Finger bobs

When you have one class coming in after the last with very little time in between, it is important to have your day thought through. Doing anything in the messy department of arty and crafty certainly needs thinking about carefully - if it can go wrong, it will!

Children are enthusiastic mess-makers, as I'm sure any parent/teacher will already know. Give them 10 tubes of colour paint, and you have the recipe for disaster on your hands - literally. But, today I wanted to see if we could be semi-messy and still keep on track. We were doing an activity that I had not thought of before, and one I will certainly be using again, namely finger-painting. A decent dollop of colour on one finger tip, and make a nice smudge. Repeat until you have sets of ten worryingly colourful & wet fingers.

Instructions here are important - "keep your hands up and in front of your face - do NOT touch anything! Now go and wash your hands, slowly!" Also important that teacher is not tempted to join in (you'll be unable to do anything 'sensible'). Our aim was to put a bit of life into our verbs, by making stick drawings around our fingerprints to show eg "I'm running" or "I'm drinking" with a speech bubble. I find a lot of my students need a line to place their letters on, and poorer writers need two more parallel lines to make sure they get the different heights of letters right (Japanese characters are all the same size).

Another important point I realised here is to write the phrase first, then wrap your bubble around it, otherwise you get clumped up letters/all kinds of confusion squeezing into an inappropriate shape/space. My Japanese students 'naturally' switch to writing down the page vertically if they have to, which is something I want to avoid.

So we have creative work reinforcing a 'physical dictionary' of movement, in colour and 'my' art with a bit of book work (finding the right words, copying the letters correctly)....students clearly had a good time, and with luck a bit more than usual went in :)

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?

dictadraw - art direction

I had an interesting lesson yesterday with one of my classes practicing their use of prepositions and the present continuous tense to describe a picture or scene. Perception is an important part of the whole process as the artists' partners had to look at a picture and describe it for their partner (who couldn't see it). The students could only draw what they were told - so it really was not a test of 'art' or drawing skills!

The three pictures on the left are based on exactly the same picture, so you can compare and contrast the details - where is the glass? What is the man doing? Is he thin? Likewise, the three pictures on the right were also based on the same picture.

The key to describing a scene is getting the main, key points described simply, and naming them/establishing their role in the middle of the picture. After the skeleton has been set, the details can be added easily in relation to the base and each other, or compared/contrasted with them.

This was a lot of fun, so thanks artists and describers for your hard work and pictures.