Nanaha's personification of Spring

 

Spring

After reading The Selfish Giant, by Oscar Wilde (OUP Dominoes graded reader version), a young reader imagines the character of Spring...think she came up with a fine piece of imaganiation (and writing, and picture!).

Spring has short brown hair and blue eyes. She is about twenty-five years old and she wears a pink t-shirt and a light green skirt.

I her hands she has lots of flowers and baby rabbits. She plants the seeds and brings showers.

She lives in a cherry blossom tree by the river.

She is very kind, cheerful, and friendly.

An interview with King Eurytheus

On a recent TV am show, Nanako interviewed the notoriously shy/cowardly tormentor of Hercules - King Eurytheus. See their exchange on SockPuppets and decide who you prefer :)

I can do it!

My favourite phrase - it's so empowering!

A colour, cut, and stick-it-back-together again kind of activity that helps children review vocabulary, read (rather than guess!) and develop logical/predictive skills.

Basically this is a variation on dominoes, here making a circle. You can do this with any lexical set (or grammar structures too), but you need to make sure the last card will join back up to the first, or it won't work (and that you don't have duplicates).

What did we do? Coloured in big dots according to the words written under them. Big flashcards with the colours and words were on the board. Don't know?  - Go check! Then cut out your cards carefully (so that your pairs are separated). Give them a good shuffle, and then put it back together again! Use the flashcards again
to double check. If you want to keep sets separate, use different coloured base paper and avoid pink (girls will all want this one!).

Most enjoyable was the children showing mummies their puzzles, and mummies not being able to figure it out. Made the children feel very clever indeed - and they are, of course!

Heads I win, tails I win

If all you have to do for homework is colour in a few pictures and cut them out, can you really improve your English?


Somehow I doubt it too - actually, any homework that is not followed up on is homework virtually lost. It has to have a purpose and a value of itself to be meaningful & motivating for the learner, and it must also be seen, and have, a greater use ie in class. Whether that is having students read their work back out loud, or engage each other in Q & A, or pick on teacher's "mistakes" etc, some extension is essential so that 'just doing it' is not the task completed - for me it is next task prepared.



So, my simple dominoes game (combining colours with clothes) was a popular 'easy' bit of
homework & a very extendable activity. I encourage my young learners to find shortcuts - in this case reading the colours off their pencils even if books are 'closed'. They know I know...pretty soon they were all 'cheating', and then deciding themselves that they shouldn't - "You've read that twice already!" Peer regulation is unbeatable!

As for the game, our most reticent reader won easily. Our best reader was annoyed that she ended up with too many cards...until although she had lost, she could put down and read all her extra cards with a big flourish and lovely pronunciation at the end, upstaging early finishers!

High five Ha-chan

Loosing Ayako - spread your wings!

I've been in this game long enough to know that this afternoon is not the last time I will ever see Ayako, who had her last class with Luna today after about eight years. The next time I do see her though, she is likely to have found herself a place at uni, had her hair done and look nothing like the super-shy elementary school girl I first taught from ABC, and still remember her as. I guess she'd pass PET (CEFR B1) fairly easily now, but she wouldn't volunteer for yet another test!


Today she muttered dark things about her reader (Tutankhamen) being 'too hard' - but that her favourite character was King Tut himself. We were drawing lines under bits & bobs we hadn't finished off before.Ayako has read countless books from the Story Tree series (OUP) into Dominoes & Bookworms - she prefers Dominoes with the quizzes at the end of each chapter. She has consistently & steadily done everything she has been asked to try, and has come such a long way she can only continue to 'use her English' from now on. She leaves us ready to blossom.



Ayako has stolen the hearts of all her teachers over the years she has been coming to us for English classes. Going to have to find another way to make Saturday afternoons fun now...



Best of luck getting into the FE course you want, Ayako. Very sad to see you go, but more excited to see what you achieve next.

xxx Jim