Magpie Moments

Larry Ferlazzo's Best Sites...

Now if only I could add all of this amazing site to my collection! ;-p

It would take more time than I have to fully explore all this site has to offer but the little I have seen has really brought something fresh to my class.

Last week I saw this amazing image 
found here linked too from The Best Sites for Learning About the Protests in Egypt

Just taking this into class sparked off some amazing conversation that lasted much longer than I expected. It was enjoyable, fun and relevant to the learners and me!

What I'd really like to learn though is how to do more constructive language follow up and feedback. I feel this is the key to an unplugged approach and it's where I am most inexperienced. But it's what excites me most about the approach. Really listening to my students content and language use and then reformulating it and helping them to notice things. Going into the class with nothing but this picture and coming out with not just a great conversation but great student and teacher notes on language.

My whiteboard work and their own personal notes... I want to facilitate these becoming much clearer and much more useful although I'm not really sure how. I'd love to watch a lesson where a really experienced unplugged teacher does this. I'm sure it's out there somewhere!

But in the meantime thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for his incredibly useful and inspirational website!

What a picture of a rose can inspire...

 
It's half term this week so I have a little more time than usual. Although come tomorrow I'm going to have to get stuck into the mountains of portfolio and assessment marking I've been putting off!

However, today... after seeing this image on the English Raven blog

I remembered a song I love by The Safires called Sweet Rose. You can listen to it here and even download it for free if you so choose.

The imagery in it is great and it inspired me to create a lesson based on the image and the song using many of the ideas that Jason used here for a lesson based on the Jeremy Harmer poem Knocking and Pulling

I'm going to try in with my E3s after the holidays so will see how it goes! I'll put up the lesson plan and materials in the next post.

 

 

A moment of language gardening...

A very natural addition to my collection today... a language flower

I was wandering around the delight that is the Language Garden blog and felt uplifted by what I saw and read there. It just made a connection in my brain and was so fresh and ... well enchanting.

Then today in class as they were trying to make sentences out of word cards I'd given them ... they started to connect the days of the week words and the afternoon, morning, evening words and something in my head clicked. The next thing we were growing the bloom you see before you and I loved it! I always clean my board after a lesson. I think it's rude and inconsiderate not too but I was too proud of this... so I confess I left it for the next person to use that classroom!