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?!

Silly sentences - making sense of nonsense

Mouldy banana

 We all know that making mistakes is part of the learning process when learning a new skill, learning a language is no exception. However in most cases it is extremely difficult to get Japanese students into this mind-set, the need to be coherent and not stick out as “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. Recognising the issue is always to first step to resolving it, so we focus on making a learning friendly environment where making mistakes is not frowned upon but in fact encouraged, it’s much more fun having a go and making a mistake.

Fire-fighter to the rescue

A really nice activity that encourages the use of new language is the game “Silly sentences”. The main focus here is not to reproduce or revise previous language patterns, but instead targeting syntax without the need of being barraged by a set of grammar rules. The cards are colour coded into nouns/adjectives/prepositions etc, and it’s up to the students to work out how to combine them in the correct order. The game cards also only piece together if they are in the correct order to ensure that the language being created is grammatically correct.

Don't stay in this house

So the end product is solely dependant on the student, achieved through cognitive thinking with a bit of trial and error mixed in. It’s a fun way of building confidence and exposing students to language they would not normally encounter. It’s not everyday you hear “the green scary baby ate the dinosaur”.

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?!

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!

How to milk a pirate

Another extensive reading project got a bit intensive in class today!

My lads had read/listened to the accompanying CD narration of the story for homework, and been asked to tackle some of the challenges from the workbook to get into the nitty-gritty of the story.

We played the "Ping the next word" game I described last week, and patently obvious who had paid more attention at home than the rest. Well done Takuro.
That got us refreshed with the storyline & characters, blew away the after-school cobwebs.

Vocab mining: I asked the students to find how many times they could find the word 'pirate' or 'pirates'  in the book. Not a high usage word you may very well argue (and I'd agree - Matsumoto is in the middle of a landlocked prefecture!) but it does crop up with persistent regularity in C.ESOL Young Learners exams...good to know?! And it was a new word for them - 'say' it when you see it. Which worked out at thirteen times each. A drill, perchance?

Grammar decoding: I asked students to underline all the action words they could find with an 's' on the end with a blue pencil (no special significance with the colour!). Pirates? No. Looks? Yes. Says? Yes. Quickly figure out what is a verb and what is not ("Can you pirate?"). Next, we looked together for action words without an 's' on the end & underlined them in another colour (red, as you ask). Similar number, often the same word. How does that work then? Good suggestions (in Japanese was OK - I only know the right words so all the other ideas get a frown!) until we narrowed it down to the word or words before the verb. Aha. The he/she/it thing.

Stick your tongue out & colour it: Finding voiced & unvoiced /th/ sounds (as a review - we have discovered this frothy pair of sounds in our phonics work lately). I HATE katakana and the myriad bad habits it insists Japanese learners are strangled with (there are no /th/ phonemes). Students tasked to find every /th/ sound and circle them either pink (unvoiced) or orange (voiced). Again, say the sounds to check them - 'imaginary' sounds in your head have no voice/teeth/tongue or lips involved do they? And ever so hard to monitor. Altogether, 46 'the/they/them' and a slippery single 'thank'. A lot of practice and a penny dropping about just how frequent this sound occurs!

Colour coded grammar - Cuisenaire Rods

Ever since IH filled my head to bursting point in Hastings on my Cert. TEFL course oh so many moons ago, I have failed to exploit my Cuisenaire Rods properly.



I had to use my very ex-girlfriend's connections in Sheffield to source a decent set made of wood; it seems in England if you are not a 'real' teacher you can't buy 'real teachers' stuff.

I wanted to colour code words for my girls this evening, because they've been getting a bit confused lately using their ~ing endings (actually not the endings but the "be" part). I really wanted to avoid L1.I found the exercise invaluable. In pairs, I asked my girls to represent each word (from the 'grammar model' in their books) with a particular rod - coloured ones help a lot, as length alone can mis-represent the importance or length of words.


We'd "done" the book work. Homework looked OK too. I found through this that they were not actually aware of what they were doing; inverting subject & "be". Nor that the subject & verb had to be consistent.

In vivid colour, the pattern became obvious: I did not want to explain (nor could I) in Japanese. Watching them work together (important - creates a dialogue you can monitor, even if they use L1, because they have to 'label' the blocks.

Graphically, my girls saw they were doing two things "wrong". First, they were using /'s/ twice, and then that they were ignoring the subject & just using "is" all the time.
Tasking them back to their books, pointing & showing I was not 'happy' yet, they really targeted the grammar (their choice!) and ended up teaching each other what their varied colours/lengths of rod represented.



Books closed, "read your rods". This the fine tuning, & group check stage. There's a tendency for this to happen in L1, but if you can't monitor confidently, insist on English. Of course, a great class would want to do this in English first anyway.
From this I realised my girls had the same problem I did at school; I didn't understand the (grammatical) words being used (in either language). Colour coding took care of that: not meaning but order - not rule but consistent pattern.
In our case:
Q: purple'white red green light-green
A: red'white brown light-green
Translated =
Q: What's he doing?
A: He's eating.
Loved the way this task migrated from book to table, heads down to heads up, mystery to accuracy. An internal struggle with 'abstract' grammar, to a co-operative vocalisation of "this is what I have figured out so far" dialogue (easier to monitor!)

This is analog digital. When the lights go out, we will still have twigs, right?

Subliminal Grammar - Story Tree exploited

I love OUP's Story Tree graded reader series for a lot of reasons, as I have mentioned before here.
My class of boys on Tuesday were thinking a story about feeding dolphins was a bit naff, so I asked them to find a few words in their reader that were 'new' for them, such as up, down, through...and asked them to tell each other what they figured they meant - encouraging them to look back at where they found the words and to think about what was happening in the pictures (eg naff dolphin jumping through naff hoop!). I asked them to underline each time they could find these words; then we wrote them on the inside rear cover with a simple drawing to indicate the direction of movement (and no, I don't think they want to be blinded with a word like 'preposition' just yet!)

Next, we highlighted words like big, wet...same process but asking them "What is big/wet?" etc. Didn't take them too long to realise what these words were doing ie describing something. Could they think of any opposites? "Are you wet/big?" etc!


Finally, we searched for 'doing' words (I had to cheat and explain a bit in L1 - my attempt to gesture fell flat and time was short) like jump, give, take...their TPR was much better than mine!



End result I think was a 'naff' book  suddenly full of cool words they could readily apply to things they see and do. Acting their way out of class jumping, being big, and going through the door!