Can't do my homework: Part 3 of 3 - flipped class

Activity from Primary Grammar Box (CUP)

Books closed, use it to hide a pair work activity and to lean on (one in-class learner paired with the Zoomer whose screen share also 'hidden' on another monitor). Pencils at the ready - no need to spell anything (although all the target vocabulary is familiar...didn't want to defeat the object of this exercise by getting bogged down again!) but the possible issue of artistic limitations/reluctance instead?

To be honest, I didn't monitor that output. Rather, I tried to see what the students were doing to get the language out...

• glancing at the rods to 'get started' & 'load' the full utterance in their mind before starting
• glancing at the rods to double check they'd 'used' each block/word ie completed their utterance (I wanted to make sure the time phrase was included to give meaning to the past simple target structure)
• moving a rod to make sure they'd used the right word needed to add a couple of extra rods for the plural (doubled the ones in play) forms - nicely previews or flips next week's lesson
• listening to each other better (for nitty gritty bits!)

...and of course listening to their spoken out & giving as much non-verbal encouragement as possible - which was not really necessary as they got on with the task really fluently, collaboratively and effectively. And, despite the masks, pretty chuffed smiles all round. And the dark clouds have lifted.

With that, I don't think any of us are dreading the next lesson! 

What are your solutions/suggestion/reactions? Let me know @oyajimbo on't twitter :)

Appendendum: a few days later I asked my son to get his homework book out (imagine the face!). I asked him to underline the words in the structure we'd been practicing with the same colours as we'd used midweek. Penny dropped - the colours had done the trick & he could correct his own work...

Where can you buy Cuisenaire Rods? 

Can't do my homework: Part 2 of 3 - a different tack

Cuisenair Rods = colour + length 'coding'

I wanted to take the words out of the equation, but leave them in somehow. Replace them?

The Game Plan...and no, I couldn't remember exactly all the words either.

Solution...post-it notes. As a group, I asked them to write one word at a time on to a post-it (books open if needed); my online student did so into the Zoom chat. So no, not a 'spelling test' per se. Fortunately, my post-it notes were not very sticky so they needed weighing down (fan was on for a reason!).

Online? I'd opened a Google Jamboard & drawn colour lines where I wanted my student to enter text. Hard for newbies, but he's been learning on the job for a year now, and could cope with the challenge (enjoys messing about with the mouse/keyboard when I give him control, defacing things!). Problem = few colours available for the pen/type tools on Jamboard than I needed...

Unsticky post-it notes...just the excuse!

So we had the question form on the table, in a straight line, and then the answer below, so's that words 'lined up'. Putting the Cuisenaire Rods on the post-its = words were there but obsured, and could be peeped at if we needed a prompt (ie "I want to read the word")  without referring to the book. We negotiated block lengths to suit the actual words...subliminally giving each part of speech a different colour code into the bargain.

I didn't want to hide the words for my Zoomer, as he's already operating from the far end of the telescope and he has a lot fewer clues to work with - cannot pick up non-verbals etc. But, as his workspace was on another screen, my in-class gang did not realise he had an "advantage", so he became quasi-sensei & his ego was suitably enhanced.

Did it work? 

(Part 3 will be posted tomorrow)

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?!

The Secret Room - Green Story Tree #3

A hot summer's day, weary students at the end of a long week..."nothing new" to learn (cleverly arranged Jim-sensei?)

listen to ‘The Secret Room - Green Story Tree #3’ on Audioboo

Love Sock Puppet - the 30 second limit really makes us hurry up :)

PANSIG Conference abstracts

PANSIG abstracts, a set on Flickr.

Over the weekend May 21-2 my local bunch of professional colleagues, in the guise of Shinshu JALT, are hosting the PAN-SIG (Special Interest Group) Conference.

There will be no less than 140 presentations from specialists in all corners of EFL classrooms; foreign and Japanese situations and in English AND Japanese. Real time translating will be available for many presentations, and an effort has been made to concentrate Japanese presentations relevant to JHS/HS teachers.

I have had a few late nights playing with every single word of every presenters' abstract to produce something called a word cloud. Very coolly (but please don't ask how) a canny bit of software generates an image with the text you have chosen, and recognises which words are used the most frequently. The more commonly a word had been used, the larger it presents in the image.

Can you see a common theme running through the images? I hope so....but if you can't, ain't no thang: shed some cash and come the conference. Cheaper than twitter & so much more fulfilling. You do not have to be a teacher to enjoy this "teachers talking about teaching English" fest - I really wish a lot of our parents will be interested enough to come. Anyway, check out the art and make a bee-line for Shindai if you are remotely interested. I would really appreciate any sharing you'd care to do to make sure we get a great turn out as well.

Via Flickr:
What is coming to Matsumoto May 21-2? A whole lot of English teachers to talk about their niche interests, share ideas and make new professional connections. What are they going to talk about?

Wordle for extensive re-telling

I wanted to challenge my confident boys to be a lot more productive yesterday - and in the process milk their OUP Story Tree reader for all it was worth. They first attacked it, underlining new words or words which they weren't sure about pronouncing. At home they listened to the story on CD, and in class the following week told me what they'd learnt. One way I like to do this is to play the CD in class and pause it (apparently randomly!); first hand up gets to tell class what the next word is, and score a point.


They have also since done the puzzles & crossword problems etc in the accompanying workbook. Spelling is behind their reading level, but that is not a key aim; of course, I expect them to be spelling at the level we are managing phonetically in class 'proper'.

I used wordle to make a word cloud out of the entire story - it only came to a paragraph in word, and even with my typing non-skills it didn't take me long. Wordle is a few clicks of simplicity itself. I wanted to include all text - it can remove 'little words'. One mistake I made was punctuating capital letters at the beginning of sentences - I ended up with "The" as well as "the" etc. Memo to self = only capitalise names.


As we'd 'listened' through already to warm up, I then asked the lads to close their books and re-tell me the story. Umming and arring of course. A couple of key words, but nothing coherent. Of course! Very unfair to dump such a hard task on them...so when I gave them a print out of the word cloud each, they quickly recognised the vocab & started nodding appreciatively. They still could not put the story back together 'in their heads'; my book open with text covered, and off we went. I'd say they could produce 60% of the text in pretty good word order. We all knew it wasn't quite right though, and they were keen to correct themselves. Key part of the exercise!


I let them check in their own books - on the floor in the corner of the room. Naturally, they could memorise a sentence & recite it at the table. To control the blurt, they were asked to point out the words (on their clouds) as they went. Slowed down fluency? In a way, yes. Made them focus on the word order proper? Yep! Did they feel really pumped up about being able to re-tell the story? Absolutely!


The next tool I want to try out is websequitur - have the lads rebuild the next book (The Magic Key). Cooperatively or competitively though?

Happy graded readers

I was glad to be able to put a couple of ideas from yesterday into effect immediately in my classroom today! New classes and a new graded readers gave us all the chance to talk about the books we were going to read - predicting the genres, storylines etc. Some group work so we could all see what the titles are for the next 20 weeks (each class will read one title a month), and pair work describing what the plot might be. Every time we changed partners, we had less time to get our message over - led to much speedier descriptions and less concern about making mistakes. Lovely!

I also showed them that, given the books are at a level they can manage, they ought to be able to read them relatively quickly. Of course, they didn't believe me. Work it out for yourself. Say you have 7,000 words in a book, and you know most of them, even a slowish reader should be able to read at least 250 words per minute. So...really, that book you could read in your lunch hour, right?!

Of course, it doesn't work out that way, but I hope with a bit more carrot and less stick this time (I am not insisting students turn in written work to show they have comprehended the story - that is for self-study. Don't do it = missing a great opportunity to improve your reading skills. The students' reading skills - not mine!) I am looking forward to seeing a fresh crop of reactions to these readers in three/four weeks here.

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