If you are reading this post will mean that our daughter Neus was born! For this reason, I won't be able to publish posts over the next few weeks. Thank you for understanding!
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
I'm Lost! Ideas to Organize Papers and Other Stuff
Keeping a good order in class is essential to having a good atmosphere. Sometimes, we have papers without names or out of their place and we don't know what to do with them. To help you to put all this stuff in order I would like to share with you three useful ideas. Places to keep all those papers that don't have names or to find previous worksheets from the days when students couldn't come to class.
1. Papers without name.
Usually, our students forget to write their name on their worksheets or exams. We can have a place where we can leave these papers and students can check if the papers belong to them. The idea is very simple, you just need a piece of wood and some clothespins stuck on it. Finally, you can decorate it with shiny colours.
2. Students who couldn't attend class.
We have to remember to hand out all the photocopies we gave to the rest of the class that day to those students who were absent during certain days of the week and sometimes is not easy to remember who is missing what. For this reason, it's a good idea to have a box like this, where students can find all the worksheets they missed during their absence. Having one folder for each day of the week will help students to find their papers.
3. A drop box.
An other excellent idea is to place a box where you, your students or even parents can drop stuff that needs to be organized or reviewed later. It can be used as a mail box where students can leave signed papers, parents' permissions, money for school trips, etc. You can adapt it to your needs!
How do you organize these papers, photocopies or worksheets that don't have names, that couldn't be handed out to a student or stuff that has to be organized or reviewed later?
Do you have any other ideas of how to organize them?
Monday, November 4, 2013
Who Was Guy Fawkes? - Bonfire Night
On the 5th of November Guy Fawkes Night is celebrated mainly in Britain. With this festivity, the British remember that King James I survived an assassination attempt. A group of people wanted to blow up the parliament and the main guardian of the gunpowder, called Guy Fawkes, was arrested. In order to remember this day, people build large bonfires, light fireworks and burn figures of Guy Fawkes.
Today, I would like to share with you this video that I found on Youtube in which the story of Guy Fawkes is explained in a very simple way. We can explain the story of Guy Fawkes to our students using this video.
English teachers usually teach the same festivals in class such as Halloween, Christmas and Easter, but I think that is very important to introduce other less commonly heard of festivals like this one.
What's your opinion on this subject? Which festivals do you typically teach? Do you often teach other less known festivals? If so, what other festivals do you include in your lessons?
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Crafty Halloween!
Another idea to celebrate Halloween in class could be to doing new Halloween themed crafts. As well as doing recipes in class, crafts are a good way to use the English language in a context and for a purpose. This will help students to realize that the language they are learning is important to understand other people.
Source: Unknown
When doing crafts in class, I always like to use materials that can be easily recycled and reused. For this reason, I have classified these crafts depending on what kind of material you will need to use to create them. Let's get started!
1. Using Paper Plates.
In almost every house, we can find leftover paper plates from birthdays or parties. Paper plates can be a good material to do easy crafts such as the following:
SCARY GHOSTS
Source: http://spoonful.com/
We can make scary ghosts to decorate our classrooms just by drawing a scary face and adding some extra details with paper like hands.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Easy and Scary Recipes for Halloween
In just a few weeks, one of the most important festivities from English Speaking Countries will be celebrated. Halloween is on the 31st of October! As we know, festivals are a great way to introduce sociocultural aspects from the English Speaking Countries. In this blog, I would like to share with you some ideas to bring Halloween into your classrooms and to help you to adapt and introduce some activities to the necessities of your students. For this reason, I'm going to try to post a variety of Halloween themed posts during this month.
Source: http://www.illoz.com/
To start, I would like to share with you some spooky and easy recipes to make with children in class. Although cooking in class could be a little messy, we can have a great time, it can be very motivating for our students and they can learn a lot from different aspects of this activity, such as following instructions, ingredients, kitchen tools...
Recipe 1. Scary Bananas and Little Pumpkins.
Source: http://excellent-eats.com/
In all kind of parties, there are usually lots of sweet and not very many healthy food choices. But, as you can see in this picture, we can provide healthy and scary treats for our kids. We can make some scary ghosts using bananas and chocolate chips. As well, we can turn clementines into pumpkins just peeling them and adding some stems.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Activities to help students to tell stories
Being able to use the language students are learning is one of the most important and satisfactory aspects of learning a foreign language. Pupils need to notice that what they are learning has sense and a purpose.
For this reason, teachers have to provide activities in class in which students can use the language they are learning in a meaningful way. At the beginning and especially with not so proficient students we will use appealing and guided activities that will help students to become confident using the language they are learning and telling stories can be a great way to do this.
The following activities are just an example of the activities that we can use in class. They are very engaging for our students and could be used in different ways.
- Through these activities we can get our students involved in the creation of the material that we use in class. This could be a good way of motivating our students and involving them in the activities from the beginning.
- Students can carry out oral or written activities to practice both oral or writing skills.
- These activities allow our students to work in groups, in pairs or even individually. In this way, we can adapt the activity to the necessities of the moment: evaluating our students oral or written competence, promoting oral or written skills, playing just for fun...
Activity 1. Telling stories using pictures drawn on stones.
source: http://www.baballa.com/
Students draw pictures on stones, pieces of cardboard or even shells they find on the beach and use them to invent stories.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Ideas for the first week - Getting to know each other
When the students come back to school, teachers and students have the challenge of getting to know each other. This could be a very complicated activity especially for those teachers, such as English teachers, who the spend very few hours with each class.
Although during this post we are going to see some examples of activities for the different levels (preschool and 1st, 2nd and 3rd cycles), we are going to start with an activity to help teachers to introduce themselves to their students.
TEACHER AUTOBIOGRAPHY BIG BOOK
First of all, it could be interesting and very motivating for students to meet their teacher. You can create a big book with different information you want your students to know like:
- Childhood.
- Family.
- Pets.
- Sports you practice or hobbies.
- Favourite books.
- Other interesting or important aspects.
- Etc.
With this activity, the teacher will be an example for students and s/he will review examples of sentences and basic structures. After that, the teacher can ask students to create their own autobiography books.
3rd Cycle - TRUE OR FALSE STATEMENTS.
After the teacher's introduction you can prepare a follow up activity that could be great especially for the 5th and 6th Graders. In this activity, students have to write true or false depending if the written sentences about the teacher are right or wrong. After that, we can ask our students to write right or wrong sentences to do the same activities with their classmates, in pairs or in small groups.
*This activity can be adapted for younger students with simple sentences or reading the sentences aloud for them.
2nd Cycle - INTERVIEWING EACH OTHER.
Source: http://www.petitelemon.com/
In the 2nd cycle students are supposed to be a little bit more autonomous, especially with oral skills. That's why interviewing their classmates can be a good way to practice basic personal questions and answers. They can ask oral questions and write down their classmate's answers. In order to help your students, you can display a poster with examples of the different structures.
1st Cycle - FILL IN THE BLANKS.
Source: http://pamhyer.blogspot.com.es/ and Readable Creations (€!).
Our first graders are not supposed to know how to read and write in English because they are still learning to do it in their mother tongue. For this reason, we should start teaching personal information sentences orally. Once they understand these sentences, we can ask them to fill in some worksheets with some basic information in order to consolidate these structures. In any case, they will write whole sentences. The writing task should be very guided and the teacher will help the students most of the time.
Preschool - MY PORTRAIT
Our preschool students aren't able to write or to express themselves, especially in English. For this reason, you can ask them to draw a self-portrait and to write their name below. We can find out a lot of our students personalities through drawing.
WHAT CAN WE DO WITH OUR 'GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER' TASKS?
Usually, when we finish our tasks we usually put them in a folder and we forget them. When we carry out a task it's important to do it with a purpose because in this way, students will feel that they have a reason to do it and not just because the teacher says it.
1. DISPLAYING OUR DESCRIPTION ON THE WALL
If we display the description on the wall, we allow our students to have a look at them when they want and in this way they review the sentences they learnt and they practice reading at the same time. A good activity for fast finishers could be to review all this structures with the help of the descriptions and they can do it in pairs or in small groups.
If we hang them in the corridor, we will allow other students, teachers and parents to see what our students did.
2. CREATING MINI BOOKS.
Creating mini books with personal information can be an attractive way to compile the important structures they need to express themselves. It's also a good idea to display them in the classroom so they can be close enough to be reached by students if they need them.
These have been just a few examples of activities for the first week.
What kind of activities do you use to get to know your students?
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