Jim's awayday in Tokyo - challenging examiners

Limited thinking time for Speaking Examiners to consider lexical resource components (words!) into CEFR bands...if only there were a website for that? https://lnkd.in/gH_AYdaQ

Speaking Examiners vs CEFR on Wordwall

Interesting disagreement about 'brass' - common in Japan as it is a 'club activity' in JHS/HS (brass band)...and in Yorkshire our number one obsession (money!), and my age group who loved The Pretenders/Chrissie Hynde! High end phrasal verb 'brassed off', idiom 'brass neck', or 'top brass'.

Here's the link https://lnkd.in/gn5efxzT - if you can beat the high score & live in Japan/teach English, get in touch about joining the SE team ;)

Thank you to Chris & the JP040 SE team for your patience with my attempts to spice up/gamify certification & re-invent the assessment wheel. 

A joined up lesson - making the most of students' flashcards

Making a learning record with flashcards

I'm a firm believer of doing more with less - and a massive fan of good text books. Students need something familiar in the hands/bags, a structure they can grab onto and a bit of a routine they can enjoy diverting from...not glued to turning the next page at all, but able to thumb back through recognisable patterns, structres, chunks & lexical sets. And then have the confidence to be able to close the book, with learning internalised, push their English skills into deeper water with friends to help & to challenge.

Oxford Phonics World textbooks have a lovely set of flashcards tucked away at the back, which are a great resource to expand learning; introduce or review words (in this case CVC patterns), make sets or mix everything up! 

• Teacher tip = have each student mark each of their cards with their own favourite colour (important these are different, so you can unmix easily when you play games etc) before cutting them out. And give each student a ziplock bag with their name on, to prevent losses!

Here we went at 16 recently studied words (shoert i and e sounds). Quiet time to cut carefully = also time to recall the pictures/sounds (which are on the reverse side). Many ways to review at this stage - teacher-led or students challenging each other etc. 

Matching & categorising: Wordwall

There's a 'blank' picture dictionary at the back of the classbook, which I love, because the artwork is the same, but it is in alphabetical order (not by unit)...a subliminal dictionary skill implanted! My approach with strong students = take a card, find it in the picture dictionary, and 'do your best' spelling it (after you've sounded it out) logically. Then check on the back & high fives, noticing a consistent pattern with the middle vowel sound/spelling. Students can do this together & correct/reinforce/referee each other (including comments on letter writing/legibility!) or competitively. Either way, teacher is passive but actively monitoring output carefully & encouraging constantly :)

Using wordwall as a follow up - I love this as there are so many different formats of game you can select per set of words (in this case). The thinking bit = different images, but clearly the same item. Creating these sets, you can add audio - male/female voice, lots of dialects to chose from. Be careful that you use a consistent sound that you want your students to model/mimic (US, Kiwi or Scottish ones that bend vowel sound? Or consonant sounds that disappear into glottal stops?!). You can have wordwall 'pronounce' all your cards, both sides, or just the one. Or none. Think about what you want your learners to do!

Ten little fingers - maximizing wordwall

Wordwall keyboard skills

When half the class is away, the rest of us will play! 

Rather than push ahead and lose classmates, we circled the wagons and consolidated together :)

Luna's own brand on Wordwall is a dedicated series of materials per text book/readers that our students enjoy enormously; reusing the vocabulary in slightly different contexts/different images...pause for thought, reasons for openning our books & checking each others' spelling...any and every which way to recycle, drill, and thrill!

To polish off our fun, we played a Detective Game about a monster - arms, legs & ears all a bit strange! 

Monster time - Study Cat

Smashing phonics on a desktop!

 You got the idea straight away...

You know your letter sounds, and your homework was great...letter writing is spot on and your pronunciation is just right. But the other student in the class is absent today & I really do NOT want to move on until they can also get the input to proceed. So instead of doing this at home (which is tough, because you need a parent to help you on a PC (or use their device & find the link from Google Classroom)...lets have some fun in-class, so you can read/spell/pronounce all the words you know, set a high score & gain confidence with not only your English, but peripheral tech skills too!

Check out this task (and you can choose various ways to play & also use a number of print options too) as a review 'game' for CVC words with central /e/ from Oxford Phonics World 2. Piece of cake to make (but no need, I aleady created stuff for all chapters for the first three levels!) and many ways to implement one-to-one, group work, books open or closed, asynchronous, in class or at home!

Milking a glossary with Wordwall

Making the most out of even the simplest graded readers!

Familiar vocabulary recycled in any good graded reader series, but the secret is to make sure students can actually read and spell the words, use the vocabulary flexibly (not just recognise a particular picture & blurt it)!

We love using the various applications/games that wordwall offers, with the added twist of PC skils (mouse/keyboard), letter recognition (upper/lower case) & QWERTY layout (not a linear ABC from the poster on the wall). Have a go yourself here, and consider all the ways your learners can recycle, drill, revise (you know, the deadly sins of teacher talk!) both at home, or in the classroom when a buddy is absent.

A global perspective with young adult learners...

A recent topic with one of my classes was where they get their news from. The responses were predictably depressing & illustrated an almost non-existent exposure to anything & anywhere outside their algorythms on Youtube/school club/Spotify/Instagram. None of them had apparently EVER read a newspaper.

Guardian reader

I recently restarted my subscription the the Guardian Weekly...which I used to read pre-internet/smart phone days. Now a magazine & in colour, the quality of the writing remains excellent, balanced and thoughtful.

I am trying to get my daughter & high school students interested in reading it - but it is a bit daunting in terms of length and depth. The items are recent and varied, from headlines to opinion pieces; book & film reviews, recipes, and other looks at 'culture'...there's almost no sport and the position wrt conflict/politics/religion etc is factual & unbiased.

The pages that I've used with my student body = the Global Report. This 'Top 20" if you like, of news items from around the world takes my learners to all kinds of places they've never considered & news issues they're completely unaware of. I really want to trigger interest in the wider world, a wider horizon for my young adults to at least be aware of, if not interested and want to find out more - even if that's just looking for a country on the map.

I've gamified the 4 pages using Wordwall, making a reading comprehension challenge. Students match a short headline (mine) to wherever in the world the news item is from (headlined in the magazine). I've tried to paraphrase using synonyms for unfamiliar/unknown vocabulary, and asked students so far to work together. 

Due to copyright, I can't share the pages from the magazine, but I hope you'll get the idea, and maybe even get a subscription for your school/home?

Here's the quiz for Nov 9: https://wordwall.net/resource/82519867

Here's the quiz for Nov 15: https://wordwall.net/resource/83219932

Here's the quiz for Nov 22: https://wordwall.net/resource/83257721

Here's a sample for Nov 29:

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 :)

Talking about chores - YLE speaking activity

Something to play with for the weekend!

Our teachers have been using Wordwall quite a lot lately, as it's provides a superbly flexible collection of easily created games/quizzes/activities. These can be played in class collaboratively, or at home...or together online - WIN WIN WIN!

This version from a class today, talking about chores. I wanted my students to get their heads up and 'fill in the blanks' ie stop mundanely reading with flat/non-existent intonation, and frequently not getting to the end of a question 'in one go'.

What do you think?

https://wordwall.net/resource/4086244