Airu says...

Miyu's Fotobabble

We think this speaks for itself!

Satoka describes her house

Always a nice little follow up to a nice little reader - when Kipper & family move into a new house and have new adventures waiting for them.

Nice drawing Satoka - nice house! And very nice voice :)

Sensei, I don't have a story to tell...speaker's block & interrogative teaching

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Casually mentioned I was trying to teach "The Narrative Tenses" last Thursday evening, via Swarm,  and then had a bit of a 'mare doing so. Friend, inspiration and twitter vivant +Michael @mickstout promptly asked me about resources to do so. Oh hell, called out!

Back story = used to employ a DELTA-qualified teacher whose every second sentence was about teaching the narra'ive tenses (Geordie), how good he was at it (them?) and that we should all d'off caps & bend a knee to the genius before us. But seeing as we have never had that many students in the rarefied reaches of advanced storytelling...you do need a bit for YLE Movers but you can generally get by without having to display any grasp of the past perfect simple/past perfect continuous/etc...in fact if you even tried, I think the speaking examiner would shake your hand!

This particular class week was missing the storytellers, instead only the 'answers on the next page already filled in' students had turned up. Any story telling they do attempt is in L1. My 'pardon?' usually gets a 'No, no' + dismissive hand wave. Been there? Can never introduce something stealthily or creatively because my thunder eternally stolen "that's on p45"...

Nuts & bolts of had + past participle etc all diligently underlined. But grasping the actual concept? Timelines, arrows, arm waving...Jim sensei needed to hit reset and start again.

So not only scratching my head all week about how to rescue the befuddled students from last week's grammatical cul de sac, needed to actually impress a colleague as well - or at least try to reply.

My students share the same language, and are not natural story tellers nor inquisitors. Imagine the opposite of Irish or Italian, maybe? Any contribution usually delivered as a set piece, accepted universally & scarcely a comment or question there be afterwards.

As usual, simplest is best, and decided after rummaging my collection of supplementary materials that nothing was really going to present itself. I needed to detox the class from the dreaded G terminology & translation mindset, and in some parlance flip the classroom. Keep books in bags, concentrate on imaginative brain, banish pencils, avoid turn-taking & prevent dominant personalities railroading others. Time too for me to be quite a lot more intrusive than I usually am (inviting fluency and letting 'errors' go).

A board game with out story telling limits

Solution. A narrative.

Dived into the back of our games cupboard & found Never Ending Stories (sorry, that awful song will start in your brains too!) - for age 6+ it says on the box. Ideal. Very simple. Totally random. Players plop cards onto a board in turn, and develop a story as suggested by the images on them (characters, objects, locations) in the order they have been played. Past tenses great. But the 'forgotten' past?

Start at the end of the story and add cards to try to get to the beginning, back-filling detail as you go. This is where the teacher needs to be very involved asking for connections, suggesting links, checking/requiring details eg Were they married before? What happened? How did they meet? and letting the whole group contribute - player whose turn it is selects 'best help' and adds the bits up. Importantly, before the next turn, teacher as narrator recaps - helping everyone keep up with developments and providing a model. Embellishment with current events etc as they occur to you are great, as students then get to see the rationale for the tenses you are using, without focusing on the tenses you are using per se - at least if the story is interesting! I challenge anyone to recount the same (and ever expanding) story the same way twice without leaving bits out; students need to see this is the beauty of storytelling not the mental linear blockage some see it as. Grammatical flexibility gets you over the hurdle and you can 'keep going' without having to go all the way back to the beginning of the timeline and get things 'in order' Students love pointing out the teacher's mistakes....ask them if you left something out...and 'rescue' yourself with a post script.

How our story unfolded - narrative to come

So, for me, interrupt like mad at the creative brainstorming phase, establish chronology and link bits together grammatically - then let that part of the story be told however it comes out. Once a turn is 'done'; gently re-tell it to check you got it right (include 'corrections' here?), and help the other students with a second listening before connecting all the other previous parts.

So there has to be a digital way to do this, for classes with wifi & tech savvy learners.Voicethread would be one way to collate a final version, I think, and could be done outside of class/before the next class. Sock Puppet, minus the time limit, another idea. Fotobabble only gives you 90 seconds - but ideal per pic?

In class, with confident students I think a Pecha Kucha type approach might work. You could also trawl ELTpics or any theme in Flickr - or go random and use flickr as a screensaver (hands free, adjust time images shown to suit skills).

Another randomiser = give a student a slip of paper with a ridiculous scenario on it and have them bluster their way out of it - kind of Liar's Game. (eg "You were seen climbing out of a nightclub window at 8am this morning wearing a superman suit")  Of course allow questions from the floor. Big class, have 2 or 3 students sit at the front and have them tell a story. Only one is true, room votes at end of story & Q/A on which one. NB They can all be false, but the winner = most convincing liar?!

A nice song despite blurty boy - any advice?

Having a bit of a problem with 'blurty boy', who challenges every single thing I say, usually at decibels that would make a modern F1 car blush. Issues his own, contrary, edicts...continues a train of thought commentary on what he (and everyone else) is doing (or not doing), how much better he is at doing whatever it is we are doing, and that he has finished first etc.

If we throw in nose-picking, banging chairs, slouching, well-developed line of off-colour (L1) language & a weak bladder...well, I am struggling for a practical approach. Some days, it's just too hot or we've got an unexpected newbie in the class; that extra 5 minutes for 'focus, visualise the steps, have everything you are going to need to hand' evaporated and now I look daft trying to find the right track on the wrong CD. And so on. Oh, of course forgot to bring his own colour pencils & instead trashes mine/prevents anyone else from sharing nicely.

I'm amazed we managed to get this lovely little song squared away without getting shouty - think a tribute to the girls' patience and overwhelming niceness of the rest of the class members.



What do you do with alpha males in your YLE classes? Would love to know!

We're cool - shades & ABCs!

Hiro cracked me up yesterday (for once not belting me in the gonads) with his super cool Korean dictator look, clinging to his cell phone throughout class. The girls are always cool anyway, and have lovely singing voices as you can hear. You can hear lots more Fotobabble creations we have created in classes at http://www.fotobabble.com/media/list?username=LunaJim

We'd love to know what you think - leave us a comment below?!

Fotobabbling along a Luna!

Check out our top of the pops this week!



Above, very early progress in Everybody Up (Starter) with 4 & 5 year olds.

Below, a curtain call for two students quitting to go to a juku - they have to 'learn' a different kind of English to be 'successful' in school tests. I have ranted and raved about this insanity before, but it still makes my toes curl. Both these lads started on the carpet at Luna in pre-literacy classes and are now on the cusp...over which I doubt they will clamber with katakana-isation, translation, death by grammar, insensible reading tracts etc. Goat? Has been got. So, one for the archive very soon, from English Time 4.

The sweetest voices singing a thank you tune!

I absolutely love the singing in this little photo! I am very biased, but it's a heart-melter :) Can't think of a better way to finish off the week!

Enunciate those important plosives, please, publishers!

Thursday is singing day - Jim's class in the afternoon really enjoys belting out a tune, even with almost no practice. Very quick ears and have a knack of coping with lyrics - the artwork in Everybody Up lends itself to this nicely.

For once I will be picky with Everybody Up as a text though, as I realised (the way the children copied) the audio is weak on something I think should be over emphasised - 'more oomph' was something I got laughed at for saying during my CELTA course way back when - that DON'T needs extra weight to convey the negative meaning of the utterance, and that the /t/ sound on the end of it is vital...instead there's a pretty lame "I donelai ........" which is meaningless. It might be construed as elegant ellision, but the message is hidden & therefore counter productive. OUP, you can do better on this one!

You can hear my guys putting a bit more gusto into their final plosives!

We ended up with a class invasion, as the next class arrived early and wanted to see what the fun was all about; we were missing our gate keeper Yukari downstairs (our son Ceilidh is unwell again). I was delighted the younger ones trumped their older mates in a game of I Spy - they started at the age of 2.5 with Luna and have been absorbing vocabulary voraciously ever since! No harm in letting students know that the competition is catching up quickly :)

Singing in colour!

 Nice to meet some classes I don't usually get to teach this week! Really enjoying finding out what you can do and how well you can sing! Who knew!

Good show kids, looking forward to a magnificent 2014 with you!

Can you cha-cha-cha in English?!

Great way to start the New Year with our first class showing off tonight!

I haven't taught these guys for a couple of years, and very nice to catch up with them again and see how much progress they are making...why don't you prove it, by the way, and do really well in YLE Starters this year? Think you'd do very well...



What is your favourite song/chant with YLEs? This is from English Time 2 (OUP), by the way...

Strange storylines #1: Kanro's roll of the dice

Check out Kanro's end-product from the team story building class last week. Like?
We really enjoy using Fotobabble for these 'hurry up & tell your story' jobs!

Sharing classroom work: In-hand tech solutions

Image via CrunchBase

As soon as I can figure out QR codes, I will be doing more with photobabbles to give our parents a bigger clue about what we get up to in class. I have a one-on-one class with a very able young lad once a week and we can tend to munch through material (too) quickly. He is my (willing)  guinea pig at the moment, as we try to do the same stuff differently (ever the language teacher's millstone?).

Some of our efforts have ended up in spectacular giggles as things didn't work out; often we both learn more (he that I'm a bit of a pillock, me that I'm more of a pillock than I thought possible...)



I deliberately chopped off the vocabulary items from the top of the text book page (and covered the target structure once we'd had a go with it "How do you/they go to school/work?" / "How does he/she got to school/work?") but used the original picture as it was too small on my phone (craving an iPad!). I want to be able to share our students' great work with parents (I think very few read this blog, tragically, nor access the stuff we share in Edmodo) at an interface they can cope with (around the stove downstairs while they wait & gossip, phones in hand. Hence, the QR codes, which will take them to the recording. Update once I get that sorted out.

Edmodo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So, how: Use the online portal to open up Fotobabble & set up an account (free). Open up the fotobabble app on your iOS & take a picture (or import a picture if you are prepared - you can crop/edit in advance then too). Hit the record button when you are ready to go, and get cracking as you have only 30 seconds or so on the freebee. As I have said about other free apps, I actually like the time stress as it hurries everyone up/necessitates re-recordings (students demand to have another go, not forced to be teacher!). Fiddle with the settings to share or hide to your own desire. You will find your fotobabbles created on your iOS on the fotobabble site, which you can then share again as much as you like - Facebook, twitter etc or embed as I have done with this one.

Image via CrunchBase

An 'extra' save I intend to do from now on with students' solo work is to add items to individual folders within Evernote. I saw a blog posting about doing this yesterday & it makes absolute sense. Down the line I will not remember who did what, when & where; will want to be able to share/give to them. Think we might do this prior to open week - certainly as a leaving present. ePortfolios is a significant part of how I see teachers empowering students (they can take their classroom & work with them) - after all, I am laying the foundations for their journey of lifelong learning.

Final thought - students always need to be able to ask questions, don't they? Here is the tables-turned recording :)  http://www.fotobabble.com/m/bjUvS3g2VWl1RGc9

Fotobabble - talking about me!

Do you like our first talking "homework" ?

ghosts?!

I think you can see we had a lot of fun with our new topic yesterday - we will be talking about our bodies and doing more cool stuff. The trick I learned from my daughter's kindy was to use rubber bands as well as string to prevent tearing.

 

If you have got any cool masks you have made, why not share them?

Fotobabble snow trek