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

Halloween party

Saturday night was the school Halloween party and teachers and students weere asked to go in fancy dress. Roberta and I went as zombies and won first prize in the teacher catagory hahahaha!! All that make up might look as though it took a lot of scrubbing to get off, but in fact, it only took a few minutes. Students were lining up to get their photo taken with Roberta hahahaha!!

Brainstorming

I’ve spent this afternoon trying to keep cool in this intense dry heat we have today in our city and also brainstorm some ideas for a conversation class about advertising for the weekend. The CCAA conversation class book already has a basic class for this subject, but like last weekend I want to increase the amount of activities to make the class last more than an hour. I have been toying with the idea of spreading this class over two weekend, one for advertising itself and the other for deconstructing adverts. The students are mainly high intermediate to MEC but I don’t want the second class to get too complicated and hard for the students to do. I receive English Teaching Forum every three months and they had an article about this and I’ll try to simplify this to use in class. The CCAA book starts off with a basic cartoon but I’ll look for some adverts online that I can download and record to pass throughout the class on the dvd player. Also I’m trying to think of a different way to ewnd the class, last weekend it was a ranking game that worked out rather well. This time I was thinking of having some envelopes containing some questions related to advertising fixed to the whiteboard in some numbered boxes that the students would choose from these to ask the other groups/students. This having the students choose from numbered areas of the board increases the student’s participation and they get a kick out of trying to guess an easy question hahahaha!! I might try to video this is possible and probably post it somewhere where only the students can see it. I’ll ask them about places for this as most of the students love posting their own photos or video online and I’m sure they’ll have some suggestions I also saw a nice lesson plan for a conversation class about making an advert by using an advert. I think this is going to be too much to do in one try, maybe I’ll spread this out and do over the rest of the semester so that the students don’t get bored doing the same thing over and over again.

This month it seems that two of my student in MEC1 have birthdays and one group asked me if they could spend some time near the end of their class to have a little birthday party. This little amount of time they asked for will not be as little as I would want hahahaha!! They are already bringing food and Roberta is going to make some hot dogs for their party. Good thing we live right near the school. I’ll try to get some photos and maybe a video of them singing ‘Happy birthday’ too. I’m saving space in my tummy by not eating anything so I can try all the goodies they are going to bring

Nearly

It’s nearly the end of the semester here, I’ll finally manange to get a little more rest   This week more or less all of the schools are on vacation now so most of the promotion work for our new school will stop for a couple of weeks while we get new leaflets printed up and wait for the schools to reopen. My students are a little late and yesterday made their unit exams with Roberta and I’ll do the oral tests on Monday before their break starts. This afternoon I will give my MEC students their final exams while I’m waiting for Roberta’s class to end. It should be relatively easy for them, its their final exam of their English course and after this they will more than likely move to other cities. I took a few photos of them to add to my Facebook account and also in my Orkut account so they could get copies of the photos for themselves. I’m not really a big fan of Orkut as it’s full of viruses and stuff and I only really use it to send messages to the students. Hopefully they’ll drop in from time to time and visit with us at either one of the schools I’m at now

Next week I’m hoping the new material for the  Cambridge school will arrive. All the children’s material should be here including the puppet that goes with the youngest levels. I think his name is Hippo or something like that and the teachers will use him to help teach class to the youngest students between 3 to 6yrs of age. I’ve never seen a puppet used in English class here so I’m very curious to see how Luiza or Roberta are going to use him in their classes   Also the Spanish material should arrive so we can look through the books. The new tee shirts for the school also started to arrive, we will give them away for the first fifty or so students that register for the new semester. They are very eyecatching, the franchiser designed them and they will be good free publicity for the school. The students from this semester were really interested in getting one of these hehehehe!! The teachers shirts we will design ourselves, there are a few places here in the city that print tee shirts and we will see what they can come up with. Hopefully we will have quite a few students starting next semester, building a language school here always takes time, unless you are the only school   Word should get around this semester and we are hoping in maybe a year that we will start to see significant numbers of students arriving. The material from Cambridge is very good and we are using their newest books so things should be fun next semester.

Trying…

I’ve been more or less playing around with stuff online for my students for over three years now. My online exercise website I started over three years ago and it has around 350-400 exercises on it based mainly around the CCAA methodology and student textbooks. I wanted to make sure that I had quite a few for the students to use as review exercises before the two exams they take each semester. I’ve also got quite a few wikis at Wikispaces now, plus one that I’m helping Roberta to make to host mainly links for exercises we created for her TN5 group. My online presence is growing hahaha!! About 18 months ago, during a teachers meeting at the school, I had tried to get some of the teachers I work with interested in making some online activities for their students that could all be hosted in my website. The result of this was that they weren’t really all that interested and nothing really came of it Now, 18 months or so later there is still really very little interest in the internet as a serious tool for teaching language in the school. The Cambridge school has a lot of online resources that exist as part of the Cambridge site and the CCAA one is just mainly for franchise promotion so I thought that the teachers would be quite interested in getting something going that would be interesting not only for the teachers but for the students too. I think that this is mainly because of two things, one is just laziness and the main reason is that here in Brasil the courses at the universities, both public and private, only teach the same old boring stuff that probably existed at the conception of the Brasilian education system. I’ve visited three universities near to our city and in all of them its exactly the same My students seem genuinely interested in all the online stuff I uploaded and I’m sure that if the other teachers tried a little that their’s would be as well. In the teachers meeting though usually they prefer to change the subject quickly to anything that isn’t related to the school :-S I decided that there is no real point to my trying to point out new stuff online to them, even when the website is actually very useful and timesaving. Such sites as Quizlet create many great exercises from a small list of vocabulary, shithot for a language teacher but it would really be a waste of time mentioning it in the teacher’s meeting Roberta says she will try thinking of something but I wouldn’t hold my breath about any ideas she has succeeding.

Classroom 2.0

I have been a member of Classroom 2.0 for a while now. It’s a website dedicated to teachers who are looking for other teachers using Web 2.0 stuff to pass on information and share new ideas. I like this site a lot. I always discover something interesting in it that gives me a lot of ideas for things to do with my students. I have been thinking about using WordPress with a few ideas I got from the Classroom20 forum to create a kinds of podcast site for one of my newest English students. My main class with him usually consists of the two of us reading a book together, first I read and then he reads so that he can listen to my pronunciation so he can correct this. The second class he has in the week is with my wife, Roberta. This class is mainly because my Brazilian Portuguese sucks and they cover all kinds of things that we don’t include in the class with me. I am toying with the idea of creating some podcasts of short stories for him to listen to, either online or to download, as well as some questions about the podcast story to see how much he understood. I have downloaded a program to use to create the mp3s, I decided on Audacity. It’s not a big download and is easy for me to use without any complicated setups, etc. I think it will be a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll expand this to use with my other students later I’m going to look again for a site to host the mp3 archives. I tried a couple but wasn’t too impressed with them hahaha!! I’ll have a look during the week to see what I can find.