Magpie Moments

Using tickets - an unplugged approach...

 

Often tickets are used for very practical activities in classrooms like role-plays etc… which is great. However, after  seeing a ticket on Sandy Millin’s wonderful infinite ideas website a few creative ideas were sparked in my head. I’ve posted there as well but  really like the Teaching Unplugged framework. After reading Mike’s excellent post, where he also used that framework very effectively, I felt inspired to have a go. Do check out both blogs and obviously the book. I've already used Mike's travel recommendations lesson with great success :-)

Anyway, here's my lesson. Not sure if it fully qualifies as unplugged but it's certainly materials light and myself and several colleagues have had really fun lessons with it.

Think about it

Tickets open doors. Think back over your life experiences. A magical afternoon at the zoo, the concert of a lifetime, a trip through snowy and unfamiliar landscapes on the way to your first job in a foreign land. These are just a few examples of experiences made possible by a ticket. If you’re doing a topic like transport, journeys or events why not take a bit of time to find out what your learners’ experiences have been. Do they have any stories to tell? Or can they imagine some?

Get it ready

Bring in a bus ticket, football match ticket, plane ticket etc… Also different shapes and sizes of coloured paper cut into the shapes of various kinds of tickets.

Set it up

Pass your chosen ticket round the class. Ask learners to imagine what the story of that ticket might be. What happened to the person who bought it, what did they experience whilst they were using it? Allow time for discussion. Ask the learners if they have ever had an interesting experience whilst using a ticket? What kind of ticket was it? Discuss the different purposes of tickets.

Let it run

• Pass out the slips of paper. In pairs or small groups, ask the learners to create their own ticket. It can be any kind of ticket.
• Ask everyone in the class to exchange their tickets with the group sitting next to them.
• With their new ticket the groups decide on the story of that ticket and write a short narrative.

Round it off

Each group shows the class their ticket, reads out the story and answers any questions. Tutor feeds back on emergent language as appropriate.

Follow up

Learners  discuss where they would go/what they would do if they had a magic ticket to anywhere. Possibly creating  a WEG style table .

	Type of ticket?	Where to ?	Why?
Salma
Darius
Akram
Jabeen

 

Thanks to Sandy, Mike and the authors of Teaching Unplugged for the inspiration :-)

Butterflies and Bowties...

 
by fox kiyo 

The idea of un)-plug-(un lessons is one that has been hovering in my subconscious ever since I read it on Jason Renshaw's  site. There's something about the idea that seems to maximise creativity and uses all a teacher's skills. You have to manage an emergent moment, guide it into something on the spot and then on reflection create a piece of material that captures the heart of that moment.

However, unlike the horrendous art of butterfly pinning, after capturing the moment, you take it into class and let it take flight again in anyway it likes. There are many ways of doing this (and I would like to learn some more!) but the one I'm enjoying at the moment is Live Reading. So when my barely literate and barely speaking Early Entry Burmese came into my class last week desperate to tell me all about their trip to the caves in Clapham, I couldn't carry on with my planned 'directions' session!

It took awhile for me to even figure out what they'd done but their excitement was infectious so together we found the words to express their experiences, first as a discussion, and then on the board. In hindsight there was too much language for their level but it was all stuff they wanted to say and I'll learn to be more concise next time!

Then, while they practiced reading it, I nipped next door and put it on card so they could order it in groups. It was easy to differentiate as I just cut it into more pieces for more able learners.

Next, a bit of pronuncation and word practice and using their magnetic letters they practiced spelling some of the key vocab.

 

The following class I had a go at inputting the text into a template by Jason with a few simple word level practice activities and ended up with this.

Download Class Trips

There was definitely too much text, even though I edited it down, but the reaction was postive. My learners respond well to professional looking resources, especially when those materials contain their work! 

We played around with the text again, the learners took it in turns to read the sentences, and despite the text being way above their skill level, they made another really good stab at reading and understanding. When it came to matching the pictures, the task was challenging but possible, and lent itself to differentiation, as the faster learners completed harder anagrams on the board.

The materials led easily into a discussion about class trips in general. We chatted about when and where we were going for our class trip :-)

Since that class, the learners have taken the reading home with them, practiced it, written it out for themselves and tried the tasks alone, without me asking them too. I think they thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of the session, subsequent material and discussion despite the difficulty level!

I really believe there's a lot of mileage in this approach for learners and it creates a high level of job satisfaction for me so thanks as usual to Jason Renshaw :-)

Any tips or ideas for how to improve this lesson or how to handle a similar situation differently would be very welcome! :-D

 

Moments from an unplugged day...

                                                                                                Image by Dan Belton

So... lots to reflect on after today - some real highs and some areas to work on!

Highs!

The moment when a Polish, male learner could not  stop laughing. I have no idea what set him off but it looked like he was laughing at his Asian, female partner whilst she was speaking. I'm sure he wasn't! But dynamics in a class of boisterous, flirtatious Polish guys with strict Muslim ladies isn't always the easiest and it could have gone oh so wrong! But we were using what came up in the classroom so I taught them got the giggles. Up it went on the board. We chatted about what to say in similar situations to avoid offense e.g.  "so sorry I've got the giggles". By the end my Asian ladies were laughing and thanking him for teaching them new language :-) Later one of the ladies also got the giggles, which everyone loved pointing out.

The creativity and variety of stories that came out of the reverse reading on Saira's Day ... from Valentine's Day surprises and a house decorated in celebration of a birthday to a special trip to the seaside and the return of a long-lost sister.

The noticing that went on when I let them be the teachers whilst they were correcting eachother's  texts.  For example, "Anna they've spelt morning wrong haven't they?" "No, no that's right." "Ohhh ... I've spelt mornign wrong haven't I?" "Yep... but it's great that you noticed!!"

The level of engagement and activity as they started their own coursebooks in their notebooks, used texts they were genuinely interested in, checked new vocab with me and eachother, wrote their own questions and had a laugh correcting their partner's mistakes and successes.

Areas to work on!

Language feedback! I love the principles and ideals behind Teaching Unplugged and the many many ideas contained within. Including the one I tried today. I can 'set it up'... I can 'let it run'.... but I need to get so much better at 'rounding it off'. Orally taking in what they are saying, how they are saying it and how I can move it forward is a real area of development for me.  I can focus on content, I can focus on form and I can focus on ways to improve but not all at the same time. Not yet anyway. So in the first class... we just did content feedback. In the next class I did write up some good examples of language I'd noticed and then we fedback onto the board some more ways you could keep a conversation going e.g. follow up questions, appropriate contributions, discourse markers etc... But  I have a long way to go in terms of developing that vital teaching skill! 

Making time for vocab! Recycling vocab is so important and I don't give enough time for it... and again we ran out of time before I could try out Cecilia's great ideas! So first thing next week...  ;-p 

Overall impressions of the day...good... the learners were engaged and enjoying the activities and once again... I was left wishing we had more time. Instead of scrambling to fill the time with anything and everything, letting the break drag on a little too long etc... we were really using the time and there's always so much more that could be done. With the notebooks as coursebooks session they only got as far as answering eachother's questions in the books. The listenings, the dictogloss, the projects... haven't even got there yet.

There's a lot to learn and I'm a long way from where I want to be but there were more than enough moments to feather my magpie's nest with today. So thanks again ELT bloggers you're transforming my teaching world :-)

 

the return of a long-lost sister,

 

Days when it pays to teach unplugged...

                                                      Image by Aleksi Aaltonen

So today the one photocopier / printer in the college stopped working ... again! Why we can't have a backup printer is a question that has been asked many times with an answer yet to be forthcoming!

Everyone panicked... calls were made etc... I started to march over to management to voice my protests when I stopped. I thought about the classes I'd planned for tomorrow ... and had an amazing realisation ... both my sessions were completely material free.

It was a total accident but I felt great.  Plus I was then able to share round some ideas... to a certain level of scepticism... combined with growing interest :-) It was the Mike Harrison idea that brought one of my friends round :-D

So if anyone's interested... my plan for tomorrow's E1 class is to start with "Something we did" p36 of Teaching Unplugged and see where it goes. If you haven't got a copy I'd highly recommend it. Followed by a slightly adapted version of Mike Harrison's excellent lesson on reverse reading.

With my E3s... I'm planning to go out and buy some A4 notebooks tonight. Then we can start using notebooks as coursebooks as per another amazing lesson shared by Jason Renshaw . I actually found that post through Chris Miner's new blog where he describes a great session. The learners are already primed to bring in their own texts so we'll see how it goes. Plus if there's time I'd like to do a bit of vocab revision using this fun, interactive idea from Cecilia Lemos.

Once again many thanks to bloggers all over the world for sharing their inspiring teaching moments online and particularly the ones above who have helped me plan my first unplugged day! I am feeling quite chuffed... I'm a long way off being fully unplugged but tomorrow is looking pretty good and perfect timing as well ;-p

Having some fun with a Live Listening...

One of the great side effects of discovering and reading so many ideas online is that they begin to sink into my subconscious... ready to pop out during a class. I had no intention of doing a Live Listening the other week in class and hadn't really thought about it. I can't remember now what the original plan for the lesson was but I know we only got as far as the 10 minute warmer! Having now done a bit of backtracking I'm pretty sure the source comes from Scott Thornbury's Teaching Unplugged resource section. So thanks to Scott for his willingness to share so many of his ideas and experiences online!

I'd asked them to look at this handout from New English File

and some interesting and quite lengthy conversation ensued. It led on to a discussion about their own traditions and customs and quickly developed into a very lively debate about arranged marriages.

One lady had the whole class in stitches as she told the story of how she first met her husband. The atmosphere in class was so fun, everyone was laughing and I just couldn't bare to pull us away and into whatever I'd planned.

So instead... I wrote up some notes based on the story she'd told us on the whiteboard.

You can probably get the gist from the whiteboard... but basically she'd never met him, she'd seen a photo and agreed to marry him, then she saw him on her wedding day and he looked nothing like the photo. She said no but it was too late. Looking back she thinks he was just a bit tired and they are now very happy with three children!!

 

I then asked them to tell eachother their own stories of how they first met their husbands and make short notes as they listened. However, they had other ideas and convinced me instead to tell my story. I agreed with the proviso that it was nowhere near as funny as the first lady's story!

Well, it was great fun, they were actively listening, engaged and interested. When they weren't quite sure they understood they checked me with me and they had a great time doing it. After the story was over I asked them individually to make some notes - which they did with alacrity... one said that it was easy to remember! They then compared notes and I asked them to write my story up in full in groups giving them some discourse pointers to work with like first, next, then and in the end.

They produced some great pieces of writing, there was a lot of discussion and chat... no she didn't say that... it was like this ... oh yes that's right and in the end their problem wasn't that they didn't have enough to say it was that they'd remembered too much and didn't have time or space to get it all down.

The lesson ended there... but there was still so much we could have done... that's what's so interesting about teaching like this. The time seems to fly by... two hour sessions no longer seem long enough! (Don't tell my boss!)

 

So the next session we did some language feedback using these great English Raven templates that I've spoken about before. Again some really interesting things came out of it like a great discussion about conjunctions and how to use them.

 

Then finally I got them to tell eachother their own stories and orally feedback to the class what they'd heard. Again, lots of laughter and lots of language and nearly two sessions worth of  'material'!

Definitely a great moment or series of moments to add to my collection so thanks to Scott Thornbury and if you're interested Alex Case at TEFLtastic has written a very informative post with more info on Live Listenings!

Scene it! Take two, a Tsunami Live Reading & Projects material...

Edit: After reading the comments on Jason's post regarding using disasters as a teaching prompt I would just like to say how deeply sorry I am for any offense this post has caused. My enthusiasm was related to the techniques and approach not the terrible events in Japan. What happened and is happening in Japan is clearly a tragedy. If the learners had indicated uneasiness or an unwillingness to continue I would have taken the lesson in a different direction.  Instead it seemed to me they wanted to express their thoughts and feelings. Whilst I do believe the classroom is an appropriate place to address world events... even tragic ones... I will try to be much more sensitive in the future when talking about it in such a public space :-(

After my first Scene it! lesson failed I wanted to try again with that class. They've been asking for another Live Reading session ever since Valentine's Day. (That never happens!) So I decided today to do a session following the recent disaster in Japan. We started with an image of the Tsunami... using Jason Renshaw's great Scene It! templates.

  Download SceneIt Japan Earthquake

This was followed by some vocab brainstorming and a discussion. They were all quite deeply concerned and distressed by the recent events and wanted to talk about it.

We then created a Breaking News report using a Live Reading. Once again they thoroughly enjoyed this task. One learner said "this work makes us feel alive". Well I've never had a response like that in class before!

Here's what they produced.

They copied it down onto their SceneIt sheets and by the time they'd done a bit of WordWise work the time had gone. However, it gave me several ideas for some follow up project work and I remembered another amazing template that the English Raven has shared here.

So this afternoon I adapted it, typed in their own class created reading as the text (yay :-) ) and hey presto... another learner created piece of content that looks professional, is topical and only took a little extra time to produce.

Download Reading project Japan Earthquake

I'm proud of it and I know they will be too... and I'm hoping it will produce some more good work on Wednesday.

 

Doing Dictogloss with E1s (elementary)

Dictogloss is one of those ideas I've been aware of for a number of years but never tried. However, reading about other people's experiences recently inspired me to have a go. After reading the English Raven's blog on the subject, I found David Dodgson's excellent post here, where he provided a very interesting, detailed and helpful description, especially the way he scaffolded the task to make it accessible to his lower level learners. (Do go and read it if you haven't already but in brief it was wordle of text -discussion, look at pictures, listen to text, fill in table, listen again, fill in second part of table, listen again, anything else? Recreate!)

My first attempt was not hugely successful. I tried it with my Early Entry Twos ... (very pre-entry, illiterate in their own language, refugees) They enjoyed the wordle and talking about my family and to be fair the task was quite challenging and helpful for them in terms of filling in the table. But it took too much time and they just didn't have the language to do the next stage. I think my text was too long... although I did think it would work with E1s!

Here's my materials if you want to have a look :-)

Download Dictogloss family

I passed the idea on to another teacher and she took it a step further by creating a text based around her house and 'there is/are' that her E1 learners had been working on. She didn't get to the actual text recreation either but she really enjoyed the lesson. This was mainly because her learners loved the task so much especially the personal nature of the text.

Her version is here:

Download Dictogloss katie

Then inspired by this I wrote a text about my neighbourhood to do with my E1s and wahoo it worked! They enjoyed the discussion, they enjoyed working together, they found it challenging and didn't think they could do it but... every single group recreated a great approximation of the text. Even better it led straight into some fun speaking and then personal writing on their neighbourhoods which I can use to try out the next WriteWays Unit found here next week!

Materials here:

Download Dictogloss Anna

I love this idea. It's infinitely adaptable and personal... especially if you write the text about yourself or something meaningful to the learners. Certainly with lower levels you could pretty much write the text on the spot if need be.

So thanks to everyone in the blogging world who wrote about their experiences of Dictogloss ... and in particular David Dodgson! :-)

Unplugging Literacy: Write your own exam...

Alongside ESOL, I also teach a couple of Literacy classes (just below GCSE level and a mix of ESOL and native speakers).  Their main goal is to pass their exam as quickly as possible. They usually end up in the class because they're doing some kind of vocational qualification like an NVQ in childcare  and they've been told they must improve their English to stay on the course.

                                                Image by LucasTheExperience

This obviously isn't the best motivator so it can sometimes be more challenging. It becomes more acute at this stage in the year when a lot of the class has passed. Anway,  this group need reading skills so I was in the midst of planning a reading session adapting a lot of the materials I used for the Arab Protest lesson described here.

Then I suddenly had a brainwave. What if instead of doing another practice exam they wrote their own?  I know this idea has been around for a while but I just suddenly realised I could do it with them.

Full of renewed excitement I had a go at adapting another one of  the English Raven's wonderful templates found here and ended up with this.

Download Write your own exam

The question tips are based on the exam they have to do. (A tick box exercise)

I'm sure someone could do a much better job of it than this.  The space to write questions is too small. However, my limited design skills aside, I was pretty pleased with it. I know technically I don't need to give them anything at all but they do need some paper to write on and I like that paper to look good or as good as I can make it!

And.... it was a very successful session. They enjoyed it and were really involved in the exam writing stage. Plus they were really  thinking about the questions, getting inside them and behind them. For example they always struggle with purpose of text but that night they were writing great questions like "What is the purpose of this text? ... to inform, entertain or persuade."

 

They were also much more involved when it came time to answer eachother's questions. They were laughing and joking about it being too easy or too hard and were clearly very motivated because it was essentially their work! Not just another practice exam.

It's got me thinking about how else I could unplug my literacy classes!

Edit: Thanks again to Jason who suggested I adapt this template instead, producing this

Download Write your own exam take 2

a much clearer sheet for learners with actual space to write their own questions!

 

Trying some ESOL Challenges...

The other day I stumbled across The Big ESOL Challenge which a local college is using for CPD. The guy who runs the blog, Sam, was on my teacher training course in 2006 and was the source of much inspiration to me then in many ways for example a great half hour when he showed me all sorts of ideas and ways to use the IWB.

I think this blog is a fab idea! Not only are the challenges good but reading how people met them is incredibly inspiring. I got a great idea from this description of how someone did a materials lite session.

It sparked off an idea of how to do a similar unplugged adjectives session with my E1s as a follow up to the Village Elders lesson where we had began to think about describing words.

So the only resources I had for the class were the following

First we had a quick recap of describing words... then I gave them the postits and asked them to label everything in the class room with adjectives... one adjective per post it. They could label objects and people and they could label someone or something as many times as they liked so long as it was a different adjective!

It took a while for them to get into it... "this is really hard" was the initial response but they did start to enjoy it. They were nervous about sticking adjectives on eachother so I got quite a few stuck to me before they plucked up more courage. (Incidentally the idea for sticking adjectives to people came from Cecilia's lesson found here)

I also needed to encourage them to use different categories of adjectives as we started off with a lot of colours! I finally had to forbid them using colours so we got a bit more variety.

  Next we put up some categories of adjectives on the board and they brought the postits and stuck them in the appropriate categories. The board ended up a bit messy but I think they got the general idea. If they had been a higher level or I'd been feeling braver I might have got them to figure out the categories for themselves.

 

Then they each had to pick five adjectives from different categories and say them. The other members of the class had to guess the person or object being referred to. This was a little slow... and perhaps I should have let them give full sentence descriptions rather than limiting them to the single words.

After that they wrote short descriptions of people / objects in the classroom and then we took it in turns to pull them out of a hat, read them and guess who it referred to. (They were written on white sticky labels so I was planning to get them to stick them to the person or object but I decided that was too repetitive.)

 

 

My overall impression of the lesson was good but tiring. I kind of knew where I was going but not having the security of a pile of photocopying there was hard. Also, whilst the language did come from them it was still quite teacher led. Anyway... I also want to write about the language follow up we did but I'll save it for the next post.

Any thoughts on how I could improve this most welcome :-)

 

Scene It! & New Resources on Protests in the Arab World...

So... because I enjoyed using the Egypt photo so much in my class the other week I decided to look again at Larry Ferlazzo's site and see what else I could find. I came across some new resources on the protests which led me to a great lesson plan on The Basics: Understanding the Upheaval in the Middle East .

Unfortunately, I don't have accesss to the internet in class and I'm still trying to figure out how to incorporate a more unplugged approach.

This conincided with Jason Renshaw uploading a whole load of really interesting unplugged Scene It! lessons complete with great teaching ideas.

Then some friends and I were talking about the protests and the amazing non violent approaches many of the protesters are taking. It's really quite beautiful. They told me about girls giving flowers to soldiers in Bahrain which led me this image here.

So there's a little insight into how my brain works! Anyway it has all culminated in an adaptation of the Scene It! resource which Jason very kindly made available in word format here. Unfortunately, it is not all unplugged there is a plugged section included because I really wanted to add some information into the mix as well as working with their current knowledge. Rightly or wrongly I'm not fully prepared to leave the Matrix just yet!

I've adapted the learning network session where each group answers a different set of questions then feeds back jigsaw style. However, I'm planning to print the questions out on coloured card and the readings on different coloured paper which in my head makes it a little better for some reason ;-p

Anyway all the resources are below if anyone wants to take a look :-) and now I really really really must do some marking!!

Download SceneIt Middle East Protests

Download SceneIt Middle East Protests Teacher notes

Download Jigsaw Questions

Download Four readings on Arab protests