Receiving presents from Julie Gold and Devon Thagard

Finally I get to lay back a bit this weekend! This is by far one of the most extraordinary project I’ve done. There has been a lot of joy and learning along the way with surprising struggles of school politics. Nevertheless, they are all good and they will nurture my future teaching life.

I felt the need to document what has happened for the past few weeks. One is to share how I started this amazing project with my kids, which many teachers might like to look to in hopes of noticing opportunities around them. The second purpose is, I’d like to share what I have learned from the event, about … people and life, yes, I know it sounds bazaar to connect these with a competition, but surprisingly enough, this competition opens a window of observation.

Devon with my students

Global Sing-along Competition

I couldn’t recall where I first learned about the competition nevertheless I remembered my first thought is, ‘gee, this sounds like fun! How do I get involve?’. The competition, Global Sing-Along, was hosted by Oxford University Press (OUP). They were very clever and considerate to have all necessary teaching materials ready and downloadable online.

To enter the contest, teachers are required to record kids singing from titles offered by OUP and upload the video clips to OUP youtube channel. There are five songs to choose from and includes all the teaching materials such as mp3, lyrics and accompanying MTV.

The first song couldn’t be simpler. The Lyrics contain only two words, ‘everybody’ and ‘up’. Regardless of how some may see the song as too easy for any elementary level kids, it is exactly a perfect test of how we teachers can expand and extend from a pure base. In daily school life, children climb up the monkey bars, they swing up high and low, they do a lot of rope jumping, they look up skyward to observe the …these child like activities supply a rich  foundation for extensive teaching moments.

I asked my 3rd graders which part of our campus they would like to showcase if they were to introduce our school to children from other parts of the world. They nominated 7 areas and I assigned each class to do a MTV for each spot. The video shooting took only one session and they just love learning outside of the classroom.

We actually did all 5 songs and I did something extra with another song ‘I like chicken’. You can take a look at the I Like Chicken Lesson Plan.

Post production

I then let the material stew for a month and started to put the clips together in August. Things started to get a bit tricky here. Neither of my computers at home or office worked properly with Movie Maker! My desktop at school doesn’t seem to be equipped with certain necessary codes while the laptop I have at home tends to crash every five minutes when running with Movie Maker. I end up rebooting the program every 5 minutes and finally have my final production ready the night before the deadline.

A couple of months later, I got the call from OUP informing me about  winning the first prize in Taiwan.

You can access the winning video clip here

Then several news report from local and nation wide media followed,  I was interviewed a couple of times. Additionally, friends of my parents did a home delivery of some news clipping.

The PRIZE?

No, there isn’t any $ involved but the reward is an even better one! OUP invited the songwriter of Everybody Up, which happens to be the same person who wrote From a distance(1991), Julie Gold, to visit us. And what’s more, the all time favorite Super simple song writer/teacher, Devon Thagard, were among the VIP list. They were to spend two hours at school with the contestants (all now 3rd graders) and Devon shall have a mini teaching session with the kids following Julie’s live performance of the song “from a distance”.  It was a thrill for kids and myself but probably a bit of stress for the administrative staff since the county government heard of the news and decided to visit our school as well.

Other than that, among training kids, preparing display and show props and daily teaching routine, I can hardly worry anything else.

The big day

Finally the big day came! You can see the  flickr album here by OUP

A sum up video clip by OUP

Devon did a mini lesson with kids (around 200 of them!)

Julie also played the song “From a distance” at our activity centre.

It was phenomenal for all of us. A first time in many ways and a lot of kids (mostly girls) reflected that they found themselves in tears when Julie played the song (I was a bit surprised since they really don’t know the meaning of the song).

After the big day

After the event, kids and many teachers were still talking about the big day. I asked  my kids to draw what they remembered on that day.

You can take a look here.

Some life lessons

• Never under estimate what one can do to change the situation.

  Find your leverage and use it well. Helpers would follow then but you have to initiate it first.

• It’s worth the risk to take the off-beaten road sometimes. Some kids need different stimulus and with careful planning, the learning experience can be really phenomenal and powerful.

• Participate contests from time to time helps to fresh up the teaching mind and seeing learning from a different point of view.

A couple of journalists came on the day and I remembered one of them asked me,

so what do these children get from winning this competition? You’ve got the recognition and what do they get?

(Sigh) I was quite taken back by his twisted interpretation of winning and education. I believe, what teacher can offer best to students is a phenomenal learning experience that years later may flourish into something extraordinary. Such experience reaches far beyond than any sweets, toys or ipad!!

I’ve tried several PPT sharing platform but they either fail to come out in normal fonts or they took forever to convert the file! Finally, embed it in seems to work with my file perfectly.

http://embedit.in/GbgnDF2R5h.swf

But it’s the carnival time of the year again! This is the third time I submitted my blog post to the carnival and I’ve since enjoyed so many more interesting reading and ideas of teachers from different parts of the world!

The theme this time is about back-to-school ideas/ice breakers/ fillers. I’m very happy to be included again! Thanks to A Journey in TEFL’s organization, there are a bunch of good readings waiting to be ponder and experimented!

I try to document things that went well in my classroom as often as possible but sometimes it is very difficult to just sit down and write! Gotta write more often and believe me writing IS therapeutic!

Do check out the 24th EFL/ESL blog carnival for lots of practical ideas! Mine is on the first of the list:-)

How do you wrap up a semester in your last few sessions? As subject teachers, sometimes it is a bit challenging to plan a decent learning program at the end of the semester when everything is so hectic and kids are restless. This semester I tried something different with my 2nd graders and 4th graders. They enjoyed the last few sessions and I get to document the things we did together. A win win lesson plan!

Activity: Song poster

Year group: 2ND GRADERS (EFL)

Props:

1. 3 copies of Eating the alphabets for each group. Preferably 1 between 2 kids

1. glue sticks and scissors
2. large posters/magazines/used textbooks
3. ready-made posters by kids
4. OUP everybody up material

Teaching goal:

1. kids can start to read English books other than textbook
2. kids can acknowledge/relate food from different parts of the world
3. kids can start to do independent search for unknown words
4. kids can help out each other in the process

Song poster activity is an ongoing project that lasts about a month. I accidently learned the singing contest (hosts by OUP) Everybody Up series via their FB page and decided to join the GLOBAL competition.

I know how 2nd graders love singing and dancing but am still amazed at how music stimulates children to learn.

I’ve posted the list here in my blog and I’ve got feedback from kids that they enjoy watching those 5 singing videos at home or after-school program. In short, they love the songs and willing to take the efforts to learn them in their own time without me telling them to.

Isn’t that great or what?

So when my kids start to learn the song ‘I like chicken’, I figure that I should have them made posters about food to showcase their preferences and fear (usually that’s more entertaining:-P)

Since I only see them twice every week, it’s quite difficult to have them return work with satisfactory quality . So how do I do that to make these 2nd graders to return their  posters on time and in good condition?

Tips for gathering posters from 2nd graders (this is of course coming out of the subject teachers’ point of view)

1. make it a repetitive work for a few sessions so this requirement would stick in their head
2. break down the task to smaller elements and evenly spread to a series of sessions
3. have to build something upon the original work is always more efficient than expecting them to hand in 5-stars work.

After the first stage of poster design, I have them find fruits/vegetable names that are both in the book and their own poster. They are to copy the word/or the initial letter( depends on the level of the kids).

They then recreate their own lyrics according to the contents of their posters.

We then have several times of in-class group rehearsing

After that, I took them out group after group to do a video shooting. They are to assign roles to each group member. Some of them are to hold the posters, some of them are to act out the lyrics, some of them are to do the sound effects.

Here are some short clips of my 2nd graders singing their own version of I like Chicken

4TH GRADERS

As for my 4th graders, I found this Project Peace online and was prompted to post the downloadable peace packs in my blog ASAP by numerous students! The packs include 8 songs and you should really check them out!!  My pick is Peace like a river.

Other than learning to sing the song, I also have them made posters during the class. To speed up the process, I have a draw, stop, pass working chant.

Each group is to work on a poster with different keywords from the song. This is a bit like playing ‘musical chair’ with a twist. I played the song and stopped randomly and they are to pass their posters to the group on their right whenever the music stops. They are to pick up from where the last group left off. In this way they are exposed to the keywords intensively with multiple stimulation from illustration, the discussion within the group and the act of making connection with the song and vocabulary.

You can see their work here.

The river one is my personal favorite!

First I’d like to specify the context of this post. 1. this is for English teachers service in public sector 2. this is aiming for elementary school teachers.

How many times you joined a workshop/seminar and hoping to learn something you can take away only left with wonders like ‘ah…that’s fancy but …how do I adapt that in my daily teaching?’

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting workshops/seminars are anything less, instead, they tend to keep this business vibrant if the goal is set clear and the speaker knows the industry and the real world. They are, however, tend to talk in general principle, and sometimes worse, in line with certain ‘official flavor’.

What I found interesting in ETs’ PD here in my district is, English education is always in the spotlight yet the supportive system behind it is unfortunately limited and scarce.

One day I had this  idea of organizing a potluck party for English teachers in Tauyuan area. The potluck party means every teacher shows up with at least one successful teaching method/lesson plan/material…etc. and do a ‘show and tell’ with fellow colleagues.

I put this in my FB status and immediately my very resourceful teacher friend Caroline second the idea. With at least one person sharing the same idea with me, I asked the  staff  at school to register the event in our teacher’s PD website and together Caroline and I started to spread the word.

We’ve got some really positive feedback from a few reps of publishers but overall the feedback from teachers wasn’t that great. We’ve got only 5 participants signed up until the day before the Potluck Party, which is fine with me since I think workshop nowadays emphasizes too much on the ‘material delivery’ instead of the ‘know-how’. With small-scaled workshop like this, everyone get to tell his/her story and idea in an easier pace and more importantly, we get to learn from each other.

On the day of the Potluck Party, 10 people showed up.

View Full Album

Caroline showed up with her heavy duty gear to carry all her stuff…a lot of contents have been taken out and placed on the table when I took this picture and poor Caroline had to carry this on her own for three floors….with high heels on!!!

I’ve organize everyone’s input here via google doc (click here if you’d like to make this list longer!) and hoping we’ll have a sequel for this Potluck Party for ETs.

http://embedit.in/tSlCkFBjNd.swf

I’ve started to see the grassroots power in teacher’s professional development. Facebook, twitter and blogs are all evident of teachers taking charge of their own learning. By networking, teachers learn much more from each other and a sense of belonging grows. Let me emphasize this again, I’m not saying that seminars/workshop that involves hundreds of  participants and A-listers aren’t doing good, instead, I still attend to events like that. What I’m trying to say is, ETs here are usually the loner in campus, we are not in the same ‘blood’ as our colleagues at school. Our very tight schedule and workload tend to trap us in classrooms with piles of papers/workbooks in long hours. Sometimes we need to know if we’re doing things in the right way, or, if there’s a better way to do it.

By sharing our ideas and the context behind it, we get to learn different strategies to adapt in different situations/schools. It is also a great opportunity for teachers to nurture their inner self as a leader. We can do so much good not just for our pupils but also our colleagues!

And don’t we all, I mean most of us, found this tiny sense of achievement in sharing our little triumph in the classroom?

Here’s the short clip of the wonderful day I spent with my fellow teachers. I wish there’ll be a sequel to our PPET!

Activity 1- crossword for catch-up program

It was the week of the midterm. I figured kids would need to stretch out a bit after a long day, so we have a crossword card game together. The word cards are from the textbook we are using and I often found packs of them left behind by kids after class. I collected them in a box and have kids categorize them. The blank ones are wild cards. I have 14 kids in this catch up program and most of them shown high interest in this game.

Some variations I did during the process:

1. I have kids pair up since some of them tend to be stuck quite often. Pairing up seems to motivate them more and encourage team spirit at the same time.

2. Later on I have each pair to start their own game and see who gets bigger ‘territory’. They seem to strive on that though they apparently need more work on their vocabulary.

3. Organizing word cards can be a pain in the neck sometimes but you can turn this tedious job into a learning game as well. Have them pick out all the vowel cards or have them sort out the word family letter pairs and bag them (you do the talk, they do the work and learning:-). You can make a list of how you want them to organize the cards and have teams race against each other to see who gets to finish the task first.

Activity 2- the brown bag game

We were covering the vocabulary of stationery. I have several items(eg. pencils, erasers…) in a McDonald bag and have my 2nd graders to guess what’s inside the bag. I get to use a lot of English that is not in the textbook yet can be heard and said everyday. This is a perfect scenario for promoting L1 in the class.

To start the conversation, I have kids feel the item through the bag. You can highlight the word ‘feel’ and ‘shape’. I even brought in the question ‘Do you need a hint?’ and after a few rounds some kids started to say ‘老師給我們一個hint!’(Miss Tsai, please give us a hint!) Ha, love it when you see learning happens so naturally!

Possible themes to generate from this activity:

1. Dialogue: Is it a …..? Is it round/triangle/square? / Can you write with/eat/play it?
2. Vocabulary: food, clasrm objects, verb(write/eat/play/draw/color/…)

Activity 3- concentration on the letter A

I found this poster when I tried to declutter my clasrm last week. I must have copied the chant somewhere online and I used it in my 2nd graders this week. It was fun and brings out a lot of rhythm and phonemic awareness.

Here’s the chant:

Concentration on the letter A!

Apples begins with the letter a

Concentration on the letter B!

Banana begins with the letter b

and so on so forth…

At first I have kids clap their hands with me when we recite the chant from a to d, then I’ll start the question ‘what starts with the letter e?’when we do the E part. They started to understand the rules of the chant after a few rounds.

I’ve had several word/picture cards displayed on board and kids are to pick out the word/picture cards when I said ‘concentration on the letter __’

This is a great way to turn a chant to a game. I’ve had the poster displayed in the classroom so kids can use it as a reference whenever we have that extra 5 minutes!

I’ve learned triptico for awhile but never really look into it until I got an IWB installed in my classroom.

At first, I was really thrilled about making my own teaching material with Smartboard Notebook. The thrill, however, eventually subsided. Why? For one, lack of time. And secondly, my computer does not updated with the shining technology, which means, it sometimes refuse to open the Notebook file or it just drag its feet whenever you play the interactive dice.

It can be very annoying. Plus I really don’t have that much time to tailor made everything!

That’s when I went back to have a closer look at triptico and realized its value. It’s light, beautifully designed and requires minimum learning curve.:-)

And most important of all, kids love it!

Triptico comes with 16 activities. I’ve tried word magnets and order resource so far with my 4th graders. They really enjoyed it!

Tutorial video clips are available on site. All the data are editable and savable.

I tried the Word Magnets first and immediately fall in love with its versatile teaching/learning value.

This is my Word Magnets file. I use it as a review for sentence pattern and self-introduction practice.

Target language is

1. I like…

2. I don’t like…

3. I have…

4. I’m….

Things I did with this Word Magnets File

I did a dictation for words as a warm up. This is where you can maximize L1 with the help of IWB. ‘Listen, drag and say’ is a common command in the class and you can start with a single word only.

Then I gradually have kids to make a sentence with highlighted words.

In this case, kids should be able to make a sentence reads ‘I have two sisters.’

As you can see, this is also a great way to reinforce the usage of punctuation and sightwords.

To make this more challenging I had kids listen for my question and try to form an responding sentence with the word magnets on board.

Another way to exploit the activity is to have them come up as many sentences as they can with the word magnets on board.

I usually would have them write their answers on papers first then have 1 or 2 pupils to show the answers on board.

Another app. I’m playing with recently is ‘Order resource’. Yeah I know, the Smartboard Notebook comes with similar interactive app. but triptico make it really easy to edit and the software runs fast and smoothly!

I’m going to try ‘Find Ten’ some time next week in my class. I think the app. is just right for vocabulary categorizing/cloze test….

I really enjoy this new ‘game’ in my class and I’d like to say a big thank you to David who provide this wonderful resource for free!

Ps. I wonder what’s in the name of ‘triptico’? Does it mean anything?

One of the teacher made a fantastic list that caught my eyes.

I especially love the 3rd one.

I can still remember vividly my first year in the Kingdom of Beast.  The open curse and confronts between teachers and students (and yes, I was unfortunately the person of interest in some cases)  was just plain frustrating and depressing.

I wish I knew more about classroom management then but still it’s all part of learning.

As my teaching years adds up, I’m getting better at what I do and often times be more aware of what I just did and what I could have done if the same thing shall happen again. I gradually learned that classroom management IS the key before any learning taking place. Sometimes it’s far more important than equipped with a great lesson plan or engaging activities.

I also enjoyed the video from Teachers TV very much. They have this special section where they invited a behaviour specialist Sue Cowley into a secret room to observe a class from hidden cams. Her job is to pinpoint the problem area where teachers can work on and give immediate feedback via a earpiece carried by the teacher. So the teacher can immediately take on different strategy upon Sue’s suggestion.

In this particular episode. The teacher has problems with a little boy who is constantly disruptive and acquire her attention all the time. I found myself relating the video with my class 4A. I was sometimes ‘glued’ to a particular group for the same reason. And I sometimes have problem of pacing my class, too.

It’s nice to have a mentor like her to watch your class and give immediate feedback:-) and, what a nice way to brush up your English at the same time!