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 :)

This is my house!

I like the big garden and the big trees.

I like the white, purple and pink flowers.

I like my piano, and I like our big bathroom.

Everyone likes the house.

Satoka

 

In the Garden - homemade flashcards + Quizlet

Lethargic students with thunder & rain rolling around the valley, my good readers quickly made this set of key words for a Story Tree book they read/listened to at home. A change of pace, and plenty of disagreement about which pictures to use. Like?

My teacher can't read properly - The Dolphin Pool with YLEs

One of the things I like to do with my YLE classes is to review a graded reader by reading it badly. Sounds a bit daft I know,  but for my way of thinking, if the teacher's making mistakes, it's alright if the kids do too!

This works as a listening exercise, as well as a (mostly) model for pronunciation, and gives learners time to think about the words & be reassured with how they will say them. No more than one 'mistake' at a time is challenge enough.

Importantly, reading out loud is not 'a test' or final proof of understanding, internalising the vocab etc. It is hard to do, as we are doing different things to reading silently (eg skipping words we are not sure about, just like the teacher told us to do!). Of course, I would like the higher frequency words to have gone in & be recyclable by now, but new ones (eg met for this first time in this book such as 'whale') or hard ones (eg 'through') ain't no biggie if we need help. Help provided to if, as in this case, we are a weaker class and struggle a bit with confidence. Nudging along and finishing is an important landmark for us all - no need to sweat on the hurdles.

listen to ‘The Dolphin Pool’ on Audioboo

Would love to know if other teachers have tried this and if it was successful/fun?

Lost in the Jungle to Space Race: offline analog reader to online digital player

The raw material

As a pre-read/speed read I asked my class to find all the animals they could in the story. I think 'sloth' is a low-frequency noun (it's not in the text!) and a bonus point to the lad who asked me what a "lazy whatsit (in Japanese)" is in English! Looking hard for creepy crawlies too!

Previous titles in the orange series have introduced irregular past tense verbs, and most of those occuring in this story are not new. We listened to the narration on the CD, underlining said, got, threw etc as we followed the text. I coughed and/or paused the CD if we missed one - lots of peeking at friends' books.

Vocab/grammar in logical place

This gives the children something to 'do' - and a not easy task either. Competitive challenge too, as well as co-operative; writing them as a list in the inside back cover & counting - in this case we had collected 22. I wouldn't ordinarilly go anywhere near that many in the course of a class!

A messy board - brainstorming

The challenge then was to try to remember what the original form of the verbs looked like. They could remember a few but 22 is a daunting; nice teacher put them up on the board but oops in a bit of a mess. We took turns to call out pairs and scribble them down in our books (see right). I think you'll agree these ARE high frequency words, so making a decent note of them is no bad thing and in a place where we can remember them ie in the Jungle!

The digital version of my messy board is a lot more fun with a PC: check out  Space Race below. Plenty of other fun ways to use Quizlet online; apps work oniOS as well but with limited functionality (still useful!).

 Why not log in to Quizlet & see if you can set a high score?!

Blending media: graded readers + iOS devices

This was originally going to be a quick posting about how I was trying to integrate Quizlet sets more into class at the table (rather than at the PC) now that I have my old iPhone 3 freed up as de facto iPod Touch.

Created on Tagxedo - regular past tense verbs in "Lost in the Jungle"

I was just about to start tapping away when I came across a blog posting on a very related topic - how to "teach" the pronunciation of regular verbs in the past tense: the -ed ones. It has taken me a few days to think about this one in a wider context...

I do not think (young) learners need to be told what they are going to learn, explicitly. Nor do they need to be scared with the mechanics of what they are going to do - before `we` have got there together (something I am sure David Paul would want students to realise for themselves). Of course, we (teachers) need to teach; that does not mean we have to stand at the front of the class & deliver pronouncements from on high. Far from it...

Complementary media - book & iOS

I like the dawn of realisation to sneak up on my students nice and quietly - preferably while they are reading. And that is secret weapon number one, methinks. Graded readers, deployed nice and strategically, quietly. Children aren`t daft - they recognise patterns, form opinions, arrive at conclusions. And after that, they ask questions or can have ideas teased out. With -ed endings, my favourite is to ask them to underline all the verbs (or 'doing' words, however you explain them?) as we listen to a new reader. My fave series has a CD narration of each title in the pack. I don`t have to explain they are all past tense; by the end of the book they want to know why they have all got -d or -ed stuck on the end (they have already come across the same words enough times to keep Paul Nation happy!). Teacher question = "When did this happen?"

Using Quizlet app to find irregular past tenses

Leave "it", the nutty crunchy grammar thing alone. Play with the book; get into the comprehension questions, true/false stuff, vocabulary mining. Mess about with the pictures and generally ENJOY READING. Again, my fave graded reader series has a dedicated workbook for each story - puzzles, yes/no, gap filling. They get suitably harder as the books climb in ambition. These are not a class activities; extra-curricula & opt-in. We follow up in class for sure - but the past tense thing is something I want to focus on here.

Once we have done everything else we usually do with the readers ("finished" them if you like!), one last teacher challenge. Listen for the words you underlined, and circle them in one of three colours (you choose the colours - but be consistent after this decision!)

• Red - if you hear a /d/ sound on the end
• Black - if you hear a /t/ sound on the end
• Blue - if you hear an "extra" syllable (ie longer than the original word) = /Id/ sound on the end

A word to the wise; every teacher has a slightly different way of pronouncing words. Decide how you are going to say your own -ed endings as a teacher, and hereafter be consistent. There are no golden rules; a general agreement, yes. What does your school want the students to be producing? What do the other teachers teach?

After all of that, I can`t imagine a book which managed to only use regular past tense verbs. Can you? Would be rather odd. I love Quizlet for making, saving & sharing online falshcards; a dedicated app means they can also be accessed by iOS. In this instance I wrote a list of the verbs (present tense) that occured in the story, and asked students to copy the list onto the inside back cover of their readers - usefully bank. Using the 'learn' function, students could match the present & past tense forms & then scribble it down - if they had not already known or guessed (encouraged them to dive back through the book to find the words too).

Screen shot, Quizlet app 'learn' function

Once learners have finished this task, there is a 'scatter' game, with a timer = immmediately compels YLEs to compete. Drilling, anyone?

Graded readers for YLEs + iOS devices

 I wanted to give my class a break from their usual routine & recent prep for YLE, and exploit one of their OUP Story Tree (Graded Readers) a bit more.

The blue series is just about right for this class - some vocab they have not met before, but by and large they can get their heads around the story & make astute guesses about what they don't 'know'.

We had not listened/read this book before, so I played the CD and asked them to follow (fingers) - they each have a set of the books. They were hooked and enjoyed the surprise ending. They know most of the characters. This particular book introduces the 's' on the end of present tense verbs for third person singular subjects...but they don't need to be told that; going to let the penny drop (maybe next week if it doesn't clatter to the floor today!)

This time around, I 'played' a sentence from the book on my iPhone - it was playing the audio function from a quizlet set I had earlier made for the book (an old teachers' trick of cutting up sentences for students to put back together again!). Instead of my voice (familiar), or CD (tricky to cue) the US accented voice was a new challenge (didn't need a speaker either - new iPhone's inbuilt ones loud enough close up). Their task = find the page the sentence came from (and re-read it out loud). Books well and truly thumbed!

Next, in pairs/3some, showed the children how to plat 'scatter' on iPhones (via dedicated #Quizlet app) to match pairs (in this case, the sentence halves) e.g.

• Chip....goes on the swing
• They....look at the swing

I though they would do this as a scattergun exercise and basically wallop the screen until things matched up. Not at all! They were extremely careful to make the right choices & referred back to the book constantly. Great! Book getting read endlessly! As a co-operative task, I know an iPad would be much better option. Nevertheless, this worked nicely with children negotiating roles of finder/reader/typer, and checking spelling etc. The first run through took quite a while and was nice, quiet, gentle reading pace. Once they realised there was a timer and they were horribly slower than the other group...lights & action!

Unfortunately, the Quizlet app right now does not support images, so we were 'forced' to switch tech & go to the PC interface. All good - still a lot of learning & still mining the same simple story. Turn-taking continued as they dictated to each other, helped find letters on the key board & whack each other when they kept making the same mistakes eg 'i' instead of 'l'. I lost count of how many times they must have read each page - a lot more than "Yeah, know the story, bored!"

Check out the flashcard set for The Rope Swing here and find all our other great flashcard sets from "LunaTeacher"

Oh, nearly forgot! The grammar thing - didn't occur to anyone, so we'll use the board next week - and I really want to use Skitch app for that! Stay iTuned :)

Guided writing from graded reading - watch the movie!

Yuta is a spacedude
by: lunajim

Back from space, Yuta describes his planet

Yuta & Jim worked up this conversation from his Red Planet graded reader...good job, I think?!

Graded readers to great storytellers!

Well done Haruka & Ayaka for creating your own inter-stellar movie!

The Red Planet - audioboo

Artist's rendering of a Mars Exploration Rover. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have been very excited with the story coming from NASA & their success landing my fellow tweeter on Mars @MarsCuriosity and I can't wait to see some of the results this massive scientific project will produce.

Meantime, Yuta has been reading The Red Planet, and as his reading is very good, we wanted to share! Your comments are very welcome :)

listen to ‘The Red Planet - Yuta’ on Audioboo

Emergent readers having a good go!

After we have all listened to the gentle narration of our Story Tree reader off the CD at home (how many times?) and followed along in the reader itself...
After we have become familiar with new words and practiced using them in different contexts in the workbooks...

Image via CrunchBase

After we have had spelling races...
After we have corrected the teacher's silly reading mistakes...
After we have found the page for certain words...

Then we are about ready to read out loud - some more than others, obviously, and reading to an audience (even friends) is a performance with fraught issues such as pronunciation, speed and nerves. Getting it 100% right is not as important as having a go - but it does help the teacher identify any little issues which silent reading clearly doesn't.

My super enthusiatic Friday team love showing off, and why not! They are making excellent progress and my hat is off!

listen to ‘Friday - The Dream’ on Audioboo

Team reading - first draft

listen to ‘New trainers on Friday’ on Audioboo

I am not a big fan of 'team reading' - tends to be at the speed of the slowest and 'pronunciation by consent'. As you listen (press play) you can hear that the children get quicker & more 'into' the material. You can't hear me moving my arms around like a windmill to gee them up!

This did help me fogure out which words they needed a bit more focus on (which ones did you identify?) and we did just that next with a board race. After that, I read it through and made some atrocious mistakes ('cow' instead of 'now', hungry/angry, nappy/happy, mad/sad, daddy/dirty etc) which was mildly entertaining and increased the volume significantly.

Image via CrunchBase

What iOS apps do you use to get more out of your classes?

Check out some other experiments with my AudioBoo here

Find this recording/download it at http://audioboo.fm/boos/847176-new-trainers-on-friday

Exploiting a graded reader with Wordle and Audioboo

Image via CrunchBase

I have been thinking about audioboo for the last week or so since I found a tweet that very interestingly reported using audioboo for error correction. I think the original idea was Steven Herder's. The main gist of that idea was to have students record themselves talking about eg a photo (and for me this immediately said "use it for FCE Speaking Test practice!") and to then write down a transcript, possibly as an out of class activity. In class? Use it as a dictation exercise but have a different student work on a recording. I like this idea because the recording is unobtrusive so would not hinder fluency, and it really does provide a healthy opportunity for refelction/peer input as to actual output.

Image via CrunchBase

 In my class, students have already read the Story Tree graded reader at home, listened to it on CD, and worked through the accompanying workbook. The story and vocab then, is familiar several times over. Nevertheless, important to warm up before wading in to action. In our case, we listened to the story again off the CD, and followed along. Time was going to be an issue, so I did not want to do anything else at this stage, just get the story back in our heads. (With time, an extra resource used would have been Quizlet - key vocab exercise or two).

Preparation: which took 10 minutes typing as quickly as possible, inputting the entire text of the story into Wordle. Important: avoid capitalisation except for names, otherwise you'll get replication in your cloud which is unnecessary/confusing. Here is the wordle on the left.

Word clouds explained: An image is generated of the words found in a text. Size of the words repesents the relative frequency that those words occur in the text. This works very nicely with graded readers which recycle vocabulary/phrases a lot.

I strongly recommend using eg Tagxedo instead of Wordle! There is more variety in the templates etc, and you can save your wordclouds as jpegs etc. Wordles once created cannot be searched i.e. fairly useless if you want to go back later & use again. Embedding here has also given me formatting headaches :(
NB Orientate most/all the words horizontally for young learners, and see if you can find a decent font that does not have unfriendly /a/ or /g/ etc. (I couldn't find one on Wordle)

Cover the words in the readers, and just use the pictures (as cues). Explain that you want students to retell the story, using the wordle (printed out) to remind them of the words they can use.

 Use audioboo app on iOS device and record (the free app allows you 5 minutes of recording time) (another recording app is fine, but the 'boo means other students can access it on their devices/at home after etc). I think with younger learners doing this as a collaborative task is a good format (or in my class, with mum). Seeing the timer run down is a good management tool to get students to 'finish' (and not dwell where they 'get stuck').

It is important that you brief the students against trying to get the story 'perfectly right' - retell it word for word as in the text. I don't think even teachers could do this! Rather, it generates in students the awareness that words 'are missing' (but that they can still narrate a story). Playing back the recording now will identify those words. With the wordle (not the text) listen to the students versions and circle the words on the wordle that they use (with older learners they could mark the word every time they used it). Obviously, teacher will need to hook up the iOS to a speaker for class to hear if this is a group exercise, and to pause regularly for students to 'replay' the soundtrack in their heads as they do a mental wordsearch.

My students really enjoyed listening to themselves and trying to figure out what they had said, and were quite critical of themselves! They were also keen to find their own 'mistakes', such as using the 'wrong' verb/noun collocation. We found that we had used some other words (not in the world) and made a little list of those. We found we had a big bunch of words that we hadn't used at all - for various reasons eg low frequency, 'new', false-friend used instead etc. In our particular case, the students had not used any of the words used in direct speech, nor the narrative verbs eg 'say', 'shout'.

This gave us an excellent excuse to read the story again! Students were asked to speak the parts of the different characters (necessitating a bit of reading ahead to recognise their parts and therefor the key words we had overlooked initially - cool!) while I narrated. This is a nice way to finish, as it gives students a polished final production - record it as an audioboo too. Ask students to 'add oomph' (not yell) - a muttered "Oh! Help!" doesn't work, does it?!

Final reminder - make sure you iOS battery doesn't run out while you are doing this (mine did, as we were reading the book again together). You will get the idea, anyway, I hope! If you want to take pictures while you are doing this, you will need another device/actual camera (recommended)!

 

Try this with your class - and please give me feedback!

Reading young learners, smiles all round

TGIF !!!

 I was really glad that my Friday class have got stuck into their Story Tree graded readers. We skipped the red series and leapt straight into the blue, and Kipper's disastrous Toys' Party. Squeels of protest as our new role model Kipper made a cake with milk (OK, apparently!) & beans, ketchup, corn flakes...of course "Mum is angry!"

As this is our first adventure with the readers, we spent a lesson getting used to the (great) workbook that comes with each title. A number of different activities that without guidance could put the brakes on before we even start. Once the ice broken there, had a hard time stopping them from trying to do everything in one go! (Essentially a 'do at home' extra that we review every now & again in class, act out or otherwise use in some way)

A cool song to incorporate here would be Super Simple Songs' "Broccoli Ice-cream", which was recommended to me last year by Ryan Hagglund during examiner training.

At the same time we also moved up a gear with a new class book (English Time 1, also from OUP) and I am delighted that the switch is 'just right'. I used the board as an in-between step - seeing new words (some, anyway) and knowing what they are (from the pictures), to 'owning them' as in adding them to their picture dictionary at the back of the book (too often never to be seen again). Books at one end of the room, to refer to as often as you like - the points go to the most methodical memory and not the fastest runner!

English Time 1, Unit 1 vocab race

I am not too concerned with lettering on the board (whole medium is awkward) just as long as legible. We did have a vote for neatest, though, just to sow a seed! The other penny dropped when they were then asked to find the pictures in their picture dictionary and to put the matching word next to it - whose writing did they copy :) An activity I like because it passively gets them to realise alphabet order. Next week? Hangman, of course!

From Reader to Writer

Toru's study buddy didn't turn up (can't really blame him, it's bitterly cold and snowing - not the best weather for cycling to Luna) so we revisited our last lesson of 2011 and did another Lego story.

Again, we trawled through a reader we have already read (this time "Land of the Dinosaurs" - OUP Story Tree Orange series book 3) and picked out some key dialogue to go with background & characters he decided on. The story, of course, is totally different to anything with the dinosaurs, but that's the whole point - we can recycle the language and make it so much more personal/memorable with our own spin on it.

How much help from me? Not a lot, really, after I showed him the main tool box, though we did need to scoot along a bit to finish in time & print it out nicely to take home.

I think this is a really cool piece of work - what do you think?

Mining graded readers - the collective

Last week I mentioned that I/we had been 'mining'  our young learners' graded readers in class.

I very much felt that was a work in progress, and more could be achieved - I set out with the same broad lesson plan in mind for another group, using the same level readers from OUP story tree series. I wanted to see if the same approach would work again, if there'd be a different result.

As per last time, I asked students first of all to figure out what kind of words they were looking at eg "Jim eats fat green frogs" - nouns/verbs/adjectives? Admit a bit of L1 to help them suss this out, but not a lot. And, as per last time, then asked them to find ten examples of each in their reader.

Well, kids being kids, when I asked them to get out their reader, there was the usual time out while pencil cases clattered to the floor/indecision about which book I meant/chatting opportunities...I had asked them to get out book 1 (they'd read all eight titles, and done the accompanying workbooks/listened to the CD narrations), so maybe this one was rustiest in memory.

Lightbulb moment: let them choose their "favourite" - quickly! First come first reserved - can't have the same book as another learner. Bingo! Decisions made pronto.

Now the students are responsible for the choice they made. I overheard a sotto voce discussion on how that choice was made (in L1) - "choose the book with the least pages". Aha! File that info away, see what we can do!

Also as per last time, I set a target of 10 nouns/verbs/adjectives - I was worried they would be lazy. Stupid teacher! This inhibited them from compiling a jumbo list - yes, they ignored my 'rule' and kept compiling, just writing smaller to squeeze stuff in! OK...I can work with that ambition too!

As they had all chosen a different book, they all had different questions about the words they were considering. Even with only four students I was getting dizzy. Bombardment nice, but I don't want to be the focus of this - figure it out yourselves, together! And so they did. Net result of that was a constant barrage of Qs at classmates "Hey, is treehouse a verb?" - "Erm. Yes, like dog. Is like a verb - it isn't "-suru" in Japanese. I intervened when one or two things crept up (like assuming all words had to be either noun/adjective/verb - my fault again...up/in/this etc started a need for a column with 'other'!)

So, now I have four kids speed reading four different books, scanning, skimming, analysing - and beautifully, interrupting each other & co-operating all the while (essentially side-reading the other three books & relighting all those memories of stories read). I was sitting there unbusy, glowing in pride - and mad as hell that one of this class announced (via mum) that 4 nights of ballet practice a week was not enough NO!!!!

I called time when they had all more or less got to the last page of their chosen reader (awesome - they were getting pissed off because there weren't enough adjectives!)...always interrupt a good activity just before it runs out of steam! The easy finish = "How many verbs etc did you find?". I realised this was not going to be fair as some of them had got very enthusiastic/lost count and written down more; there was some repetition too (which helped us figure out why go = goes, for example). All good - we are learning TONS.

Image via Wikipedia

Solution. Remember the board/word game Scattergories? It's another EFL goldmine of a game, especially for end of term. Basic premise is that if you have written down an original word ie one that no other student has done, you score a point. (Part one winner was the student with the most words total; and sub-champions for each sub-category - everyone a winner). And then the penny dropped, as we read out all our words...Ayaka was going to win all ends up (even though she had complained the most about her book because her book was the 'hardest'?) Book 7 trumps 1,2,3! Oh, the books get harder? She had all our words and then some?

Gorgeous. The smile on Ayaka's face. Triumph!
Gorgeous. The dawning of ambition!
=========================================================================

OK, I got excited about my kids killing a lesson plan as we went? Oh yeah! What they did ticked a dozen boxes all over the place, with materials otherwise 'dead'.

This 'mining' activity will work with adults - especially if they are all using the same reader - give them the same chapter and a time limit? Let them choose their fave character if there is dialogue....and that is their word pool. Or their favourite chapter, or even number pages - whatever!

Mining in progress - YLE graded readers

My strong readers on Wednesday have been doing great work lately, and impressed me with their discovery of past tense /ed/ ending sounds...after they figured out what verbs were. We don't usually dwell on grammatical terms, but we have reached the stage when we do need to start differentiating/labelling things. The reader we have just read was a good starting point. They had colour-coded the past tense /ed/ endings red/blue/purple, according to the pronunciation. This lot are all verbs, we agreed. The current reader they are reading features irregular past tenses for the first time...handy, we just got that page in the textbook too - stroke of luck or what?!


Then we looked at 'things' eg rocket, computer...before trying to figure out what 'red', 'big' etc were - and what they went before/added detail to (erm, nouns?)

So we made three columns in our notebooks, and then had a race to find 10 of each (nouns, adjectives, and verbs - in the present tense ie transform the past tense back) from the reader. Absolutely milking the material to death, by way of speed reading, skimming, scanning, analysing, categorising - and competitive too (I've got 7 adjectives!").With a young reader title like this, you can be sure they'll get almost the same sets of words; suggestion for a thicker book would be a point for every word that your friends did not write down, encouraging them to dig into the text for the juicy (new?) words.

After all that heavy brain work (and aggressive writing!) we needed a game. Silly Sentences seemed random (to them!) but they quickly got the idea - categorising words again. The lovely thing about this game is that the different parts of speech are colour coded, and jigsawed so that that will only go in the right order. Kunpei found a pattern he liked and stuck with it (photo). Takuro won, though, as he found the other 'secret' of success which was finding words that rhymed. Toru? He was the real winner, as he decided he was only going to make sensible sentences - smart lad!

The Magic Key - Yuta helps Jim narrate

Haruka helps Jim read: Castle Adventure

The New House - graded reader on Voicethread