Broaden Your Students' Boarders

At some point (usually in the middle of semester) I start giving out tasks to prepare a presentation at home and deliver it in front of the class at the lesson. It's individual work, no teams or pairs. The speaker chooses the means himself - PowerPoint, posters, blackboard, etc. or nothing at all.
And this semester I have got a group of really great 5-6 graders - they are super capable, willing and skillful. However, obviously, not skillful enough to deliver first-class presentations in English and speak freely for more than 15-20 seconds.

Yet I gave them the first presentation assignment last Saturday. In case you are not familiar with the foreign language level of kids at this age, I'm throwing in a picture. The huge dog illustrating all the skills you've got to have to deliver a presentation and the chihua-hua illustrating the set of skills they posses. Truly.
Now add the nervousness of public speaking (that would be those ears drooping over the little cuttie on the pic) and you'll probably come to the conclusion that it's not the best idea. I wasn't all that sure about it either. The bar should be high, yes. But not too high.

I asked one hero (really, I can call him that now) - Danya - to prepare a presentation on anything he wants: his lovely cat, favourite sport, hobby, favourite food, etc., and he chose to share one of his passions. Which is... Magic Tricks!
Can you believe that?
Trust me, I believed in him and thought he would handle speaking English in front of his classmates. I didn't expect a jaw-dropping performance, however.

Not only did he make a PowerPoint presentation, but also brought some "equipment" and showed us about 10 magic tricks right on the spot.. In English!
You could see his hands shaking, him trying to formulate ideas in English correctly and one would think Gosh, that's overwhelming. Nevertheless he dealt with anxiety just fine and made a great performance. I feel so proud of him! (although there is nothing I helped him with really) And also so glad that I decided to give that task after all.

And this post, I hope, will serve as a reminder to other teachers and myself too that kids are capable of lots of things indeed. We shouldn't limit their creativity and development zone by being afraid of failure or not believing in them. Well, definitely one cannot be successful all the time, and bumps will come along the road, here and there. But you'll never learn (and what is more important - broaden) your borders till you try.
And being a teacher I feel responsible for showing a child where his current benchmarks are and how to broaden them.

So dear colleagues, here is what I want to tell you:

Broaden your students' boarders ;)

Motivation and Reward Systems to Implement

Not only has the new school year started, but it’s already been two weeks, which means two lessons with each group for me. And I’ve been really eager to start posting at least once a week in summer, but procrastination and lack of self-pushing didn’t let me do that.

In short, I was lucky to be a part of two camps – one two-week regular camp, where my colleague-partner and I were leaders of the youngest team and where I taught English 3 hours a day. I doubt I will describe this experience in detail as it’s not concerned with teaching English that much, it concerns working with kids though and therefore I might mention that time period here and there. What I really want to say about that camp is that I was genuinely happy. Every day of it. I loved all of my kids and felt truly overjoyed about the whole process.

The second camp was only 5-day long and was completely devoted to English. 4 teams and 4 team leaders, 8 teachers, our great boss and English every second of the camp = English Incubator. I was a teacher of project-management lessons, so it was kind of CLIL even. I will definitely devote a post to the English Incubator itself some time later. No doubt I loved every moment of it as well.

But that’s enough of “How I spent my summer”. I’d love to share something more up to date with you.

This semester I have 3 groups (3-4 graders, 5-6 graders and Intermediate) on Saturdays and 2 Elementary groups on Sundays. And I decided I should test two motivation approaches and see how each of them works.

1) English Journey Passport

I’ll start out by describing the approach I have with Saturday groups. I managed to create and English Journey Passport (here is the link for you to download the whole set). And here are some pages for you to take a preview look at.

The concept itself: every lesson we travel to a new place in England, Scotland or Wales. We go from South to North, learning a bit about each city we visit. When child visits a city = attends a lesson, he/she receives a new page for his Passport.

Page #2 – Student info page + space for drawing personal coat of arms or group’s coat of arms if you decide to spend time on creating one

Page #3 – motivational quote (can be any number actually, I’m planning to give it to students right in the middle of the course)

Page #last – brick wall where I’ll post coats of arms of the cities for every lesson that student attended

City Pages:

Students fill in

·        - the date

·        - name of the city

·        - an activity he/she liked most/least at the lesson; some impression of the lesson

·        - new words

Teacher fills in

·        - homework battery bar (color the number of slots according to the completion and accuracy level of h/w done)

·        - lesson activity slot (I give stickers which say great/good/try harder/you can do much better; actually any way to note how active student was at the lesson would do. You can have just three colors - active green, so-so yellow and passive red – and fill the circle with the appropriate)

·        - special achievements (to praise any distinguishing activity, e.g. “wrote the most creative story”, “made no mistakes in listening tasks”, “won in a vocab game”)

·        - new words (so it’s either you gluing a list of words students are supposed to learn from the lesson or them writing 5-10-15 new words they learned at the lesson).

I also have my personal info (mobile phone and e-mail) at the bottom of the page, near the envelope picture so that students and parents can contact me in case of any questions. You can adjust the pages to your personal needs using any visual redactor. To create the pages I used an awesome free web-site https://www.canva.com/

2) As for the Sunday groups, I’m implementing something I have already tried before, and which I learned about from a great colleague of mine – Ksenia (http://www.kseniashashmurina.com/). Each student made/drew/printed out his/her own image on a small piece of paper. And every lesson I stick them to the board chart at level “1”. Being active and giving answers at the lesson, students gain points and move up the chart. Those who reach 10 get a small prize at the end of the lesson (stickers or sweets).

Furthermore, I keep the record of all the points gained by each student at every lesson. And I will sum up all the personal results at the lesson 16 and reward the student who earned the most points with some cool stuff (some educational and fun stuff, I haven’t decided on that yet:))

Primary Colours Week

I have so many things to write about and I haven't written anything for so long!
Let me start with something that has just recently ended. We had a Primary Colours Week at Unium and it was awesome!

When I was in America, I remembered a Crazy Socks Day at school as something great that we don't have and as something that would make school life more fun and enjoyable. I always ask this question - why not have all different sorts of fun while studying if it doesnt' interfere with the actual learning process but what is more contributes to it?!

Teachers Crew on the Violet Day

And having special days seems to be one of those fun things. So at the second Speaking Club meeting (a bit later about that) we came across the topic of these special days and I offered our students to come with ideas of their own special day or rather a special week as we are not a usual school and our schedule is different. So while just one day wouldn't work for us, a week would suit perfectly. Students were encouraged to send their ideas to me by e-mail. After a week I created a poll to vote for the best idea (got three ideas from them but still it's an achievement, I think, since it was for the first time). And the idea of Primary Colours Week when everybody wears clothes of the colour assigned to a particular day won. So we went from red Monday down to violet Sunday following the rainbow order and it was awesome!

Kids that had me as a substitute teacher on the Blue Day

Since I have lessons only on Saturday and Sunday I was preparing for indigo and violet, but at some point suddenly a substitution came around and I went to one of our centres on Friday and brought every blue accessory I had with me and made the girls wear it and take a photo =))

It was so much fun! I'm sharing with you photos of my groups, not all of them followed the colour rules despite my request but still it was great and quite team building.

My Elementary group

So this upcoming Sunday we are going to reward the girl whose idea of Primary Colours Week was implemented and we have also made a competition for the most active educational centre and yesterday all the winners were chosen and now their prizes are on the way as well! :)

me, my student and two colleagues - Indigo Day

I'm glad that this idea came to my and my colleague's mind as we were writing the plan for the second meeting! I hope we will be able to do something like that next semester as well! I also think it will be fun to make some kind of quest/flashmob in summer so that the kids satay tuned over the brake.

Do you have any special days at school? Please share, I'd love to hear about your experience!

How To Turn Your Lesson Into a Quest in 15 Minutes

Today I decided to add more fun to our usual small competitions and unite all the exercises under one topic. We had an Adventure Islands Quest. You can see our route on the right. As you see, it takes not more then just a picture on the board.
As we were doing it I thought that I could have made a paper boat so that it would travel for real. That would have added some interactivity, you now.
This quest can be planned in advance and have some special points, tasks and so on or can be included into your lesson without any special preparation.

When to use it at the lesson:

1) As a HW-check activity if you had at least 3-4 exercises. Plus you can always add some extra practice to the topics assigned for HW and here you go - already about 6 exercises, which is good number for any quest.

2) As a New Topic journey. You can arrange the stages in accordance with grammar-vocab-use of english-listening-writing-.. scheme. Or plan the stages as introduction-let's come up with the rule-drilling-freer practice-etc.

3) As an activity that will go through the whole lesson. In this case a more profound background story is probably required, so that it unites different parts of the lesson. Or you can just have stages (e.g. HW-check, new material, practice) and substages at each of the major stage.

How you can prepare such an activity in 15 minutes before the lesson:

1) Choose a topic. The easiest way is to go with some journey - islands, space, town, country, etc.

2) Count how many exercises you have in your plan today (or how many HW exercises you have if you decide to make it as a HW-check activity).

3) Draw stages in accordance with the number of the exercises (e.g. 5 HW exercises mean 5 islands). Set some ultimate goal at the last stage - find a treasure, rescue your friend, catch a thieve, collect all the puzzle pieces to make a picture, etc.

(optional - 4) Draw some extra stuff/characters/surroundings/etc. It will take you not more than 60 seconds, but will add significantly to the atmosphere.

(quite optional - 5) Take a magnet and put it at the first stage to mark the beginning. Move the magnet as your group conquers the quest.

6) Copy all the exercises from the textbook and cut them out so that they look like some cards (it takes about 3-4 mins, but kids will love them more than just regular Open textbook page blah-blah exercise blah-blah).

(optional - 7) You can also stick these cards to the stages so that kids can come up to the board and grab them - the more they move the better.

It's as simple as that! I tried these Adventure Islads with both teenager Elementary and Young Learner's groups and it worked just great!

I hoppe your kids will love it too=)

Wish you fun and effective lessons ;)

How to motivate your students to do homework

Here is a tip I came across in the net I don't remember how long ago. And this semester I decided to try it out with my 5-6 graders. And as you can see from the photo, the thing is working! All the exercises for homework (including written assignments such as essays) are handed in in time and always! Now, the price I'll have to pay is the following :) - when the number hits ten, I'm gonna throw a pizza party for them. And since I'm a bit too soft teacher sometimes, there is gonna be ice-cream too :D Kids love it! Every lesson, in the very beginning, I hang this poster on the board and after I'm done walking from student to student to check if the homework is done, we all count the numbers together and then I write it in the square.

Hmmmm....an idea just stroke me..I should let kids do that! Why am I writing the number? Really! I should have students - each week a new one - write the number on the board! It will make them feel more responsible for the whole process of getting scores for homework + the feeling of achievement.

Great! I'll definitely ask one of the students to write number 7 this Sunday ;)

Long Time No Write; Teacher's 8th of March

It's been a while since I wrote last, and well mainly it's connected with the beginning of a new semester both at Uni and at work :) so here I am again, swapping my teacher-student roles everyday which is fun and makes me believe The Desk Theory. Or The Desk Effect to be more accurate. It's about changing your behaviour once you are sitting at a student's desk. Like from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. I'm a teacher - a responsible person, joyfully carrying out my duty. And once my lessons (where I'm a student) start at 2 p.m. I turn into a usual student, who talks with fellows, chats in the Internet, doesn't want to do the tasks, yaws, looks at the wrist watch every 10 minutes to check if the lesson is over (depends on the lesson, of course), talks off topic and so on, Love it! :D

Anyway, the post is not about that at all. I'll try to be concise

Big Event Number One. The finale of the Teacher of The Year competition at Unium has taken place! It was great! It was just awesome!! And despite the fact that I didn't even get to the second part of the final contests, I'm happy. Truly happy for having taken part in all this at all. It's been great experience, it gave me so much.. I already see myself next year talking my colleagues into taking part in it and saying how cool and beneficial it is :)) I really want to congratulate Taira, the winner of the contest. I'm sincerely glad that she who won the competition and believe that she deserved it more then everyone else. That makes me love my company even more - the fact that well it was a competition and I'm so happy for my "rival's" victory. It just shows what kind of people work at Unium. Professional, awesome and united.

And of course I congratulate beautiful Ksenia (http://p0-lubvi.livejournal.com/) on winning the Audience Award! One more person who I'm truly glad for! Thanks to her idea, now I have this cool chart at my YL lessons. Each kid made his/her own hero and now they move up the "ladder" for the correct answers at the lesson.

I love my job, I love my Unium and I'm proud to work there. Well, after all I did become the best teacher of the year, as you may see :D I'm lost in thoughts about the special effort that I've been awarded for though =)

Big Event Number Two. We held a Speaking Club meeting hurraaaaaay!! =)))

It was legen... wait for it... dary! Legendary! And I'm not kidding. Well...I knew I wrote a cool plan of course.. :D But the children! It were the children who made that evening special. And of course my fellow teacher Yana, who assisted me in holding the event as a second teacher. We made projects, videos, had 3 different discussions, presented our ideas, watched Obama's campaign commercial...and all that in 2,5 hours! + about 20 minutes of taking pictures, giving and receiving feedback, hugging with students, Yana and my best ever methodist Genya after that.

I'll provide a short plan for the meeting in the next post, I hope it will help or at least just inspire you :)

I'm planning the second meeting now. It's gonna be in the beginning of April. And having chosen the topic I foresee it to be a success again, with Genya's help we'll make it a piece of cake.

Big Event Number Three. I've got a new job! It's in a bilingual kindergarten. So now my blog is going to be full of pre-school stuff as well. I'll write about it in detail a bit later. For now I'm just trying to figure out the approach, techniques, just run around without full understanding of what I'm doing and why :)))

That's probably it about the big events.. I only want to add a few things

First of all, it was one of the best 8th of March. My ODI and Int kids brought me flowers, sweets and handmade presents, drew pictures on the board and said wonderful things. I think if I write one more time words awesome, cool, great or legendary you'll start thinking that I'm crazy or just out of normal words. But it was really awesome! That's how I felt those Saturday and Sunday - working all days long but very happy. Nastya gave me loom bracelets, Veronika drew a beautiful rose, Dasha brought sweets and a greeting card with very warm words inside, Erlan brought yellow tulips, Luiza - sweets, Alena - tulips, Gleb - a gorgeous rose, Julia - three bright pink roses...and Alina - sweets...Michael brought daffodils in a pot....and Nastya - more sweets..and a candle..

And with every piece of each present I felt like the happiest person. We shared sweets and sniffed the flowers, sang songs, jumped, danced...and studied English through all that of course! With every piece of those gestures, courtesies my heart filled with deep appreciation for what I have in my life and for all the people I meet (especially those under aged pieces of joy:D)