Flipping word lists; young learners & Wordwall

Not a touch screen, but...

 My favourite page of any graded reader is the glossary, which in any good YL book is presented as a picture dictionary. These words are obviously important in a particular book for better comprehension, but might not be as high frequency as to pop up throughout a series regularly. Readers don't have to learn these words of course, but it certainly helps to be familiar with them/know where to look if they get 'stuck'!

Personally, I love to gamify such sets of vocabulary using wordwall, which has the easy option of adding any set to a Google classroom as a link or an assignment. We try to share everything we create at Luna as well...have a look & rate our stuff?!

YL blended class

Wordwall is a great way to flip a class/reader. Frontload all the 'hard learning' with a fun game or two (one set = 5 different ways (or more) to enjoy your creation without having to do any more creating at all (bingo busy teachers!)...if you have a PC screen for a class...collaborate, or take turns - whatever works for a particular class. 

And this can work for you with online learners - give a zoomer control of your mouse, and make the other students their 'helper' - warning, this can get noisy! Or the other way around, if your zoomer is limited by screen (tablet or mum's phone) then have them direct buddies with an open book, and have your in-class gang put books away. Put the team on the leaderboard...really does generate the need to go home & be the champion before next class :)

You'll notice, we haven't even started reading the book yet - but we want to now!

Lazy teacher! Directing traffic :)

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!

Speed reading

This is a game I first saw Aileen Scouler play many moons ago, as a way to get her kids to respond a bit more quickly. Very simple, nicely competitive,


and rewards the careful listener/accurate reader as much as the swift of reflex.

Simply, the teacher reads (or plays the CD) of a book. We love our OUP Story Tree series at Luna. Whenever you pause, whoever thinks they can read the next word, dings a bell or something, and has a go. One point if they are 'close enough' for you - shake your head if someone else should try.

Obviously the teacher can be as soft or as picky as they want to be. Personally, I like to be a bit picky after children have listened to the story (at home, for homework). Immediately shows who has been a good student....and teacher can pick on the 'new' words or the oft tricky ones.

With a new book, the opposite works nicely; pause at known words, and children will be happy not to be challenged on the unknown ones - but be keenly motivated to listen up for pronunciation...good grades readers have a healthy habit of recycling words, don't they?!

So, lovely little task to get readers focused, and a nice incidental way for teacher to target vocab. Thanks Aileen!


On the hoof - best of British!