Material design

As Susan House points out, one of the advantages of creating our own material for the classroom is that we can adapt them to a specific situation, because although we might teach to different groups with which have the same level of English, each group is unique and unrepeatable. Let's consider some resources:

• Flashcards: are without any doubt the most reusable teaching resource, there is an endless list of potential activities and ways to use flashcards in the classroom. Make sure you take into account the class size as the bigger the class the bigger the flashcards should be; another thing to consider is the way in which you will use them. If you use them to introduce a new topic, for instance, A4 flashcards will do, but if you want them to play a game like 'Heads up!' it would be better to customize small flashcards.

Ideas:
-Show and say: Hold up a flashcards and ask the class What's this?  the students respond, e.g. A banana (students can take turns in holding up the cards)

-Find the pair: Students work in pairs, each with a set of flashcards, they lay them face down on the table and take it in turn to turn over two cards trying to find a pair, the student that makes the most pairs is the winner.

-Hide and Seek: Hide an agreed number of flashcards in the classroom, write the words on the boards as a guide. The students have to find the cards, when all the cards have been found the students stand up and say which cards they have. The student who finds the most cards is the winner.

-Describe and Guess: Take a flashcards from an agreed group of objects, without showing it to the class, describe the object on the flashcard. The class must guess which object is being described.
-Tell the story: Choose a scene from a story, as you tell the story to the class, replace the key vocabulary with flashcards which you hold up. The students call out the missing words. Make sure that the key vocabulary is repeated and see if the students can anticipate the missing word before you hold up the flashcard.

Flashcards - Parts of the body

• Posters: Susan gives us two examples of posters:

-Collages: Choose your key language, students look through old magazines for examples of the key language and glue them onto card, making an abstract design. Different groups work with different colours and produce.

-Information boards: Choose your key language, students work in groups collecting and displaying information on their poster e.g. wild animals. Each group is given or chooses a different wild animal. Give all the groups a set of defined tasks, e.g. 1. Where does this animal live? 2.What does this animal eat? 3.Describe your animal.
Make sure you give enough language examples on the board.

 

Poster - Shapes.

   Susan House. Series Editor: Paul Seligson.1997. An introduction to teaching English to children: Richmond publishing

 

Assessing students the right way

  Most of the times when we want to find ways to improve our performance as teachers we focus on the obvious or on the same things again and again, and most of the times we forget to rethink our assessment tool(s). 

  Today, I want to point out that I find it highly effective and useful to assess students as many times as possible during the term; this gives them a sense of fairness about the final mark they get and they also appreciate the teacher giving them more than one opportunity to show what they are capable of doing. 

Here Peps Mccrea gives us two great ideas: 

• Hinge questioning: Asking the whole class to answer a multi-choice question using hand-signals; or show their thinking using mini-whiteboards.

• Exit ticketing:  Giving students 3 questions to answer on a sheet of paper which they have to hand to you as they walk out the door. ("The 7 habits of highly effective lesson plans – Peps Mccrea – Medium", 2015)

For the latter, I've used Socrative and it turned out to be great. My students were about to have a test so we used Socrative for revision; they told me it helped them a lot to be aware of the topics they were struggling with. Here's a useful link: http://help.socrative.com/launch/exit-ticket/deliver-an-exit-ticket 

The 7 habits of highly effective lesson plans – Peps Mccrea – Medium. (2015). Retrieved from https://medium.com/@pepsmccrea/the-7-habits-of-highly-effective-lesson-plans-f785f1f8974e

Creating the desire to learn

Teachers are in charge of a huge fan of responsibilities, it's common knowledge, but nobody really takes a moment to think about what we are capable of doing: 

taking into account the way our students' brains process and store information; choosing and combining methods and approaches which are suitable for each setting; teaching metacognition strategies to our students in order to help them become independent of us one day; performing several roles, multitask, i.e. explain a topic while tying a kid's shoelaces; finding out the different learning styles and intelligences present in our classroom; putting into practice a variety of classroom management strategies, solving spontaneous problems which solutions are not written in teacher's books, but one of the most important things we, teachers, deal with is motivation. As the great pedagogue, Philippe Meirieu said: “We cannot content to give something to drink to the ones who are already thirsty. It's also necessary to provide with something to drink to those who don't want to drink”, in order to reach reluctant students' motivation, we need to build brick by brick a good rapport, show them our true colours and encourage them to do the same. We must show that we are genuinely interested in their lives.

Additionally, we should make activities meaningful. That's the way we will get our students to work and become independent learners, ask yourself: Who do you think will be fond of talking about things that are meaningless and unnatural? It's preferable to get your students talking about things they are keen on like the football match they watched last night or their favourite music band.