Extra activities book

I love giving extra activities to my students when I have the time. In all the time I have been teaching in Brasil, I have amassed quite a collection of books, printouts, worksheets, games, activities, etc. It is more or less impossible for me to remember all of my favorites and any new ones that I come across that I would like to try out with my groups. I have a hard cover notebook that I use to keep all of these favorites together. Originally this book was given to each of the teachers at the previous school I worked for to help them plan their lessons properly. I had been teaching the same books for more than six years and could give the classes with my eyes closed, so I decided to put the book to a better use :-D At the moment, the book is now about three quarters full and held together with a lot of sellotape hahaha!! It has envelopes and pockets glued into pages to hold the cards and photos that go with each activity. This idea never caught on with the other teachers I worked with there, but its perfect for me as I give so many classes at so many levels that any time I finish a little early or something comes up that prevents the normal less, I can just open to a page and pick something out. Most of the activities in the book I have done before, sometimes I find activities or games that I like the idea of alot, and they get written or printed and stuck onto a page that I never get to plan out first. These tend to be simple games that require only the use of the whiteboard, although others that require props such as cards I have also done straight off the bat too. I’m wondering what to do once this book is full and I have to start another one, as this one gets carried about with me to both Wizard classes and my private classes too. Still, there’s quite a few pages to fill before that happens :-D

Visiting time

Being a native speaker, I get invited to a lot of schools to give presentations, let the students interview me, play games with students, etc. I’ve been to the biggest public school here in our city quite a few times now (see pic above), it is always good for a laugh. I’ve been to one of the private schools in our city many times too, usually for the small children to interview me with pre-prepared questions and with a translator in tow. I like this contact with the younger students, although really until this semester I had very little contact with youngsters until I changed schools, this was mainly down to an outdated idea my old employer had about children’s teachers, one that they are still following. Now I am organizing Friday activities for the students at our Wizard school, with sessions for both youngsters and teens to adults. It’ll be a lot of fun, our school is well organized and they have deals with places like the local cinema, in case I would like to take the students there one day. Of course, they have to have a suitable film showing in order for me to take the youngsters there.

This week I was asked to take part in a whole afternoon of activities with the youngest students of a school in our city. It’s a school that I have visited quite a few times before. The marketing girls organized it and it’ll be good fun for the children taking part. Firstly, they will get to have contact with a native speaker from the UK, it will probably be the first time that most of them have ever met a foreigner. Secondly, the afternoon will be spent giving a sort of English class to them that will be a cut down version of the normal Wizard Tots class, complete with my little puppet helper called ´Little Wizz´ hahahaha!!! I have never given class with this material before, but the Tots teachers spent a couple of hours prepping me for this class and although I haven’t settled on a voice that I feel comfortable using for four or five hours for the puppet, everything is just about set to go. Also, they asked me to do some kind of activity with a song, there are many English songs and rhymes that can be downloaded from the internet to be burned to an audio CD. I had a chat with one of the marketing girls who is going with me to see which songs they already knew, either in English or Portuguese, so that I can prepare the song and they will have the time to learn the song before Monday arrives. Luckily, there are quite a few songs that are in both languages, some Brasilian TV presenter called “Xuxa’ recorded quite a few English songs in Portuguese. This is great for me as the children will already have familiarity with the song, even though it is in another language. From the list, we chose ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’. The main reason for this is that apart from the previously mentioned familiarity of the students, the words are simple and repeated over and over again, I only have to prepare simple vocabulary in English for our marketing team to memorize and I’ll probably do a PowerPoint for the students to use, with kids, a picture speaks a thousand words. These cut down classes will take around thirty minutes each, although I will speak some Portuguese with the students, the puppet will only speak in English – sorry ‘Wizz’, that’s what you’re getting paid for hahaha!!! I think the afternoon is going to be a lot of fun. I’m not sure if they will let me take any photos of the event, if they do I’ll post some here.

Collocations

This weekend I had an interesting discussion with some students I was giving extra class to about groups of words. They were trying to translate words for word collocations and getting nowhere with it. With some expressions and collocations it is impossible for them to do this and what they end up with with word to word translation is usually unintelligible in Portuguese. I was talking about this problem with them and about them maybe trying to learn and remember chunks of vocabulary, collocations, word groups, etc. The main problem with this is that some Brasilian teachers like translating and the students get used to it. Trying to break them of this habit is not easy. I’ve seen teachers at the university giving an entire English class in Portuguese and this is for a university diploma   I told them I would look for some ideas for them to use to help them with this problem and hit the internet as there are usually hundreds of ideas there for both students and teachers. A friend of mine, who is a teacher trainer for Cultura Inglesa, Brasilia, had posted something that looked just the business in the Teachingenglish.org website. He had posted something in the site about using ‘lexical notebooks’. It looks more or less perfect for what they need   I might try it with my students too, I will have to modify it a little to fit and firstly see if my students show any interest in trying this out. Also in the site was a couple of postings from another teacher about collocation classroom activities, I have already used some activities with my advanced students but it is always nice to have a few more to use. All three of these activities can be easily found at the teachingenglish website. I’ll definitely try out some of these activities as soon as I get the chance   They give suggestions for text analysis activities, preparation activities, speaking activities, dictionary/matching exercises, etc. As I try them out, I’ll post about them here

Chinese checkers vocabulary game

I saw a nice variation of the Chinese checkers game in the Interchange ideas book and thought that this would go down really well with all of my groups at Wizard. Although the book allows photocopies and they provide a blank model to just write vocabulary in, the model is geared towards using the phonetic alphabet and so I decided to create my own blank model based on the source from the book. This way I can pass the copy to any of the other teacher who would like to use it in their classes too   I like the idea of this game because it reduces the amount of TTT against STT to almost zero, apart from when the students need a bit of help. Students love competition and a bit of friendly rivalry will go down well too   The main idea for the game came from a book called ‘Pronunciation Game’, written by Mark Hancock, published by CUP. The Interchange 3 activity was based loosely around the activity from the book but for vocabulary instead. The idea is that the students work their way around the board according to their dice throws and using the vocabulary from the board game in sentences to win points by writing their initials or team name over the won hexagons. With three teams this activity wouldn’t use up too much classroom time and could be used as a different kind of review or just a filler. In the last week, I tried out quite a few different activities and they all went over well. Hopefully this one will down well with the students too

Pc woes

Our pc monitor is playing up. I had them come take it see what is wrong with it. Hopefully it won’t take too long to fix it, the store are usually very fast and they know all about our computer because they build it and maintain it for us.

Today my students received their books but we just did more extra activities as they need to take complete the preparation work at home before the first class can begin. Its like this for every class they have, it saves me some time apart from explaining any new vocabulary they didn’t understand at the start of the lesson, but this only takes a minute. Also the exercises that they complete as part of their coursework are only a single page. Evaluation is done continually instead of overly large exercises that take a huge amount of time to correct, especially when large piles of late exercises appear. This way the school knows exactly whats happening more or less in real time for each student and parents get a better and more accurate idea of how their kids are doing, whats happening classwise, etc.Its refreshing to have more free time, even though correcting exercises isn’t really that much hassle for me as they are in my native language. Also half of the exercise is completed in class with me, also saving both myself and my students time One wierd thing is that my old school contracted a teacher from here at the new school to work there at the same time, even though the schools are rivals and the old school is bleeding students to this one. Really strange, must be a Brazilian thing as this wouldn’t happen in the UK.

Back to todays activity, as the students write quite a few compositions, I thought we’d do something involving looking for vocabulary. We did the cat adjective game, an oldie but a goodie. It always gets the neurons firing   I had a quick evaluation during one class, not for methodology but I think to check student teacher bonding hahaha!! Mainly my groups are teenagers, my favorite levels to teach. They are always excited and ready to go. The cat game produced some interesting ideas about what adjectives could be used to describe a car   Although Roberta and I have shelves full of books, it is always worth reaching back to the older, well tried and tested materials

Crosswords

I like crosswords as a way of helping the students remember vocabulary and definitions. Sometimes I put them into vocabulary reviews to break up the monotony of doing the same kinds of reviews all of the time. I never really thought of a different way of using crosswords in the classrooms until I saw an excellent idea in a book called ‘Vocabulary Games And Activities For Teachers’. The idea was simple but something I hadn’t thought of before – instead of giving the clues for the crosswords and letting the students fill them in, get the students to give each other clues to the answers. The way it suggested to do this was to give the students crosswords that were half completed and put them in pairs to find out the other missing vocabulary from a partner who also had a half completed crossword containing the words needed. I really liked this idea and though my students would enjoy this activity a lot as well as them getting to practice more spoken English in the classroom. I didn’t really give much though as to why the book had so many example photocopies to be used in class until I decided to try to create my own using the vocabulary from my MEC lessons. The book showed thew answers written into the croswords by hand and I soon discovered the reason for this, its just easier hahahaha!! The problem is that most websites that create crosswords for free give an answer key with no numbers for the clues, my first thought was just to white out the answers on two answer sheets and photocopy for the students. This proved to be more trouble than it was worth and I resorted to printing out two crosswords and and answer key. The answer key I marked with two different colors highlighters to give me the vocabulary to divide between the two halves of the crossword and the blank crosswords for me to half complete and photocopy for my students. This way was a lot faster and produced a lot better results simpler and faster. Of course for this hand-written answers on the crossword its necessary to have neat handwriting, not that doctors scribble I’ve seen some teachers use I’m pretty sure that my students will like this exercise, later when I have more time to roam through the book I’ll see what other ideas it has in it