots of practical ideas were demonstrated and I will now outline some of these:

• Name cards - these could be used to make a seating plan before the students arrive; to choose classroom monitors; to keep a check on behaviour.

Helena showed us her system of having a sun, a cloud and a storm on the board and under which she would stick the children's name cards, depending on how well they were behaving.
She also gave each child a card at the end of the lesson, with from 1 to 5 stars coloured in, which showed their overall behaviour in that class/day.

• Use positive comments and stamps on the children's work to motivate them
• Smile!
• Allow those who have performed/behaved best to leave the class first
• Give postive comments to their parents

She also showed us a few flashcard games to maintain interest and focus such as:

• Odd one out - learners decide which flashcard is different
• Remember and re-order - Learners close their eyes and say what has changed 
• Password - show a flashcard and the children have to say its name before they can sit down
• Run and touch - one or more students go out of the room and they have to find the hidden flashcards
• Through the keyhole - stick a keyhole template in front of a flashcard and learners have to guess

I have to say that none of these games were new to me, although it is nice to be refreshed sometimes and I do recognise that it can be very difficult to come up with original ideas!

The main problem my friend Leahn and I had with this talk was a difference of opinion on the use of praise and punishment with the presenter. I don't want to go into details as I think Leahn is going to write a blogpost of her own on this subject.

Overall Feedback: A varied talk on different aspects of managing young learners, providing a variety of techniques. I don't agree with everthing that was said, but I value the usefulness of having plenty of tricks up your sleeve!

TESOL Spain: Young Learners Part 2

In my last post I talked about Nina Lauder's session "Exploring the Real World in the English Classroom", which you can find here.

It is now the turn of Carol Read, who is an expert in teaching primary-aged children. I recommend taking the time to have a look round her blog where she discusses the theory behind many aspects of teaching younger learners and provides practical ideas on how to do so.

By Enokson on flickr

Carol's talk at TESOL Spain was entitled "Picture books and cross-curricular themes". It was a very interesting session, where Carol talked about different kinds of picture books and how to use them in the CLIL classroom. Unfortunately, I arrived slightly late (blame the slow waiters at VIPS restaurant!) and missed the introduction, where Carol introduced the audience to BICS and CALP (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency).

We looked at Cummins' Quadrant (see below) and where picture books might fit in. Of course, this depends on the book in question, and Carol divided picture books into three categories: Factual, Fictionalised Science and Fiction.

Cummins' Quadrant

We were shown examples of each type of book and some of the advantages and disadvantages of each. Personally, because the group of learners I am using a CLIL-type syllabus with are very young (6 years old, first year of Primary) I prefer fiction. All young children love stories, and pick up lots of language from listening to a story and participating in a story-telling session. Stories are more fun than non-fiction, although it may sometimes be more useful to use a fictionalised science book, where the story is based on scientific fact, than a fantastical story of pure fiction. Carol did mention, however, that she had never come across a child who had problems distinguishing between fact and fiction in stories. Just because in the story the ladybirds talk, doesn't mean that the children will actually believe that ladybirds can speak! Children are actually very good at differentiating between what is real and what is not.

Carol the showed us some of the books more closely, providing us with examples on how we could use these books in the classroom. The two story books I remember clearly from the presentation, were:


I will not ever NEVER eat a tomato by L. Child
Lost and Found by O. Jeffers

Eric Carle's books such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Tiny Seed were also mentioned. I have used The Very Hungry Caterpillar in my own unit on Creepy Crawlies as a basis for the introduction to the life cycle of the butterfly. This was also one of the ways Carol suggested using picture books as a springboard into CLIL projects. Others she talked about were the life cycle of a frog and the food pyramid.

Overall, Carol's talk was very informative, but more importantly in my opinion, fun! She read us the stories as if we were the children in her class, and we all really really wanted to know what happened next! This was a valuable experience, as sometimes it can be hard for teachers to tell a story effectively, especially when you have a class full of restless children. Carol managed to keep around 200 of us engaged - not such an easy task when your session is just after the lunch break!

If anybody is interested in using CLIL resources in their classrooms, Carol has shared a couple of projects on Onestopclil.

TESOL Spain: Young Learners Part 1

Small Explorers - from Morgue File

In the first of this series of posts I plan to write about the TESOL Spain 2011 convention, I will first be looking at the talks I attended about Young Learners. Those of you who regularly read this blog will have discovered that teaching children has become one of my passions over the last two or three years and where better to start than with something I am always striving to do better?

Often, when I go to conferences, I tend to go for any session related to young learners, but this time I decided that a healthy mix would be more valuable. I attended four sessions where the focus was on our younger learners and in this post I will summarise some of the key points that were made in the first session, as well as my own reflections on what was said.

The four sessions were the following:

Exploring the Real World in the English Classroom by Nina Lauder
Picture Books and Cross-curricular Themes by Carol Read
Writing Instructions - Where? How? Where Does It Fit In? by Elizabeth Forster and Richard Stenhouse
Classroom Management for Primary by Helena Kennedy

Exploring the Real World in the English Classroom by Nina Lauder
Nina gave an informative and enjoyable talk about how to incorporate different aspects of a child's world into our classes. Suitable for both a CLIL context and a more traditional language learning setting, her presentation provided lots of practical ideas to take away and use in the classroom. The talk began by looking at reasons why we should be trying to bring the real world into our lessons: It can be motivating and fun; it makes English real and meaningful; it helps the children learn values such as respect and tolerance.

Practical Activities:

• Have children bring in a photo, an object, a song to show and tell
• Bring realia into the classroom e.g. if you are looking at food, bring in real or plastic food, have tasting sessions etc
• Riddles: Choose an animal (or a word from the lexical set that is being studied) and write a set of clues about it. One by one, give the children a clue and ask them to think of what it could be. They could discuss this in pairs or put their hands up to answer.
• Guessing Games: Show the children pictures of the words they have been learning. The children ask each other questions to determine which word was chosen.
• Stamp or Clap: Like a guessing game, the teacher (or pupil) chooses a word (in this case an animal) and asks questions about it. If the answer is "yes", the children should clap. If the answer is "no". they should stamp their feet. A fun way of getting children to listen carefully and respond.
• KWL: This stands for KNOW/ WANT TO KNOW/ LEARNT. Draw a table with three columns and write KWL at the top, one in each column. The children write down things they know about the subject and things they would like to know. When the children have learnt more about the subject (e.g from reading a text or doing a project) they fill in the last column.
• Poster Grids: With any poster or large picture, divide it into cells with co-ordinates. The children then ask each other what they can see in a cell of their choice.

Nina also talked about doing experiments and using estimates, code-breaking and using charts; bringing Science and Maths into the classroom.

One of my favourite ideas from this talk was the idea of explorers. OUP have a series called Explorers and Nina showed us her cardboard friends from the series that she takes everywhere with her. She takes photos of herself and the explorer in different places and then brings them into class to use as a springboard for discussion. I love this idea because it really brings the real world into the classroom. Your little "friend" does not necessarily have to be an explorer - it could be any classroom pet or puppet that you choose, but I particularly thought that the idea of an explorer would appeal to children of all ages, both boys and girls, and that it lends itself well to work on the environment, geography, history and so on. After all, what an explorer does is go out and explore new places.

Overall Feedback: A very positive session with lots of practical ideas and the reasons behind the theory.

Next up:  Picture Books and Cross-curricular Themes by Carol Read

TESOL Spain Annual Convention - Changes and Challenges: Expanding Horizons in ELT

This weekend I have been at the annual TESOL Spain conference. I had a great time, met lots of lovely, interesting people, heard some inspirational talks and learnt about some new practical activities to try out in the classroom. When I go to a conference like this one, I try to attend a healthy mix of plenaries, keynotes and practical workshops, and I think I managed to do so this time. Almost all of the sessions I attended were well worth seeing or participating in and I have taken something positive away from all of them.

Over the next few days, I will be posting on some of the talks I enjoyed. I'm going to look at the handouts and the notes I took at each session and split them up into categories before I start posting what I learnt here.

Just to whet your appetite, you can expect to hear about talks by Herbert Puchta, Paul Braddock, Karenne Sylvester, Nicky Hockly, Hugh Dellar, Jamie Keddie, Carol Read and Nina Lauder (in no particular order!)

Troublesome and Intolerant: Part Two

Yesterday I outlined some of the problems I've been having with a particular group of young teens. You can read this post here. Lack of motivation (to do anything - not just things they don't enjoy), hormonal mood swings, a tendency to answer back and general apathy are the main factors which complicate the possibility of a successful lesson.

This second post is not to continue to moan about my unsuccessful attempts to get them using English (you'll be glad to know!) but to talk about something that came up in our last two lessons and has been troubling me ever since.

We were discussing the topic of human rights and how everybody should be treated equally whatever their race, sex, sexuality and so on. The class seemed to agree that this was logical and fair. We then discussed a basic human right which states that every citizen has the right to leave his/her country if they wish, and I explained that many people had to leave their country because of war or the political situation and that they were called refugees. Suddenly, some of the students started to complain about some local immigrants who sell packets of tissues at the traffic lights. Comments were made both about African and Chinese immigrants, who form the main group of non-Spanish speaking immigrants. The attitudes expressed by these students were, to put it mildly, not very tolerant. As some of the students were getting quite heated up, I decided against a dogme-style discussion of the matter and to leave it for another day.

The thing is, I'm not sure exactly how much importance to give the topic or quite how to treat it. I'm fairly sure that they were the typical outlandish remarks that teenagers often come out with, without thinking of their consequences. Maybe they were trying to shock me or each other, more likely they were just regurgitating things they had heard from their parents or on TV. 

So my question is: should I plan a lesson on tolerance or should I leave it to their "Citizenship" classes at school? (To be honest, I have no idea of what is taught in "Citizenship" but most people deem it a useless subject around here.)

If I do take advantage of this situation, I wonder how I should go about it. I was thinking of possibly doing a lesson on stereotypes and bringing it around to how the Spanish are sometimes considered and how that makes them feel. I'm not sure though, that this wouldn't actually have the opposite effect and make them even less happy with people of other nationalities. Another idea is to try to find a copy of a documentary that was on in the UK a few months ago about asylum seeking children who have been mistreated in the UK and somehow adapting it to their level. If only the African tissue-sellers spoke English - maybe if that were the case I could ask the bloke that stands on the corner of our school's street to come in and answer questions! That would be a bit unorthodox but at least it would be effective! Unfortunately, most of these guys are Senegalese French speakers who don't speak Spanish very well, which would make communication quite difficult. To be honest, I'm not sure how happy some of the parents would be about me bringing in a stranger from the street into the classroom.

Anyway, I wondered if you had ever tried dealing with this kind of topic with such young students, and whether or not it was worthwhile. I'd love to know of any websites that promote the education of tolerance that you may know of.

And before you say it, J (I'm beating you too it!), I know I'm being far too teacher-centred in all this and doing far too much work myself, but I think this group need some kind of input on this in order for them to have a personal reaction. Just asking them to imagine won't work.

So, any ideas or experiences on this that you'd like to share? If you have written a post about something similar, please add a link in the comments section. Cheers!