What happens next exercise

Our English school has an auditorium complete with projector and I wanted to do something with my groups using this. Getting into this place isn’t always easy as there are many groups all wanting to get in there hahahaha!! I decided to play a ‘what happens next game’ with some of my groups and spent the last couple of day finding a decent sized video clip that I could divide and use with my students in order to play the game. My biggest problem was finding a show that the students don’t all regularly watch so that they wouldn’t know straight away what happened in the clip. Luckily Sky TV is full of shows and finding one wasn’t all that difficult. I chose a clip from ‘Glee’. I used MS Movie Maker to edit the clip into three pieces and because the projector here will only accept avi files, I had to use Winavi to convert the files from wma to pass them   auditorium. I was going to divide the clip only into two parts but as luck would have it the story let me divide into three parts,so I could ask the students to first predict what would happen and then for them to predict the cliffhanger for homework. I have to mark two classes in a row a little time at the end of each class in the auditorium just to do the activity but my classroom is right next to it so moving rooms quickly isn’t going to be a problem for me and my groups. The nice thing is that the projector uses usb and this saves me a lot of time and hassle as I can just drag the files on and off the hard disk and use them without having to burn them to a DVD first. The nice thing is that as well as using it with my Wizard groups, I can also use it with my conversation class students straight off our computer screen because of the large size monitor

As well as trying to get a few of these kinds of exercises prepared in advance for my students, I’m also going to take over planning the extra activities for the kids and teen students. With the kids, I get to take them to the ice cream parlor, watch movies and play games with them based around the movies, take them to the local cinema, etc. Of course, for these activities out of the school I’ll draft in some of the other guys to help me out For the older groups, it seems to be mainly activities based around movies, although I’ll see if I can get them interested in doing some other stuff too. I have many activities to fall back on from nine years of teaching as well as a set of bookshelves overloaded with books and material. Roberta is always good for coming up with new stuff to try out as well I’ll see what comes of this and post the activities I do here

Writs

I like to try to have a different topic for each conversation class I give. This weeks conversation class was about ‘writs and crazy court claims’. I found the material to base the class around in a book called ‘Newspaper articles to get teenagers talking’ and worked everything around this. All of the claims featured in the newspaper article were based in the USA. Some of the claims in the story were completely outrageous and from online I discovered that one of the claims was, in fact, an urban legend that had been floating around for quite a long time, with people changing the story a little with each telling. I got the class to try to guess which of the stories was this one Talking about the crazy things that people sue others for was a lot of fun, some of the stories, such as, suing your neighbors or a store for something that wasn’t there fault cracked up my students hahaha!! It gave them an insight to how suing people works and how people seem to target whichever person or company has the deepest pockets to get the most amount of cash possible, no matter how tenuous the connection to the case may be. Stories like people targeting a radio station for broadcasting an ad for a show where people were injured, suing a dry cleaners for millions of dollars for a pair of pants amazed them. There was also a story about this new American craze in The People. I’m debating how I can shorten this down to maybe do something with it in my classes at Wizard, although an hour doesn’t really leave me a lot of time and I shrank it quite a bit for my normal conversation class. I’ll see what can be done for it

Preparation

Although we work in a private English school with its own methodology, we also give private conversation and English classes at home. Working with a set methodology makes classes easy, even though extra planning is required to do extra activities to make sure that the classes are subtly different so that the students don’t do exactly the same things every lesson of the book. Over the nine years I have been teaching in Brazil, we have accumulated a very, very large resource center (I couldn’t think of a better word) in our house. Everything from our own websites, thousands of worksheets we have either created or picked up over the years, and enough books that the shelves on our book case are literally bending under the weight   For every class we give we can usually find something to go with it or enhance it a little. For the text interpretation classes we have enough material that we could give a different every day for weeks and still not run out hahaha!! I know a lot of teachers that don’t even own their own grammar books or dictionaries. I have no idea how they manage to give class without even these two most necessary books, well, actually I do, they used to come into my class in the middle of a lesson and ask me things., or drag me off to their classroom to explain things like word pronunciation to their students. Very sad for their students to have to see this.

Giving the private classes gives me the most amount of freedom, although I get to experiment in Wizard with worksheets, activities, etc. We use books from Cambridge to give the private classes, and these books come with a lot of ideas and games or activities spread throughout the books. The books also allow a lot of freedom as we are not really restricted by any kind of time limits and from our huge pile of resources we get to do many things, including increasing our resources from the stuff that gets created as part of lesson planning. We have a guy that comes 17km from another city only to have class with me and I like to keep things changing a little every class so that he gets to try something different either in class or for homework. The Cambridge books come complete with quizzes for each unit of the book and I use these to find where my students have any problems and then create something different to try to reinforce the class and also hoping that they will remember doing something out of the box for that reinforcement and then remember the lesson too So far,this has worked out pretty well, Roberta and I ask our students to see how they like things and we encourage them to tell us which they liked or didn’t like the most. I don’t look on anything negative as a bad thing, as this can also be discussed as part of the class, giving something else different as part of the lesson and letting the students get off their chests anything that they might not normally say. It works out really well and gives me great feedback at the same time Giving private classes really sharpens a teachers techniques

Where does the time go

I just cannot seem to find the time to get online and blog. Times flying with both the school and our private students and by the time I think to get online usually I’m at the time of the day where I need to rest up my leg and all thoughts of blogging quickly vanish hahaha!! This week was worse because both Roberta and I went down with some kind of stomach bug that laid both of us up for a couple of days, but we’re more or less back to normal now. Also Roberta is starting to work on her monograph and as the year progresses my computer time will grow shorter and shorter :-S  Couple this with the constant power failures in the city and blogging becomes a distant dream. Still I get to Twitter a lot so maybe that makes up for it hahahaha!!

This weeks training at Wizard was nice as we found out that this semester there wasn’t a single student asking to be moved to another group or complaining about their course, etc. Nice to know that none of my groups complained too   Although I had spent all the time since I arrived in Brasil working for one franchise and using their methodology, attending many courses, seminars and giving private classes using books requiring a different methodology made it pretty easy to change over to another methodology with no problems. Working for a franchise is nice, you know what you are going to do every day, even if you are going to do something a little different in the class, but, its nice to have your own students with materials completely different too. Teaching private students sharpens your classes a lot, you’re constantly thinking ahead to see what can be done differently or better. Also with private classes you get a lot more freedom to experiment with new ideas, etc. Although I have been giving conversation classes for a long, long time, sometimes people suggest things to me that I am amazed I have never thought of before hahahaha!! This semesters training course at Wizard is based around a twelve week course that revolves a lot around a Jeremy Harmer book and its a lot more fun and interesting than the usual methodology training that I repeated over and over again for the last eight years. I’m sure that they will have methodology training at this school too but nothing can be as bad as the terrible MEC training that I attended last year from the CCAA Rio head office, especially as she asked me to give the rest of the training on the second day because she hadn’t prepared anything  

Last week, Roberta and I started watching a new series on Sky called ‘Flashforward’. It passes two or three times a week so we won’t have to miss any of the show. The basic idea is that everyone in the world faints and their consciousnesses all jump forward to about six months in the future and then people try to figure out why it happened and what if anything they can do about changing the futures they have already seen. It looks like shaping up to be a great new show. Tonight the second show in the series will start at 10pm, the same time as the Oscars will start on TNT, but it won’t matter if we miss the first hour as all the good stuff is always at the end of the Oscars and it will repeat I don’t know how many times over the next few days – plus If we really want to know who wont what we can just look online I wonder if Avatar will really win best pic? I’d like to see something like District 9 win instead…

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