viernes, 30 de noviembre de 2012

Games and songs: A good way to motivate students

From my point of view, using games and songs in an ESL context is a good way to catch the attention of our students and make them want to learn more.

As a teacher in an academy of English, I realized that the best way to learn, motivate and make children protagonists and participants in their learning is using games and songs.

Songs help children remember what they have learned and develop meaningful memory. It is also an activity that students enjoy.

Games get the student interested in what they are learning. They also learn to work cooperatively.

Now, I want to record here some games for children that can be adapted for any level and content:

-         Find a partner with the same card à Students take a card and read it. They mustn’t show it to anybody. They have to walk around the class and find a partner with the same card.

-         Answer the telephone à Children pick up a piece of paper and write their telephone number and their name. The teacher collects the pieces of paper and chooses one of them. Then, he/she pretends he/she is phoning one of the students. The student whose number has been chosen must answer the phone call. (Hi. This is Pablo…).

-         Simon says à The children should follow the instructions the teacher says. The teacher says “Simon says…” and then the pupils do what the teacher asks. However, if the teacher doesn’t mention the words “Simon says” the students shouldn’t do anything. The child that follows this last instruction loses.

-         What’s missing? à The teacher draws some objects on the blackboard. One student goes out of the class. Then, another student rubs one object out. The other child comes into the class and has to guess which object is missing from the blackboard.

-         Guess what’s in the bag à Students try to guess what is in the bag, based on the descriptive language used by their classmates.

-         Bingo à It is a gambling game, played with several students, in which numbers selected at random are called out and the players cover the numbers on their individual cards. The first to cover a given arrangement of numbers is the winner. Numbers is the common topic, but it can be another one.

-         Memory à Match card pairs. Cards can be of different topics.

-         Hangman à The word to guess is represented by a row of dashes, giving the number of letters and category of the word. If the guessing player suggests a letter which occurs in the word, the other player writes it in all its correct positions. If the suggested letter does not occur in the word, the other player draws one element of the hangman diagram as a tally mark. The game is over when the guessing player completes the word, or guesses the whole word correctly; or when the other player completes the diagram.

-         Pictionary à The team chooses one person to begin drawing; this position rotates with each word. The drawer chooses a card and tries to draw pictures which suggest the word printed on the card. The pictures cannot contain any numbers or letters. The teammates try to guess the word the drawing is intended to represent.

-         Telephone à One person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group.

-         Mimic à Imitate some actions, objects, animals… using only your body. You cannot talk and make noises.

sábado, 24 de noviembre de 2012

Meeting individual needs

The article “Meeting individual needs with young learners”, written by Peter Westwood and Wendy Arnold, talk about differentiation defined as “an adaptive approach to teaching that is responsive to individual differences among learners”.

I want to focus on “approaches to differentiation” point. They show us eight strategies that teachers could use in their classrooms to try to get the individual differences of each student. I am going to comment the strategies that I found more interesting.

The first one is working in whole-group activities. This means that students can participate in a shared experience practical work. All children are active agents in the work and contribute with the best of their individual talents.

The second one is small-group activities. The aim of this strategy is to provide opportunities for children to work in a smaller group, where they can feel more comfortable and confident. One kind of activity that I like it to much about this strategy is a teacher from Portugal that what he/she does is rotate groups through different activities, but only one of these activities need the attention of the teacher. This provides children an individual guidance.

The next one is projects work. It involves that children decide based on their interests, what they want to work. I’ve been working in a school that uses that methodology in their classes and children learn and enjoy it a lot. They feel the protagonists of their learning. I think it is a good option, because they can work in whole-group or in small-groups and thus can work with the two approaches that have been discussed above.

The last one, learning styles and preferences it’s about taking into account the individual differences, create in the school day methods and activities varied and motivating.

To conclude, we must recognize that it is not an easy work for a teacher to meet the individual needs of all their students because of the large class size, rigid curricula, prescribed textbooks, lack of time for preparation… But it is not impossible. As teachers, we can only try to improve the learning of our students bearing in mind their individual needs.

lunes, 19 de noviembre de 2012

Learning Styles: VAK

Everyone learns in different ways. A learning style is “the way someone learns or the way a person's senses interpret and organize the information they receive”. Teachers and parents have to know the child's learning style to help students learn. Identifying students’ learning styles help educators understand how people perceive and process information in different ways. 

Some learners might need instruction presented more visually, while others might require more auditory, kinaesthetic or tactile types of instruction. Without adequate knowledge about their individuals’ students’ style preferences, teachers cannot provide the needed instructional variety.

How can teachers discover their student’s learning style?
  • Observe and take notes about children’s learning. 
  • Activities that show us the style preference of students. 
  • Questionnaire.   
There are three basic styles: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic; to bear in mind.

Visual learning style involves the use of seen or observed things, including pictures, diagrams, demonstrations, displays, hand-outs, films… Visual learners tend to gather information with their eyes.

Auditory learning style involves the transfer of information through listening.

Kinaesthetic learning involves physical experience –touching, holding, feeling, practical hands-on experiences… Kinaesthetic learners gather information through their sense of touch and movement.

Usually a student learns better when taught in one of these three areas, but sometimes a child may have two strong learning styles. It is very important for teachers to focus on all three learning styles when planning lessons to ensure that all students can learn.


sábado, 10 de noviembre de 2012

Learning English at home

As we know families have an important role in the education of their children. Teachers provide children with different tools to get knowledge in the school, but these are meaningless without the cooperation of parents in their homes. That's why parents should be involved in the education community. They have to create a home environment that encourages learning. 

Then, as teachers we must accept the need to invite, inform and train parents to be involved in their child's learning process. Furthermore, when families and teachers and communities work together, schools get better.  

How can we do that?

Theresa Zanatta provides us with five classroom routines to put this objective into practice:

  • Routine 1: Keep parents regularly informed by sending home hands-on, student-made learning tools. Things like flash cards; take-home storybooks; and realia such as puppets, game boards, sentence machines, personal picture dictionaries, and spelling boards are memory and speaking prompts for describing and explaining what students are doing and learning in English class.
  • Routine 2: Set up individual student portfolios or English folders for students to keep their learning tools organized and accessible. The English folder is much easier and quicker for parents to see how students are progressing in all of the four skills.
  • Routine 3: Invite parents to comment on student-made classroom activities. Encourage parents to write the date, any comments or questions, and their initials on the back of the student-made learning tools that go home.
  • Routine 4: Pupils teach their parents. The teacher is in a position to model and show students how to show parents how to foster and encourage parent interest and involvement.
  • Routine 5: Send student-written letters home. Students can take home simple student-written notes to parents which the teacher dictates to them. This simple task invites parents to become involved in a regular way in what their child are learning and learning to read.

Finally, a quote from Albert Einstein:


“The Supreme art of parents and teachers consists in creating pleasure in the pursuit of creative expression and knowledge”.

sábado, 3 de noviembre de 2012

Differentiated instruction

This theory is related with the child-centered approach, where the students are directly involved and invested in the discovery of their own knowledge and education. The main point is that learners are the focus and, in that way, they become fully engaged in the learning acquired process. How we can do that? Asking questions and leading students to solutions nurtures student's natural curiosity. 

To achieve the child-centered approach in the classroom we need to meet the individual needs of all students, and that is the differentiated instruction.

As a teacher we should work to accommodate and build on student’s diverse learning needs. The better way to deal with student’s difference as Carole Anne Tomlinson said in an interview, is “keeping kids together in the context of high-quality curriculum but attending to their readiness needs, their interests, and their preferred ways of learning”.

To obtain a well-run differentiated classroom there are three hallmarks to be taken into account:
  • Teacher-student connections (active relationship between teacher and student).
  • A sense of community in the classroom (kids have to understand and appreciate their differences).
  • The quality of the curriculum being used (give kids the most robust materials seeing them capable of learning)
We must be clear that achieving the differentiated instruction in a classroom is not an easy practice because may be in one day we have five or six classes, but it is not impossible. There are some techniques that help teachers to know what students needs are. For example, to keep a kind of diary where noted things they learn about kids. It’s also a good way give students periodic surveys asking them about what they particularly liked and what they found particularly difficult.

Finally I want to record a phrase from Carole Anne Tomlinson interview that really defined the main goal of a teacher:

“Let's assume students can all do good work, and let's attend to the ways that they need us to teach them in order to get there”.

Here I am attaching a video where you can see the differentiated instruction in a school: