Take Them Back to the Well

Here is an activity you can do with your learners to allow them to get more ROI from a text they have already studied, including having done any and all activities that were included with a given written or audio text.

This activity requires no paper, just one die per group of 3-4 students and a board on which to post the directions. You can modify the requirements of each roll of the die depending on the level you teach.

Remind students to ask their peers in the group for feedback after they have completed the task on their turn. Play proceeds clockwise.

One thing I like about this game is that it has an element of choice and an element of chance.

How do you guide learners back into a familiar text to take advantage of their having crested the initial cognitive burden of learning all the new terms? Do you think it's important to do that as a rule?

If you would like to know more about taking learners 'back to the well,' consider joining me and John Sivell on December 10th from 7 to 8 p.m. for a webinar on the topic. Save the date. :)

Outdoor Classroom Day

For two days I have pushed up sweat-slipped eyeglasses with the back of a soil-dark hand. The back of my neck is sunburned, and muscles are so stiff and sore that I will barely be able to get out of bed tomorrow. But the Early Girl and Roma are in the ground, empty cages waiting above them for vines that will branch and climb. Nasturtiums (shouldn't the plural be Nasturia?) and Marigolds guard the Dinosaur Kale and Rainbow Chard, seedlings all. A three-inch promise of Zucchini sits atop a rich, black mound.

Covered in rosebush scratches, I know that I am alive.

I'm told that May 18th is Outdoor Classroom Day. The educators who thought up this annual event probably had K-12 in mind, but I think outdoor time could be good for adult learners, too. What do you think?

Tomorrow is not May 18th, but the seniors' class and I are hopping on the city bus in order to check out the recently donated open-air Ping-pong table in Windsor's Kiwanis Park. This follows a module on free and low-cost things to do in Windsor and another module during which some students taught the rest of us how table tennis is played.

If I remember to take pictures, we can turn these into a Language Experience Approach (LEA) story afterward. I've never used LEA with any group other than literacy. This will be a good way for us to go materials light and will save the day after teacher spent all her lesson planning time holding a pitchfork. I wonder how seniors will like LEA, whether it will prove to be a valuable tool worth using again.

How about you? With the interminable wet and chilly weather finally abating and the sun smiling down, are you thinking of ways to combine an ESL lesson with a bit of fresh air? I would love to hear.

Board Game for Vocabulary Review

I am indebted to Val Baggaley, ELL Instructor at the Centre for Excellence in Immigrant and Intercultural Advancement for sharing this great board game template. In this version that I'm sharing in the BLANK TEMPLATES section of my free resources area, I have inserted royalty-free clipart images as sample placeholders. If you have a newer version of MS Word, you can simply right-click on any image and choose "Change Picture." The new picture that you insert will then automatically size itself to fit the cell. How cool is that?

I am in love with this board game. I use it with my literacy learners either by filling it with images from the unit they have just finished (e.g., furniture and parts of the house, articles of clothing and weather) or by leaving in one item for each letter of the alphabet. The alphabet version is especially useful when we have new learners join the class who are still familiarizing themselves with the alphabet and related sounds. This is why, as you will note in the sample template, the five vowels are represented by words beginning with the short vowel sound and not the long. (Otherwise I surely would have used ice cream for "I" instead of igloo, a word my learners will perhaps never need.)

One reason I find this board game especially valuable is that it accommodates a multi-level group, as my literacy class seems always to be. Students roll a die and move coloured markers from START to FINISH. After landing on a square, the learner must at least name what is in the picture. Students are encouraged by me and by their peers to use as much English as they can muster in talking about the picture. Other players can encourage them with questions regarding colour, like/dislike, etc. When that player has run out of ways to talk about the picture, play continues clockwise.

In addition to finding this game a fun way for literacy learners to review sounds and vocabulary, I have had success using it with the seniors class. Their speaking/listening skills are at about CLB 3 while their reading ability and grammar knowledge are much higher. In general, my morning class does not like to play games, but they make an exception for this one. Well, they don't like using the dice or markers, but they readily grab copies of the game board and sit in small groups to quiz each other on the terms of the unit we've been covering. Whatever works!

For game pieces, I find that plastic-covered paper clips work wonderfully since there are many colours in a pack. I just bend one part so that it is perpendicular to the other part. This way the paperclip has a foot to rest on and a little handle by which to grab it and move it around the board. If you have game pieces from board games picked up at yard sales, all the better!

Tip: If you have a group that tends to rush through this too quickly, announcing "teacher, finished!" before another group has even made it to the halfway point, give that group a penny instead of a die. Heads = move 2 spaces; tails = move one space. Heh, heh. ;)

If you end up using Val's board game, please leave a comment to let us know how it went over with your learners, what level they are, etc. If you come up with successful variations on this game, let others know!

Happy Year of the Wood Goat

When I ordered four lunar new year treats from a nearby restaurant, I wrongly assumed they would all be ready-to-eat. But the taro cake needed to be pan-fried. I was floored when a staff member of a different department offered her time and their kitchen to slice up and fry the taro cake then bring it up to us on a plate. Not a day goes by that I don't remember how fortunate I am to work with people like J in an environment where you'll never hear anyone say, "That's not my job."

Students brought dumplings, peanuts, sunflower seeds, sesame balls, glutinous rice balls rolled in something yummy, black bean cakes, fruit salad, sticky buns, and more. The koi cake you see in the picture was purchased.

The prior week we had guests from LINC One whose instructor was playing chaperone on a field trip for Black History Month. I was in need of material that would both appeal to the seniors and be comprehensible to the level one students. Once again, The Westcoast Reader came to my rescue. We used the lesson about Lunar New Year from the Special Days and Holidays book, including page ten from the Word Games and Puzzles book (see their sidebar) so we could all find out about our respective animals in the Chinese Zodiac.

After reading the text and working with the vocabulary, we played "Find Someone Who" with a BINGO card I created. This all took two days (four and a half hours of classroom time). I was thrilled when two of the LINC one students, given the option on day two of watching a movie with other students, chose instead to come back to our class!

Did you do anything for Valentine's Day, Family Day, Lunar New Year or Black History Month? I would love to hear about it if you did.

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Coming Next Week: Why and how I use Total Physical Response (TPR) and how you can, too.

Why We Play Sentence Unscramble

Over the weekend I was Skyping with John Sivell (TESL educator at Brock), and we were talking about how literacy instruction should vary depending on whether the target language has a shallow or deep orthography. 

With their lovely one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence, languages like Spanish and German have been very easy for me to learn to read and pronounce. Learning to read English as a second language, on the other hand, must be quite a challenge for our literacy students. Our learners have to contend with so many spelling irregularities, homophones and homographs, don't they? One letter can make a number of sounds, and one sound can be represented in a host of ways.

Once we as a class have pretty much mastered short vowel sounds in CVC words, I enjoy teaching the two-vowel rule. But I wince every time we run into an exception. We put those in a special column. They are our English-spelling-is-sometimes-crazy-I'm-so-sorry words. How can we better equip ESL literacy learners to take on a language in which predicting the pronunciation of the word in front of you isn't so cut and dried?

From the week we made snack bars in class.

John pointed out that when you are teaching an orthographically shallow language, you can focus a lot on the phonetic building blocks of the language. That's often enough for the learners. But when the target language is one with an orthography as deep as that of English? You have to support the learners with lots of oral practice before reading, and especially with plenty of syntax practice. Knowledge of the S-V-O pattern of English helps learners predict what the next word in a sentence might be, which in turn helps with fluency in reading.

Every week my literacy class tackles a new story or task. If it's a story, it might be Mo Stays Warm from the ESL Literacy Network, A New Dress from Talk of the Block series, or a book we have written ourselves based on photos taken while engaged in an activity. Whatever the text, I always load the ten to twelve new vocabulary words of the week into Spelling City, which allows students to work with the words on computer lab day--spelling and playing various games with them.

One key game is Sentence Unscramble. I always edit the sample sentence for every word in my Spelling City word list so that when students play this game, they are unscrambling sentences taken directly from our text. If I am giving students a sentence scramble worksheet in class, we will first play the game together as a class, pulling up the website on the classroom projector board.

I have found that by making syntax activities a regular part of our weekly routine, students quickly internalize the S-V-O pattern of English sentences--without a bit of metalanguage! Higher levels enjoy this game, too.

Update: This game has been moved to the premium section, prompting me to ask my school for a subscription. We pay about $54 per year USD. Now each student has an account and their scores go into my grade book. I can also print certificates of achievement for them, which we put in their portfolios.

Why We Love BINGO (And How We Play It)

I must confess that the first time I saw an instructor playing BINGO with a class, I thought the teacher was just being lazy. But since trialling the activity with a literacy class, I have to say that I'm completely sold on its value to learners.

The first difference between many BINGO games supplied in ESL books and the one I use is that you are following what I call Martine's* Rule Number One: "Whenever possible, have the students do the work." Instead of passing out ten or more different BINGO cards to ensure everyone doesn't BINGO at once, pass out a blank grid with the bank of 24 words at the bottom and let the students place the words randomly (key word: RANDOMLY) in the BINGO grid. I print an extra copy for the caller and cut up the word bank so I can place one word per strip of paper in a bag or bowl to draw during the game. We use dots pressed out from coloured card stock as markers.

If there are true beginners in the group who need extra support, two things happen: 1) a stronger student will almost always move unbidden to the seat beside the weak student, and 2) I will project the word bank onto the board and point to each word as I call it. I love the fact that strong students don't look up / cheat while those whose skills are still developing get extra help in a discreet way.

Why do I feel this game has value to the learner?

• It is giving learners' brains one more exposure to the week's words.
• Students get practice copying / printing 
• Students get practice listening and recognizing the word as it's pronounced, which is much harder than it has been throughout the week since the word is not in context.
• Learners get practice reading.
• Having to quickly find the correct word in the grid, students come to realize that good spelling and legible printing work in their favour.
• Winners must call out five words and pronounce them well before they can come claim a prize.

After a few rounds, I usually ask one of the stronger students if s/he would like to come up to the front while I play his/her BINGO card. Often more than one student will volunteer, so they take turns. This is when the energy in the classroom really picks up. Students relax more, laugh, tease, correct the caller on his/her pronunciation, razz the caller if s/he goes too fast or slow, and in general have a lot of fun.

Colleagues tell me they play this game with higher levels by giving the definition of the word rather than the word itself. I'll bet there are lots of ways to play.

The BINGO template in Word is in my Free Resources - Blank Templates section. I have used Word's "columns" feature to align the word bank at the bottom, which can be found in the LAYOUT menu. To get this to behave for me, I type the 24 words in a single column, allowing them to flow onto the next page, and add a blank line at the end. I then highlight the words, making sure I don't highlight that last blank line. Then I click LAYOUT - Columns - three columns. If this fights you, just use the tab key to arrange your words in three columns at the bottom of the BINGO grid. Depending on which font you choose, you may have to adjust the font size. I use Comic Sans 18 point.

Happy teaching! Oh, and DO let me know if you use this resource. Or share your ideas on this topic. It would make my day.

*I feel so fortunate to have had Martine Johnson as my main TESL educator at CCLCS in Toronto. She has since retired.