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

Hat making

In one of the Friday activity sessions, My students watched Alice in wonderland. It was really popular with the teens, especially the girls   As part of the activity, I asked the students to make a hat, the more original the better. The idea was that we would choose the best one and they would win a prize. They were more interested in seeing the film than making anything though hahaha!! I created a hat to wear, It was more or less based on the Mad Hatter’s hat from the movie and we found a website that gave simple, easy to follow instructions on how to make the hat from a cardboard box, including how to cover and decorate it. This was great, as its Roberta that has the creative skills when it comes to making something with handicraft, I prefer computers, especially games hahahaha!! The ink for the website and the hat is www.instructables.com and it was working the last time I checked it. The basic design of the hat is a cardboard structure. The site gave instructions with pictures on how to make this. With a bit of hot glue I came up with something that more or less resembled the picture on the site hahaha!!

The site said to cover the hat with material but I chose to use crepe paper instead as it was cheaper and if it got damaged, everything was paper and it could be dropped into the nearest recycle bin. Crepe paper wasn’t as easy to use as I originally thought, its strong but glue soaks through it very easily, resulting in it sticking to my hands instead of the hat frame. I found a quick solution to this by using a piece of flat card to smear the glue very thinly over the hat frame, this stopped the glue soaking the crepe paper and made it a lot easier to cover   I ended up with the hat below:

All that was left to do was to let everything dry and hope that it didn’t rain so I could carry it to the school. Oh, one thing I discovered about the crepe paper, once I wore the hat and it gets a little hot and sweaty, the color comes out of the paper, the result was I had a slightly green forehead hahaha!! You can see a photo of myself modeling the hat in the school auditorium 

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.

Story rebuilding activity

While giving class at Wizard, I sometimes get free time in the output classes and where as before I would create large activities to use with my groups, here I need something a little smaller to use. Almost all of the activities I have can be modified to something smaller, but there are also many activities that only require short amounts of time and preparation to work with in class. The story rebuilding activity has been in many books and sites and I like it a lot.

First of all, I needed to find a suitable text, it needs to be long enough to cut into chunks but not so long that it will take all of the available time to just do the reading part. A nice site to find texts is Breakingenglishnews, it has many short current news stories that can be easily modified and also the site provides many activities to go with each text. You only need to cut and paste the ones you want to do, and there are many to choose from   After I had chosen the text, the next part was splitting it into chunks, depending on how many students you have, you might have to make more than one copy of the text chunks and divide the class into two or three groups. I cut my text into six chunks, the size of which you can see below.

The boy, then 14, was repeatedly hit on the head with the 3kg weight. He was left unconscious and rushed to hospital. Students who witnessed the attack said Harvey’s anger seemed to give him extra power.

After dividing the text, I cut the text into strips, on strip containing a chunk of the story. As mentioned above, if you have a lot of students, you’ll need more copies of the strips. Either number or letter each strip and make yourself a copy of the text with an answer key to make it easier for you to keep on top of things once the activity starts.

To use the activity in class, Divide your students into group(s). My classes tend to be small enough to do in group, I average about ten per class. After dividing the students into pairs, etc., give each pair one of the chunks of the text, making sure that they are mixed out of sequence. Ask each pair to look at their chunk and then ask them to read out their chunks in turn. You’ll need to allow time for vocabulary questions, but if you chose a text good for their level this should be down to a minimum. After all of the chunks have been read out, ask the students to tell you what the story is about, the students can ask pairs to read their chunks again if needed. After they have settled on what the story is about, ask them to rebuild the story from the chunks, putting them into their correct sequence. Remind the students that A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 won’t give the correct answer   After they have gotten the correct sequence, read out the text in its correct form. If there is still some free time, you can ask some questions to see how much of the story the students understood or some other activity, such as a homework activity about the text.

You can use the activity I created for my students by downloading the zip file from the link HERE.

Cambridge ESOL event, Brasilia

This afternoon a group of people from our Wizard school are going to Brasilia to take part in an event that Cambridge Uni have organized. The event is for TKT and will last the whole afternoon. I love the Cambridge events, they are always in English and a lot of fun We have to make our way over to Lago Sul to go to Colégio Presbiteriano Mackenzie, I have no idea where this is,well, apart from it is somewhere near the embassy sector of the city. There is bound to be a bus that passes near it.  Although Brasilia is the capital of Brasil, they don’t really have many seminars there for ESL, so I like to try to get to them when they have them if it is possible. I’ll drag the camera with me to take some photos of the event and post here or in Facebook. I don’t think anyone from Roberta’s school are going to go, but she can join in with me and the rest of the gang

Event name – TKT – Preparing for TKT Modules 1, 2 and 3

Description – TKT is a test from Cambridge ESOL about teaching English to speakers of other languages. It aims to increase teachers’ confidence and enhance job prospects by focusing on the core teaching knowledge needed by teachers of primary, secondary or adult learners, anywhere in the world.

What happens next (part 2)

Yesterday afternoon I managed to mark time in the auditorium for a couple of my groups to try the ‘what happens next’ activity. The largest of the groups has eleven people and the auditorium easily holds this many and seeing as its not a huge room I didn’t need to shout in order to get the students to hear me. The video clips were already prepared and loaded into my pen drive, as an afterthought I decided to run up some subtitles in English for my students. I ran them off pretty quickly using “Subtitle workshop’, this program can be easily found on the Internet and works really well. The DVD player hooked up to the projector in the auditorium works with avi files and srt subtitle files and searches them all out as soon as you connect the USB to the DVD player. It was just a simple matter of browsing the USB stick to find the ones I needed for the activity and the clips played straight from the drive with no problems. The audio was a little out of sync with the video but this was out of my hands as the clip I took from the Internet and edited out was already like this. It was hardly noticeable though and none of the students noticed it   I started this activity by talking with the students about the problems teenagers had and then explained that they were going to watch a video clip with breaks in it and they would try to guess what was going to happen next at each of the breaks. I had edited the main clip into three separate pieces so that I could just play each one on it’s own. Originally, I was only going to use two clips, but the clip had a place where I could divide one more time, sort of like having two cliff hangers   I passed the first part and then asked my students to give some ideas as to what they thought was going to happen next. Their ideas were going to the toilet, escaping from his girlfriends house, breaking up with his girlfriend, etc. After getting a good range of different ideas, I passed the second part and after it had finished asked whose answer was closest to the video clip – in fact, none of the were (the guys tells his girlfriend’s parents that their daughter is having a baby by singing a song in the middle of a dinner toast). After talking about the second video clip a little, I asked the students to predict what was going to happen next. Ideas ranged from the father congratulating the kids to the girl dumping her boyfriend to the father forcing the boy to marry his now pregnant daughter. I passed the final clips and asked the students to tell me which idea was closest to the clip. None of the were close though, as the father throws his now pregnant teenage daughter out of the house. Afterwards, we rounded off the activity with a quick feedback as time was running out. I liked doing this activity a lot with my groups, teenagers are so animated and active, with a lot of ideas and enthusiasm

I uploaded the clips I used in this activity so that other people can use them, complete with the subtitles I created. If you want the whole episode you can find it at the Fox website or look online. The video files I used are very small, only a minute or so each in length. You can find them by clicking HERE

Internet crazy

I’m a member of many sites, including, Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, Google Groups, etc. Most of my students old and at Wizard are members of these sites so it makes it easy for me to add them all, once I can find them, that is   Also I have this blog here, but I am struggling to find to post to it at the moment. Every time I try to sit in front of a pc to blog, something else comes up and I end up forgetting about it for days, or weeks hahaha!! Twitter I use the most as it takes very little time for me to update and Orkut when I get an email telling me somone has posted something there. Facebook is my main social networking site, Orkut is unheard of by my friends in the UK. I like Facebook the most as it links to every other site I use and I can access them all from the facebook site. Recently a lot of my students asked me if I had a Formspring account so they could add me and post things there. I had seen the links to some of my students Formspring accounts, but had never gone to look at them. Formspring is mainly a site where you go to post questions for your friends to answer, to learn more about you. I signed up for an account so I can try getting my students to post questions there in English for me to reply to, another way for them to practice their English I hope   In Facebook, you can simply add the site and it appears in your profile so that people can just click on the tab and post questions and read replies to other question already posted there. I’ll add the links to my other accounts so that my students can easily find the links and then sit back and see what happens. Hopefully, it will turn out to be something fun to do and I’ll get to discover a little more about my students, to go with the little things they told me about the 1st class in the ‘toilet paper game’ hahahahaha!!

Online exercises

I was looking at all the stuff I created online over the last six years and although none of this stuff is really usable with my students at Wizard, Roberts can still use them with hers. The only one I can really use with my students will be the prepositions one, everything else will be from scratch. I’m still thinking about how to go around creating the new stuff. I might just have one blog or wiki and run everything from that, instead of having the amount I already have for Roberta’s students. It would make things a lot easier and I wouldn’t need so much time to jump between everything. Maybe I could get the students to edit this one more this time around too   Quizlet is definitely one that I will use and I’m not really sure what will go into it after that. I love online resources, at the other school I couldn’t get any of the other teachers into it though. I might have more success here as they talked about my homemade online resources when I handed in my CV. Maybe some of the other teachers will already have some stuff prepared as well ,that will make it easier to combine everything, will have to see what happens with regards to this.

There will be another training course this Friday. It will still be based around the book they gave us a copy of called ‘How to teach’ by Jeremy Harmer. I already started on this book. Its not so much a book telling people how to give class but instead about how to liven up and make the classes more interesting. I’ll have soon read all of the book, i love to read hahaha!! I am curious to see how the methodology training will be, especially as I can compare it to the disaster I had last year with the donkey from Rio while at the other school. From what I was told its completely different and a lot more two way instead of some jerk standing telling everyone what to do and not paying any attention to what people are saying to her with regards to improvements   Of course, you get these know it alls everywhere, I just wish they didn’t always seem to be where ever I am hahaha!!  I’ll wait and see what Friday brings, all I know for sure is that its definitely going to be fun and interesting

1st day at new school :-D

Today was my first day of giving class at Wizard, the new school I’ll work for this semester. I don’t think they even looked at my CV, they told me that my reputation was more than enough hahahaha!! I hope everything they heard was good   Training for the courses was a breeze, plus over nine years in teaching, not counting the stuff from the UK, made it relatively easy to pick it up. I had always been told that it was translation methodology but I haven’t seen all that much evidence of it, apart from the teacher using L1 with the beginners. My classes are mainly intermediate or advanced as in the other school. Today was mainly warmers and teamwork exercises that I used with my students to build a good bond before methodology started.  Four groups down and one to go   I bumped into quite a few old students from CCAA here, some of them just started their classes today too. Nice as it means that I have some people in the classes I know so makes meeting the new groups for the first time easier   Luckily i have a couple of books full of activities that I have tried out so it was easy to pick out two or three activities to use with my class. I used the following three activities:

1. Toilet Paper warmer
I Took a fresh roll  of toilet paper and concealed it in a plastic bag somewhere just out of view of the students. Once the students were all seated I asked a student to take the bag for me and show everyone what was inside it. Once they had seen the roll I told them that I wanted them to take as much toilet paper as they would use normally when they used the bathroom. This left them with either a small amount or with the enthusiastic student a handful of toilet paper.Then I asked them to count how many squares of toilet paper they had pulled from the roll. For each square I asked them to tell the rest of the group something about themselves. It’s always good fun and they got to find out a little about one another. After I asked them to put the toilet paper in the plastic bag so it can be reused.

2. ‘Just like me’ chorus game
Give the students two strips of paper and ask them to write an affirmative sentence about themselves beginning with the letter ‘I’. Collect the strips and read them out one by one. If the sentence is true for any of the students, they should call out ‘Just like me’.  For example, if the sentence says ‘I like dancing’, the students who like dancing should all chant ‘Just like me’.

3. Drawing blind
prepare two large drawings on sheets of A4 paper. They should be simple and clearly defined.

For the 1st drawing:
Ask for a volunteer and give them a marker pen. Have them face the board and inform them they cannot turn around. Ask the remaining students to give instructions on how to draw the picture, giving vocabulary when needed. After compare the two pictures.

For the 2nd drawing:
Ask for another volunteer. this time, blindfold him/her and repeat the activity as above, comparing the pictures when finished.

Afterwards, compare the two activities, seeing which they thought was easier, harder, if they felt more together as a group helping their teammates to complete the task, etc. To increase the atmosphere/anticipation, you can set a time limit for the students to complete their pictures.