Conversation class – Survivors

The conversation class today was about Survivors and travel. I was going to use the CCAA conversation book for the class today but I’m a little tired of using it so I switched to a book I got from SBS called ‘Teamworking’ and found a nice activity about survivors of a crash on a desert island. The length of time for the activity was about an hour so I only needed to create an intro that would last about 15 minutes to fill the time slot completely. I found a nice ranking game in Penny Ur’s ‘Discussions that work’ book that fitted in just nicely.

Intro - Write a list of methods of transport on the whiteboard: ship/yacht/plane/bus/car/truck/helicopter/ hovercraft. The students have to rank the methods according to a certain criteria. The book gives the following that can be used: speedy/comfortable/heavy/noisy/expensive and useful. After to get the students to discuss why they chose the methods according to their lists.

Main activity – This came from the SBS books photocopiable pages. There were three pages that had to be copied, with enough for as many pairs or groups in the class. One page contains the first page that the students see as well as some questions for group discussion that can be cut up according to the level of the conversation group. The second two pages contain task cards that need to be cut up, there are 32 altogether. These the teacher gives out as the students ask for them. The activity has a lead in exercise to warm up the students and then they move onto the first card which explains that they have been marooned on a desert island and asks them to choose three items from a list to take on their adventure with them. From the first card they then ask for other cards depending what their choices are. Some choices will result in different things happening, such as people dying, etc. This continues until either everyone has died or they are rescued. After the group discussions are handed out to see what choices were made and how they could have chosen to do things differently.

The photocopy book comes with full teachers instructions as well as a maze map so the teacher can follow along with the students and at the same time see all the possible choices that the students can make. After cutting everything up, I glued some small envelopes into my planning book so that I wouldn’t lose and task cards and could use them again next semester.

Ranking game -’Victims’

This week I was going to do  role play as part of the conversation class, but one of my students couldn’t make this class this week and asked me to do something else and put off the role play until next week. So this weeks class was about ‘Life and death’ and went down well. The CCAA conversation class books are okay to use but I always have to add a little extra onto the material to make it last the full 90 minutes of class. This weeks class was rounded off with a ranking game that I found in a teaching manual called ‘Victims.’ The main idea of the game is that the groups of students are members of a committee of city elders who have to vote which of five girls is going to be the last member of a group of young people who will be sacrificed to the Minotaur in order to keep the city safe for another year. This list of girls and descriptions given to the students is below:

Chloe – one of six brothers and sisters, family very influential, so children have so far escaped being sent. Chloe is very talented, has won several prizes for singing and music. Engaged to be married to rich businessman who threatens to withdraw financial support from the government is Chloe is sent.

Arete – Only child, mentally retarded but adored by parents. Occasionally violent, once attacked young child through jealously but parents have seen to it that this should not reoccur. Occupies herself with simple sewing jobs.

Charis – Orphan, rather a wild character, has lived on the streets, kept alive through charity and occasional thievery. Has recently come to live with a middle-class family, responding well to affection and teaching; shows signs of exceptional intellect.

Thalia – One of five children, but her brother was sent last year. Thalia was very close to him and wants to be sent, hoping he may still be alive, but her parents are violently opposed to her going. Very popular, an excellent athlete.

Euphro – Eldest if six brothers and sisters, Family is fairly well-off. Ugly, nobody likes her very much as she is intolerant and given to unkind gossip. Mother often ill, so Euphro spends much of her time looking after younger brothers and sisters.

There is no correct answer to this ranking game, only for the students to make their choice as a pair/group and then to justify why they chose that particular person. It’s a little grim but people can always do as the book suggested and tell the students that some Greek hero arrived and slaughtered the Minotaur to save the sacrifices from their deaths. If I get the time, I’ll do this with my MEC students as an extra activity, they love talking so this will be right up their street hahaha!!

Time

I’ve been a little busy to post here the last few days, too many things to organize and also two private students that are going to start up classes with me needing my time to get things sorted out for next week. Also I had to change my conversation class subject for this afternoon after one of my students told me she couldn’t come and asked me to move this weeks subject (role play) to the following Saturday afternoon. This weekend our class was about life and death, including a ranking game that was a littler gory, where the students had to choose one of five young girls to be sacrificed to the minotaur to save the city. I’ll post about this later in the weekend when I have a little more free time

Arrange the pictures activity

I saw this activity in a book a while back but hadn’t gotten around to preparing anything for it until this week. I’ll use it after the small holiday the students have next week. The basic idea is for the students to arrange a group of pictures taken from a cartoon or other source that have been cut into separate pictures. The instructions are as follows:

1. Make 2 copies of the same cartoon or picture set.
2. Cut one set into separate pictures and keep the other as a model.

From this point there are two different ways you can proceed.

Variation 1 (pairs)

1. Sit the pairs back to back.
2. Give a complete picture/cartoon to one student and the cut up pictures to the other. The idea is for the second student not to see the completed picture.
3. The first student describes the pictures in sequence and the second tried to build the picture by placing the parts in order. The second student can ask questions for clarification to help with the construction.
4. After the second student has completed the picture the students can discuss the story and what’s happening in the pictures.

Variation 2 (pairs/groups)

This variation only needs one set of pictures from the picture strip. Cut strip into individual picture and give one picture to each group/pair. If their are more pictures than groups/pairs then the teacher can safeguard these. Each group/pair tried to guess what the story’s about by studying the picture given to them. The group should write down their ideas. They then change pictures with the other groups and they look at this new picture and try to imagine the story based on it and the previous picture, again writing down their ideas. They keep swapping until all of the pictures have been viewed. By now, the groups should all have some idea of the story and each one presents what they think the story is about.

Finally the teacher presents the pictures in order and tells the story, including pictures not given to groups. To spice up a little the teacher can keep the final one hidden to see what the students guess the ending is before showing it.

I really liked the idea of this activity and my advanced/MEC students are all very creative and I’ll try to fit this in their schedules. For the conversation classes this one will definitely be in their schedule too. Sometimes I like trying out these conversation activities with my smaller groups first so i can see what needs changing and how the timing works for each part of the activity.

Prepping

Although the title says I’m prepping stuff, in reality I just finished I had some stuff to type up for the weekends conversation class about laws and obeying laws. It started off as just the basic CCAA conversation material but I have added a few extra activities to it to spread it though the 90 mins of class. I’ll finish off this times class with a ranking game with the students trying to decide which of a list of prisoners up for parole will be released to make room in the jail and also why that person was chosen. I got the idea from a book and changed it a little to suit my students. These ranking games always get the groups talking as they try to get to what they think will be the right answer. Of course there isn’t a right answer but I never tell them that  

Also this week is the ugly clothes day. Today was the first day but Roberta told me that not many students went all dressed up. The flip flop days were easy and required very little effort but I think students will either not dress up or just not go to class. I’ll see how many of my students will be dressed up tomorrow. If more than one is I’ll be surprised hahahaha!! I’ll try sending a few reminders in Orkut too. I think the main problem with this day was not the idea so much as the fact that most students didn’t want to travel to school dressed this way, even though i told them that it was possible to just bring their change of clothes in a bag and dress at the school. I’ll see what happens and maybe have a few pics to post over the weekend.

Another thing that came up this afternoon was the Children’s Day celebration. It was supposed to be the 3rd October but they have changed the date to just before we want to travel so we won’t be able to take part in the event. The little ones usually sleep over at the school and play games and stuff. It gets a bit chaotic but its usually a good laugh   There are enough teachers and helpers though to cover for us. The staff seem to have this idea that I’m not really all that keen of kids, even though there are five of them back in the UK hehehe!! I don’t try changing their minds about this as it allows me to get out of things that I don’t always feel like taking part in. I have the most groups and don’t always have extra time for all of the activities that they want to do and apart from that there are more teachers for children that any other age groups at the school. I’ll be thinking of them all there when we are flying off on vacation hahahahaha!!

Finally..

Finally it is time for me to sit down I have been quite busy all day long so time to make coffee put feet up and relax, or at least sit in front of the computer checking my emails and stuff hahaha!! My private student went home just to study up ready for Monday’s class, we’re going to start working on grammar for business English. I already have the material and she is going to make some photocopies for herself from my book. She is working with jewels at the moment and teaching biology. Apparently she speaks fluent French too, wasted on me though as I passed on French the moment I had the option in High school all those years ago. Nice for Roberta as she has wanted to study French for a long time, just that now she doesn’t have free time for this. Maybe at the end of the semester or the new year, who knows.

My second conversation class was about advertising. I had already prepared the material and worksheets so nothing to get stressed about. A couple of my old students came to watch today, very nice! As an extra activity for the end of the class, I had searched out some crazy adverts that people had posted in newspapers or magazines from the net and printed them off for the students to read through and discuss. Some of the ads were for things like ’second-hand tombstones’ and ‘time traveling’, etc. There are some really crazy people out there hahaha! On Monday I’ll start planning the next one, I have no idea what I’ll do yet.  Maybe something about UFO’s, etc. It depends what I have the most material prepped come Monday

1st conversation class – ‘Love’

Man, I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to get online to post anything. The first conversation class was Sat afternoon last week, the main topic was love. At CCAA they have conversation material but it only provides enough activity for 20 mins at the most so to pad it out a little I added some extra stuff. Luckily whenever SBS have a sale or book promotions Roberta and I go there so we have quite a few of the very expensive books they sell and I dug through a few of those to find some thing for conversation class. One nice activity for the start of the class was a personality quiz about romance that I ran through with the students, it wasn’t supposed to be a serious quiz and started the class with a laugh. The main CCAA conversation material was next, for most of the students this was the first time they had even heard the school had material for this and we worked first in pairs and then as a group discussion to find out what the students thought of love and how people thought love and relationships should be. The final part was a ranking game about the qualities of a husband or wife. As luck would have it, the groups just turned out to be adults in one group and teens in the other (there weren’t a lot of students for the first class because the message didn’t get out early enough the classes were starting hahaha!). This meant that after they had finished ranking the qualities from the most to least important we got to see how things were viewed differently by teenagers and adults. The qualities the groups were asked to rank were as following: tolerant, considerate, faithful, affectionate to husband/wife, affectionate to children, hard working, tidy, home-loving, good-looking, rich, thrifty, good lover, and well-educated. It wasn’t surprising that the two groups had very different ideas about what qualities a partner should have, the top five qualities for the teens were

1. good lover
2. affectionate to partner
3. faithful
4. home-loving
5. affectionate to children

The top five qualities for the adults were

1. tolerant
2. faithful
3. well-educated
4. home-loving
5. good lover

This worked out quiet well as it resulted in a discussion of how different the lists were for both groups and why they though the lists were so different Now I just have to think of what topic for this weeks class..

Dia do trote

I can’t believe how long its been since I last got the time to post here Very sad, I must try to get a bit more time organized. A new semester and the school has a new director too, things have been busy. Last week was promotional week for the school which meant the teachers visiting the local schools to drum up a few more students. The other day we visited the local public uni here n the city to talk with the letras classes. I think this visit to UEG was a bit of a waste of time though because most students in letras don’t speak a word of English and don’t want to either. For them the degree is just a way to get a public job and knowing that they can teach terrible classes and receive a government salary with all the trappings. They have changed the rules for English teachers since I’ve been in Brazil, such as, having the interview entirely in English which weeds out 99% of the bad ones. But not all public teaching jobs require this and nepotism gets a lot of cousins, brothers, etc jobs in public schools. UEG suffers from this quite a bit. One English teacher last year was given her job by some relative that already works there and her classes were so bad that the students used to email me to ask me things and to get me to help explain things to them because their teacher didn’t have enough knowledge to do it in class. Luckily for the students this teacher only lasted one semester thanks to a change of coordinators but since then the students told me they have had two more that were just as bad. It’s quite sad really that the students are so excited when they find out the have passed the public exam to study for free in the Public uni only to be so sad and depressed a year later at how bad the classes are   I tried to teach there last semester buy didn’t get back to me about this because of some documents they said they needed but some of the students there told me that this wasn’t the case. Some of the students from my wife’s class come to our house so we can help them out with their projects, etc. so at leas they get some decent support from somewhere.

As the title of my post says, this week is Dia de trote. Well, actually its from today till Sat this week. The new director came up with the idea of having the students do something funny or unusual once a month, just for fun. This week is the first time we have tried this at the school and it was decided to do something simple for the first one like wearing Havaianas to class. Most if not all people in Brazil wear some kind of flip flop so this one was easy for the students to do. I’ll take a few photos of my groups completing this task to post in Facebook and Orkut. It’ll be interesting to see what other ideas they come up with for this day

We moved house recently and in the promotion we have been advertizing conversation classes. I have been digging throught all of the boxes for the material we have for this and I came across some books that were packed and had been hidden away for quite some time. I was really pleased I found them because they have many interesting conversation activities I can do with my MEC students that require very little setting up. I’ll have a good look through them over the next few days to see what I can find to use this coming semester with my students. they are mainly teenagers and love doing different things