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!!

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

Conversation Class

They told me this evening that I will start giving conversation classes on Sat afternoons, the first class will be this Saturday. I really like giving this class, mainly the students are advanced or MEC students so I have more or less complete freedom as to what material I get to use, what activities, etc. Some of the activities I’ll do I have used before and will just modify them a little for these new students. They haven’t done them before, the modifications are rreally just so I don1t get bored giving them hahaha!! I have a lot of conversation books, from beginners up to MEC and CCAA also have their own conversation material. I used it last semester and it was okay, nice and easy to set up and use and they are based loosely around the CCAA methodology but I like doing different things so these books I’ll use maybe up to 50% of the time and my own for the rest of the time. I like using material about controversial topics as they always give a lot of feedback from students. Some topics tend to give a lost of responses where as others tend to be boring for the students, such as abortion, etc. Romance always gets a laugh, Role play is really nice too and this time I have the added bonus of our video camera to use in the classes too   I’ll probably start the first class with the toilet paper roll activity, its a great warmer and also allows the students to find out a little about one another. I take a fresh roll  of toilet paper and conceal it in a plastic bag somewhere just out of view of the students. Once they are all seated I choose and ask a student to take the bag for me and show everyone whats inside it. Once they have seen the roll I tell them that I want them to take as much toilet paper as they would use normally when they use the bathroom. This leaves them with either a small amount or with the enthusiastic student a handful of toilet paper.Then I ask them to count how many squares of toilet paper they have pulled from the roll. For each square I ask them to tell the rest of the group something about themselves. Its good fun and they get to find out a little about one another. After I ask them to put the toilet paper in the plastic bag so it can be reused. After this, the class is warmed up, happy and ready to start

Busy

I’ve been busy this week. Over the weekend we visited the farm and spent Brazilian Independence Day with Robert’s family. As we aren’t all that far from the capital we got to see the fighter jets flying over the farm all morning as part of the celebrations. The president of France was here for the commemoration too but his main reason for being here was selling arms to Brasil. I have no idea why the government here would want to spent billions on submarines when they have so many other things that this money could have been spent on. The celebrations were really only for the morning inthe capital as they had to unblock all of the roads ready for Tuesday morning for business as usual. I think next year Roberta and I will go to the capital to see the parades and stuff, in the 9 years I have been in Brasil I have never been to see this. The problem of working all of the time means that I spent very little time doing anything else, although Roberta says that now I have to cut down a little so we have more time to travel and see Brasil. Since I’ve been in Brasil I have only really traveled once to the state of Sao Paulo to visit Roberta’s grandmother. This year we will go to visit Curitiba, a lot of my friends said this is one of the best places in Brasil to visit, clean,beautiful, loves tourists and not so much violence too. I checked out the site for the city and it has a huge list of tourist places to visit, should be a lot of fun. Just have to make sure we take a lot of extra blank mini dvds for the video camera as the website lists so many place to visit and things to see and do. I don’t know how many of them we will fit into the small amount of time we will stay there hahaha!!

Also this week Roberta is giving her final classes in the pre-vestibular course at the uni here in the city. Its a free course that city hall gives here every year to try to get more people from the city to study in the uni here as more or less all people at the uni are from outside satellite cities. The first pre-vestibular course they had for free in the city was a bit of a nightmare, the English teacher was more or less incompetent and my wife knew more than she did. Now they have some better ones and students from the Letras courses also give classes as part of their course to gain credits, these classes are all monitored to make sure that the classes are good and relevant to the uni vestibular exams. These student-given lessons are better than the ones given by the regular vestibular teachers I think, because the regular teachers aren’t monitored to make sure they are actually doing anything whereas the uni students are in their final years and need to make sure their classes are up to scratch to get their credits towards their courses. Roberta’s classes are always nice, she has a knack for coming up with interesting ways to give class and to get the main points of whatever it is she is teaching across

This afternoon I’ll ty out the activity I posted about earlier in the blog. I have just to cut out the cards and then I’ll see how it goes. My MEC students are always good for testing out new creativity tasks and they love a chance to do something a little different from the normal methodology. I’ll post how it goes after class.

Another activity…

I’m browsing through the many books we have looking for another activity for my MEC students to do, they really liked the last one with the alien eye hahaha! I saw another one in the Penny Ur book I used last time that looks quite interesting and I think I’ll give this one a try. It is also an activity for conversation that requires some inventive imagination. The name of this activity is ‘Connecting Pairs.’ The main idea of the activity is to find as many connections as possible between two elements, no matter how . The book says that pictures could be used instead of words written on strips of paper, I really like this idea of using pictures. I think that I’ll put the pictures in envelopes of some kind so that the students will get to choose two of them and be more involved and have some participation in the choosing of the two elements. Also it suggests giving a time limit to hurry the students along. After they have come up with all possible connections they can think of in the time limit, the students can show the two words/pictures to the other groups and share the connections they though up. I think my teenagers will really get into this. In the ‘Men from Mars’ activity they thought up some really creative idea for what their artifacts could have been The book give a list of words to be connected and some of them are:

• a wedding and an ant
• a pen and a new-born baby
• a silkworm and an axe
• love and a rubbish dump

The vocabulary from this list would have to be changed according to the level of the group doing the activity. The book gives this as an example of how to connect the words/pictures:

Words given – shoelace/egg

Connections:

• The shoelace belongs to a man who likes eggs for breakfast.
• The shoelace came undone causing it’s owner to fall headlong into a market stall full of eggs.

I don’t know if I’ll have time to prepare and try out this activity this week.

Professor CCAA

Although I’ve been working for CCAA in Brazil since I arrived here, I have never really found a good site for teachers from this franchise. The main CCAA website is really only for franchisers and not teachers or students.  Recently though I have been really interested in a site created by a teacher called Zailda who created an excellent Google Group for CCAA teachers. It’s ran by CCAA teachers for CCAA teachers and provides a lot of support, information, files and material that other teachers have created specifically for lessons, etc. It’s free to join and helps out a lot. I mainly work with advanced or MEC students but also teach EPG and I like having a look to see what extra materials are on in the group. I like posting my own stuff there too, mainly extra activities or conversation materials. Our Spanish teachers were asking me about it and I gave them the links to go look see as I saw quite a few people posting there about Spanish materials. The site provides links to other sites of interest and hosts discussions to help teachers try to solve and problems or queries they have. I really like this site a lot, I just need to try to find a little more time to post things there

The Martians have landed

This afternoon I tried out an activity we haven’t tried before in my MEC/Advanced group. I saw the idea in a book by Penny Ur and thought my teens would like it a lot. Roberta helped me to prep a little for it too   The activity came from ‘Discussions that work’ and was called ‘Men from Mars.’ The basic idea was that the students would put themselves in the places of Martians who were coming into contact with relics for the first time from the planet Earth and trying to figure out the purpose of the objects without any reference to human civilization. I used just everyday objects for the relics and to make the activity a bit more fun and to get the students in the right frame of minds to think as aliens Roberta printed out some different colored eyes and with some help from some double-sided tape I glued them to my students foreheads to give them all an extra eye hahahaha!! This idea went down really well, so well they got photographed with their new addition The first part of the activity was that the students had to find out as much as they could from the objects only from its presence, touching them and seeing what moved, sounds, etc and writing this down. I asked them to give me their first report (I was in the role of head Martian) and after they had reported what they had discovered physically about the objects I asked them to then think of functions for each of the objects. I had to let them have a bit of creative freedom with this, which they really seemed to enjoy. After they had debated a few good ideas for the functions of the objects they gave their final report to me. We had a lot of fun with this activity, the students really got into it

Pic 1 – Myself with my student with our extra eyes

Pic 2 – The artifacts that my students worked with

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

Playing

This afternoon I have been playing with Edmodo, I signed up for it the day it went live but I haven’t really had the time to look at til properly until today. At first I was a little lost with it, not getting into it but really what i could do with it as far as my English students were concerned. Everything became clearer as soon as I created a group   I have some ideas for using it with my groups and I’ll talk with them about it next week to see if they want to give it a try. I have already spoken with my TN9 students about microblogging and I think this might just be exactly what I’m looking for with them. They liked the idea of blogging online but didn’t like the idea of anyone else try into read their postings and Edmodo looks like it’ll solve this problem for them. I’ll chat with my MEC groups about it too as well as my EPG business English group to see if they want to try it out as well. Hopefully it’ll be a lot of fun

EPG

I spent most of my day today giving three-hour classes to my MEC students. These once a week three-hour classes are because my students study all day in their high schools instead of the usual half a day in Brasil and don’t have time for the normal two ninety minute classes.  The little time I had I spent looking for materials I could use with my business English students next week. Although they are beginners they have a small amount of vocabulary and I wanted to give them some worksheets, etc. for them to look over. A quick visit to Eslprintables soon gave me quite a pile of sheets full of vocabulary. I think these guys will really like them   I have also been trying to find some beginner stuff related to agronomy, I have some fruit and veg charts and wanted some others to go along with them. Over the weekend I’ll try to find some other stuff. There are only two of them in the class as their factory isn’t built yet and they are just here for Research and Development and Tech Sales but they are really enthusiastic about their course   They told me that they really like this studying with a native speaker hehehehe!! It’s nice when I get told this but for me if they do well in their exams and get good grades then I really feel satisfied.

Also over the weekend I’ll have a good look at Edmodo. I have registered but haven’t really had the time to have a good look and play with it. I’ve been trying to think about ways I could use it with my students. I’ll look in the forums to see what ideas others are having to see if it inspires me too. Most of my students have net at home and so the only real problem I have is getting them to stay out of sites like Orkut long enough to use the web for something more constructive hahaha!! I’ll see what I can come up with and maybe ask a few of my MEC students to see how they feel about trying it out as well as giving me some ideas as to how it can be used to help them with their courses.