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)

Storytelling. Part 1.

So here I am, preparing for my new post for the Teacher of The Year at Unium, watching different TED videos and reading articles on storytelling. I decided to make the topic of Creativity my field of study for the next post. Hopefully I will be able to gather some interesting material. So I would like to share with you what I have learned so far.

At first, I'll share two the most interesting videos I came across today, one by J.J. Abrams and anotther by Andrew Stanton. You'll enjoy watching them both for interesting ideas and for fun. Greatly inspiring as well by the way.

Just to leave it here - new vocab for me from these videos. Loved those words, so not to forget, I'll put them here.

Venerable - accorded a great deal of respect, especially because of age, wisdom, or character.
E.g.: a venerable statesman

Ubiquitous - present, appearing, or found everywhere.E.g.: - his ubiquitous influence was felt by all the family- cowboy hats are ubiquitous among the male singers

To snatch - quickly seize (something) in a rude or eager way.E.g.: she snatched a biscuit from the plate

Punchline - the final phrase or sentence of a joke or story, providing the humour or some other crucial element.E.g.: his humour did not depend on punchlines

And now I'd like to list some points and try to reflect on them a bit:

• Storytelling is joke telling.
• Stories affirm who we are. Each person creates unique stories and character. All of that reveals our mood, intention, values, concerns and matters alike.
• Stories cross the barrier of time. They serve to transit culture and history. Some stories survive trough ages being told from mouth to mouth.
• Stories help us discover similarities between each other. Why do some films and books become more poplar than others? Why do people from different countries, of different age and sex find the same stories attractive? Because they appeal to problems that people face all over the world. We all are similar. Like Tolstoy said, all happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But even those ways of unhappiness are similar, each case has its particularities, no doubt. But the base, the eternal questions, are the same. It's one of our greatest strengthes as mankind, I believe.
• There isn't anyone you couldnt learn to love once you've heard their story. No comment needed. Just a very profound idea.
• Story commandment is - make me care. We feel touched by a story the moment we start to care for the characters. 
• Good story should make a promise that it will lead somwhere that's worth your time.
• Storytelling without dialogue is the purest form of sinematic storytelling.
• Audience wants to work for their meal. They just don't want to know that they are doing that. We are born problem solvers. It's a well organized absence of information that draws us in.
• Unifying theory of two plus two. Make the audience put things together. Don't give them four; give them two plus two.
• If things go static, stories die. Because life never is static.
• Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
• Questions you can ask yourself:

1. Have you constructed anticipation?
2. In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next?
3. But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term?
4. Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be? 

• Storytelling has guidelines, not hard fast rules.
• You've got to love your main character.
• A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.
• Story needs to invoke wonder.
• Express values you personaly feel deep down in your core.
• Mystery is the catalyst for imagination.
• Blank page is a magic box.
• First - give a teaser.
• Mystery after mastery - solving one mystery leads you to another (it can be apllied just to characters, appearing one by one in the book).
• Leave room for imagination to the reader.
• What audience think they are getting shouldn't be what they will really get it the end.
• Storytellers need to develop their characters, go deep into character's actions and attitudes.
• The only thing ripped off in the story should be a character. 

Sherlock Holmes Quest

Today was our last lesson in this semester and I'm really excited right now about strating the new Intermediate textbook in two weeks with my elder students!
I hope that all of them will stay in the group, we'll add couple new faces and start fresh and kickng right away!

I would like to share with you ideas and materials I used for our last lesson. We always try to make it special - prepare a quest or some game. Last lesson I offered them 4 topics to choose from and everybody agreed on Sherlock Holmes.

So that's how our Sherlock Quest lesson went today:

1) Find the next clue. Children teamed up into 2 groups (I have only 5 students in this group) and ad to run around the Educational Centre to find the clues of their team colour which would lead them to new clues and so on till they found the last ones that had secret words written on them. Some of the clues contained not only directions, but also small tasks like find out how to say hello, bye and thank you in German (that was in a German classroom, the teacher of which agreed to help me) and find out the EC manager's name.

2) Create your own Detective Agency. Children had 10 minutes, lots of markers and a piece of paper for each group to create a symbol, a moto and come up with a name for their Detective Agency.

3) Meeting the victim. The Agencies received their first calls. It was an old lady who had been robbed. She told her story where she and her cat Mr.Whiskers were drinking tea when the accident happened. What she saw was only a black figure climbing out of her living room window. There was only her neighbour with a baby walking down the street, the gardner who must have been doing his work in the backyard and no other witnesses. So the detectives decided to go to the gardner first.

4) Witness number 1. The gardner was a lonely old man living with his owl. He didn't want to say anything till somebody played the Story game with him while drinking 5 o'clock tea. I found this game at the EC and it's designed to spur children's imagination and develop storytelling skills. It's called Rory's Story Cubes and you can buy them either "in flash" or purchase an app, which is three times cheaper. The real dice feel great in your hands though. So the thing is that each side of the dice (there are nine of them in the box) has a picture on it. Player rolls nine dice and gets nine pictures. He needs to make up a story that will contain all of those words now.
After having played the game the gardner decided to share some info.

5) Wintess number 2. The young lady that was wallking down the street with her baby in hands that night was very nice and agreed to answer all the detectives' questions. She only needed some time to run to the grocery's and buy some milk for the baby. Meanwhile she asked the detective to look after her chiled and play sharades with him. Here I took some words from the units we studied this semester, wrote them on cards and put either S, T or D at the bottom of which card. S is for show, T is for Talk, D is for Draw, so now guys needed to take turns to get the card and either mime, explain or draw the words.
When the lady came she answered all the questions and the detectives found out that her husband saw Mrs.White's husband 1 week ago, which was really strange because Mr.White left the town 2 years ago when he and Mrs.White got divorced.

6) Witness number 3. The neighbour's house was at his workplace and worked really hard to catch up with his deadlines so he didn't really have time to talk to the detectives. The detectives decided to help him to write the articles (this man was a journalist) and therefore save him some time to talk to them. Here are the topics that I offered to my students (they had 15 minutes to write 1-2 paragraph stories):

• You are building a sand castle and suddenly notice that the sea has brought something to the beach from its deep waters. You come closer and see that it’s a bottle with some sheet of paper inside. You open it and here is what the paper says:
• You are walking the streets and at some point an old man and an old lady approach you. It turns out that it’s exactly you who they need for one secret mission…
• You are walking the streets and arrive at a narrow one. All the houses there have dirty grey walls, doors and windows except for one house that stands at the very end of the street. It’s bright blue and has a yellow roof. Who lives in this house?
• Write a story where you will mention a girl with a pot with honey, a bear, a street lamp
• You and your friends are camping in a forest. It’s an early morning and you and your best friend decide to have a walk. You find a tree with a nest on it. The nest is full of golden eggs. One of the eggs is opening….
• “That’s where the rainbow ends!” – Lilly cheerfully cried out loud. It was a very interesting place indeed….
• And all over the room there were… pancakes! Here is how it happened.

After having helped the man they learned that he saw Mr.White at the Glade's Bar last week. Mr.White was talking to some tall skinny blonde guy and was pretty nervous.

7) Witness number 4. At first detectives had to find the right person at the bar buy matching pictures of young men and appearance descriptions. Once done, they started asking the tall blonde buddy questions to which he was reluctant however. He wanted to gamble with them at first. Cluedo game was very popular in that bar and the guy agreed to tell them everything he knew only if they win this game. So we played cluedo (there were 6 of us all together, so it went perfectly). Here is the Amazon link to the game in case you don't know it. I was lucky to have it at my EC, but I think you can make one yourself (I'm planning to, because it's rather expensive).
The gambler told the detectives that Mr.White discussed theft with him and ask for advice. The gambler however didn't know where to find Mr.White.

8) Witness number 5. When the detectives were leaving the bar a girl approached and said she heard them speaking and could take them to Mr.White. She showed them the house and in order to thank her detectives decided to play with her. Any game you find funny at useful at the same time would fit this step. It would be great if the game was active as well because after playing Cluedo children get tired sitting and want to move around.

9) The Mansion. So detectives arrived at the mension. It has three floors and 16 windows + 1 window on the roof. Mr.White is in the attick so to get to that roof window children need to go through those 16 first. Each window (as you can see on the picture) has a sticker on it. Some stickers tell you that you earn 2-5 extra points, some tell you that you loose 1-3 points, some give you small tasks like sing your fav English song and get 5 points, say these three tongue twisters in a raw without any mistakes and get 7 points, and some imply completing a worksheet on one of the topics of the semester.

10) The arrest. You got that old evil man! Now to finish up your quest in a fun way act like poor Mr.White, make couple jokes, say something funny, thank the detectives on behalf of Mrs. White and even draw a cell on the Mr.White's picture.

Some extras you need to/may apply:

• Don't forget to score. Give points (and reason the number of points given) for each task. Calculate all the points at the end and reveal the winner;
• Act out the characters. Take up the roles of the witnesses and make it fun. I printed out pictures of each witness and their house/room/office and added some character pecularities to each. For example, my gardner had an owl that he was always talking to; the gambler was stupid and talked with his mouth full; baby's mother was too energetic and active, wouldn't stop talking and so on;
• Give useful prizes for the winners (e.g. copybook for foreign words, small English proverbs dictionary);
• Play Sherlock Holmes OST music in the beginning and then put on some music when children work on tasks and worksheets.

I hope that some of this information will prove useful to you :) you are very welcome to try out these ideas at your lessonsand leave a comment about how it all went.

Thank you very much for reading and do not hesitate to share!

Learn to learn: tools for selfdevelopment

Today's post is going to be devoted to tools that I use to develop my skills and abilities: both personal and professional.
The idea to write a post on that topic belongs to The Teacher of The Year contest organizers at Unium. It's one of the topics we are supposed to wirte on as the second challenge on that competition. So I decided to make this post useful for everybody and provide some great apps I've been using to have fun and improve my skills.

Selfdevelopment tools, sites and apps

• Lumosity. This is probably the most famous one of all. It's an application that provides games to train the following skills: memory, speed, attention, flexibility, problem solving. There are two versions: free and pro. At the very beginning you are offered a test to check you attention, speed and memmory on the basis of which (+on the basis of a short survey on what skills you want to imrove) your personal training programm will be developed. In free version 3 games a day are provided; you can play them as many times a day as you wish. In pro version 5 games a day are recomended for you to play (based on your goals and first test results), but you have constant access to all the 40+ games that actualy exist in this program. In both versions you can set training remainders so that your device will remind you once a day to do the brain workout. At every point of the app usage you can go to the My brain page and see your LPI (Lumosity performance index) - picture on the right. However comparing your LPI with other users' is only available in the pro version. The app suggests training 3-5 days a week. Besides the actual games you receive quite interasting articles on how the brain work issues once in a while. Available for iOS, Android, Windows and also at the original website.

As for my personal comment on this app, I must say that it's fun! Games are really nice, interactive, quick and colourful. You get scores every time and have separate record tracking for each game so that you can always see your progress. In my University group we all have this app and from time to time compare our LPIs. I would definitely recommend to give it a try, especially since the free version provides so many opportunities and you don't need to pay any money to train your brain regularly.

• Elevate. This is another personalized brain trainer which however aims at a bit different skills and abilities: speaking, writing, reading, listening, math. Those are rather channels through which you give and receive information. There are about 25 activities overall that help you to develop the most necessary skills. At the beginning you are asked about the skills you would like to improve. Then a special training programed is developed for you. Each day you are given a chance to train three of the skills via playing interactive games. You also have milestones which are fun to reach aand make your training process more interactive. This app suggests training at least 4 days a week to get the best results. Ranking is also available in pro version which can be easily purchased. Available for iOS, Android and also at the original website.

Writing about my personal usage experiance I must say that first of all it's a great tool for English teachers and students. Not only is it listening that's trained (well obviously, cuz the app is American) during the process, but also spelling, grammar and vocab range! Which istruly amazing! I'm definitely going to "advertise" this app to my students next semester (as they are going to be Intermediate now;). Interface is very nice, activities are challenging, interactive ad interesting, It is definitely worth trying.

• Brain+. This app is focused on such skills as memory, problem solving and attention. There several sections: Brain Profile page, where you have both overall results and separate skills results measured in BP (brain points); Brain Coach explains how Brain+ will help you to improve and developed (very interestinng to listen to this info); Science - a great collection of articles on how the provided games develop your brain, on how brains work and general and so on; Training, where you actually play games. Available for iOS and also at the original website.

As I have just started usinf this application, there is not much that I can say, but so far my experince has been nice and brightful. I really like the science section, where a lot of info is provided. It's nice not only to lear stuff about brain but also find some new vocabulary as I'm not a native English speaker.

• TED. I think this site doesn't really need any presentation. Great source not only of educational videos on a vide range of topics, but also a very nice resource for me as an English teacher - to show some pieces or some shorter videos to my students to do some tasks. As most of the lecturers who make videos for TED are great preformers, their speech is usualy eloquent, well-structured and pronanciation is quite easy to figure out. That's probably all I'll say about TED. You should definitely check it out if you don't know this resource yet.

I very sincerely hope that at laest some of this info will prove useful to you :)