Teacher says - almost nothing? Let the kids play!

Teacher said 'rip it up'!

It's been a while since I've shared our classroom activities here. My students inspire me, and I love how the simple things work best - we are more or less back face to face & done with blended zoom lessons - where we couldn't use physical resources...

Any teacher of young learners will tell you that the physical interaction of learners with their own resources, and their physical interaction with each other is priceless - and we are more or less mask free too (not a policy, just the mood).

You can see we are continuing to use online resources - really cool presentation tools & 'distracting' audio/video components. And of course you can see our students all have their own text books = physical resources we at Luna think are irreplaceable. 

You can see flashcard chaos? 

Let's get organised!

I see students managing their own stuff, sorting and saving - and helping each other. Gentle corrections and lots of unsponsored vocabulary spoken...I mean, no teacher talk time, but students prompting, checking, repeating. Teacher's job = shut up & listen! Sure, a few subtle corrections & non-verbal encouragements, nudges & thumbs up, but hey, the students are doing all the heavy lifting! All the non-involved (but attentive) teacher needs to do is a little bit of fine tuning of pronunciation/word substitution & make sure we all have the same number of cards.

Pro tip? Before you take flashcards out of the books (eg Compass's Sounds Fun or Oxford Phonics World) ask students to 'tag' their own cards with their own unique colour - a pink dot in all the top left corners, for example. Why? Well, any card game you play = they will need to unsort quickly! And give then a zip lock bag to keep their precious cards, and elastic bands if you want to save even more time & bundle sets/units together - I don't...the "sorting hat" scramble is another opportunity for learners to queitly/quickly re-process vocabulary & categorise/sort it. Another little win, sensei!

I think I'd estimate teacher talk time in these lessons at about 2 minutes/hour. As a game player - setting the standard/modelling output & answering "Jim sensei, what's this?" questions, & joking along (H told me to 'Go away!' instead of  'Go Fish!') fully involved - but as a peer & actually trying to loose the game itself. 

I have a cunning plan!

How much Japanese did the teacher need to speak? Nope, none.

How much Japanese did the students come out with? Precious little, apart from 'social'or game play reactions.

How much explanation went into the games? None - we started, and guess what, the students figured the rules/goals out for themselves & stress-tested their ideas - and then refereed when Jim-sensei tried to blatantly cheat!