Talk to the Stars, Class Idea

Not so long ago I was driving along, at my usual pedestrian pace, singing as if I were the star of diva. It soon occured to me that perhaps I wasn't Whitney Houston reincarnated. I was, and am, in fact a 34 year old bearded English teacher whose range when it comes to singing isn't even close to that of the late great songstress. Anyway, I decided instead of singing along I'd simply ask Whitney some question, which she could then answer from beyond the grave. 

Between the point of laughter and annoyance my wonderful lady wife told me that what I was doing would be a good activity for the students in my class. From that moment on it crept into my classroom. First as a filler and later I developed it into a full hour long (or longer) class. I've since presented the idea at a couple of conferences and a nuimber of language academies. Each time the feedback has been great, upon using it with their classes a number of teachers have got back to me and told me it has been very motivating for their students. 

It is particularly good for question formation but it's also great for using more natural language.

The way I've developed the class is as follows. I'll give instructions and examples.

• Split the class into 2 groups. 

Get each group to come up with as many different musical genres as possible in 2 minutes.
Next students come up with as many artists as they can.  (Encourage students to use language of disappointment at this stage "ohh yeah, of course" or "I can't believe I didn't get that one." It's a great opportunity to work on their tone)

• Now split the class into pairs. 

Students then come up with a list of their favourite songs of all time. Allow 3 or for minutes.
Ask each group for a top 3 songs and get them to expalin to another pair as to why they like those songs and what they are about.

These two warmer activities should take between 10 and 15 minutes.

• When everyone has finished discussing their favourite songs get each pair to choose one of their top 3 and write it on the board.   

Have a vote amonst the students as to which song they want to work on throughout the next section of the class.  

• I'm going to pretend my class voted for  I have nothing  by Whitney Houston. I have nothing They usually go for something like Perfect by Ed Sheeran, or Happier, by Ed Sheeran. And sometimes Photograph...... by Ed Sheeran.
• The next step depends on whether you have a multilingual class or a mono lingual class. I teach in Spain and thus the class is monolingual.  I next get the students to take the first (or any) 5 or six lines and translate them one by one. SO they can fully understand the meaning of the song. 

Share my life

Compartir mi vida
Take me for what I am
Tomame por lo que soy
'cuase I'll ne ver change
Porque nunca voy a cambiar 
All My coulours for you
Todos mis colores para ti

The translation may not be 100% accuate and there may be phrasal verbs or phrases that don't always work in the students´given tongue but it does give them a general idea of what the song is about and what the singer is trying to say. 

• The fun really begins now as you tell them they're going to interview the celebrity. They have to (as a group) come up with questions that will be answered by each line of the song. This is a wonderful place to introduce some more natural language and make the activity more exciting. 

Here is a quick example. You need to be ready with your youtube link queued to pause and un pause giving the celebrity a chance to answer. 

"Hi, Whitney, thanks for joining us today. I've got a few little questions for you. Firstly, what would you like me to do?"

(Unpause) Share my life

"Wow, we've only just met that's very forward. What should I take you for?"

(unpause) Take me for what I am.

"I'll bear that in mind, Is there something you'll never do?"

(unpause) 'Cause I'll never change

"Change what exactly, and for whom?"

(unpause) All my colours for you.

You get the gist. Rather than simply working on the questions it really helps students become more natural. I also did it with Adele's hit Hello, in the form of a phone call. 

• When you've gone through the activity with the class, the next step is to let the students go off on their own and work on their own song. I f you have time remaining in the class do it then and work with them on corrections, or simply send it as homework and check it in the following class. Ther interviews only tend to last between 10 and 30 seconds. Those students who want to do more let them do more. 

To close the class I use Lyrics Training to see how much they've learnt from the song and to give them a chance to hear the whole thing again.   

In the following months this activity can be used as a simple 10 minute filler and is great for students struggling with quesiton formation. 

I hope this comes in handy over these cold winter months. 

I'll leave you with my phone call to Adele, Let's see if I have time to upload a video in future. 

"Hi, Who's calling?"

Hello, it's me 

"Ohhhh, Adele, Long time no speak. What have you been up to lately?"

I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet

"Ok, no problem my dear, why do you want to meet?"

To go over everything

"Wow, everything, that is an awful lot of things. You know they say time is money. Will we have time for that? 

They say that time's supposed to heal ya But I ain't done much healing

"Ok so they say more than just time being money they also say it heals. Well get well soon Adele". 

So there you have it a nice class based on music, revolving around questions and ending in fun.  

Why are you so petrified of silence?

Why is it as language teachers we sometimes feel grossly uncomfortable when the class is sitting in silence. We sometimes think, these guys are learning a language why on Earth aren't they speaking it, ALL THE TIME?

Last year I had the good fortune of working with some great teachers and here I picked up a number of great activities. One of which was centred almost entirely around the notion of a silent classroom. I used this wonderful warmer and have since adapted it for my teenage PET class and will do so with my pre-advanced class later in the term.

So the big question. How can we make students speak without making a sound?

It's pretty simple really, they write to each other. The first time I did this in class, I did it with every single level I had.

I made sure they entered the class in absolute silence. There was a slide on the board (which you can find here) which told them they weren't to speak to each other but they could communicate through scraps of paper and a pencil.
The slide also contained a couple of starter questions to help them on their way.
For the kiddies it was stuff like: "What did you do at school today?"
For the adults something similar but a little more complex like: What did you get up to at work today?


It worked really well.

For that very reason I decided to do it again, this time with my PET students. I told them to make sure they brought their mobile phones to class.

When they entered the room in silence they could see the activity outline up on the board . I sat them in a circle facing away from each other and gave each of them a piece of paper to write their number on.

I then gave the numbers out to different students.  I then let them chat to each other, freely. In English, in silence. I put a few ideas up on the board to help them out. I gestured questioningly towards my students to see if anyone wanted to make a suggestion at a conversation starter. If so they had the chance to write it up on the board (without using words of course)

The next step was to see if they could deal with multitasking.  I ushered them to change numbers and add the new person to their group. There were then three people in each group and everyone was speaking to in two groups each.

At first this caused a bit of an issue, but soon enough their amazing teenage brains adapted to it and their multiwhatsapping brain came to the fore. After a good ten minutes I stopped everyone and asked them to read aloud what had come up in their conversations.

Some of it was surprisingly deep, two of the students had got themselves into a discussion as to how the Spanish education system was in desperate need for reform. Other students were talking about how good Cristiano's goal was the night before. Best of all though they had been writing in English and correcting each other's work and having fun at the same time. Never in my life have I seen a group of 12 teenagers so happy to sit in silence and speak English to each other. It was utterly glorious.

Give it a go. If your students don't have phones, just give them some scraps of paper and get them to pass them around.

'til the next time

Potatoes and Their True Potential

I've got root vegetables on the mind. Root vegetables? What are you on about Harry?!

I recently sparked a great deal of interest in one of my classes by walking simply placing a potato on my desk as the class walked in.

"Teacher, A potato?" questioned a rather befuddled Alfredo.

"Yes, Alfredo, it's a potato. Very good but what else could it be?" I asked the teenager usually nattering away in Spanish as he walks in.

He stopped in his tracks and respond it could be a Spanish omelette if we just added a few eggs and some onions.

After getting a few of the more obvious answers I got students to sit down in groups and try and write 10 unique uses of a potato.  We got a few good ones. A door stop. a pencil holder, a paper weight and one particularly strange students felt it would work well as an instrument of death as you could destroy the evidence in a delicious fashion. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. Or run to my car.

It's a great way to upgrade lower level students' language. I had my kids 4 (10 year old) saying things like:

"Well, it's a potato but it could be used as a toy."

For my B1 adults I created a quick conversation template that I put up on the board to get them to use language slightly above their level.

A: "Well, It's obviously a potato, but it could be used as a............ or even a........... not to mention a............."

B: "I see you're point. They're all great ideas. However, I'm pretty sure it would be best used as a............ . What do you reckon?"

My favourite idea from this class came from a lady in her early fifties who suggested the best use of a potato would be as a fake breast.

I've also found with my higher level students, teens in particular, it's a great way to get them using their mobile phones in class. Words like doorstop and bookend don't tend to pop up in everyday language, so after they've described what it could be used as:

"It could be used as the thing that keeps doors open."

I get them to take out their phones and ask Google exactly what it is. They type in, "What's the name of the thing that is used to keep doors open, in English."

As a warmer I found this really worked and got the students thinking straight away. I went on to try it with other vegetables and then on to other household items. By the end of the month students were disappointed if they walked in and there wasn't a foreign object sitting on my desk waiting to be analyzed.

Another fantastic item is the eternally useful paper clip. Which can be used as practical things such as opening your iPhone or other more surreal ideas like the zip on a zipline for small beasties. I was particularly fond of that idea.

Yesterday I ended the activity by telling my students that potatoes could be anything, which meant they were potatoes. I then went rouind and each students stated loud and proud. I AM A POTATO.

Give it a try. Get your students thinking outside the box as soon as they walk into the room. It'll go down as a class that lives long in the memory. That's for sure.

Til next time

Getting to know your students a little better.

How do you get students to pay attention in class? Well, preparation is one of the big things. If you're ready for a class and don't just go in and throw a class together ad hoc it'll generally run an awful lot smoother.
Other than that making the class relevant to the students will always spark interest. Small things like writing their names in examples and mentioning their names out of context tend to help.
That's why I devised this questionnaire. I wanted to know more about my students to enable me to tailor the classes to their needs and, perhaps more importantly, their interests.

A fully editable version is available here Questionnaire and my sample answers here my answers. I've updated this blog with a sample of one of my students answers. It restored my faith in humanity just check out Iñigo's answers

Print it off, hand it out and obviously change your answers so they're appropriate to your classes level. If you're feeling imaginative why not try in your student's mother tongue.

Now I've got my students answers I can change parts of my classes to make sure at least one person in the class is giving me their undivided attention or even getting others to give their attention to them.

If you were an animal, what animal would you be? Why?

What is the best book you’ve ever read? Tell me a something about it.

What is your biggest strength when using English? Speaking, listening etc

What area do you need/want to work on the most?

If you could have been alive in any place during any era, when and where would it have been?

What do you do to improve your English outside of the classroom?

What is your favourite English word? Why?

What do you know more about than most people?

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

In an Ideal class what would you learn?

Who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Batman? Why?

What is your superpower? What real superpower would you change it for?

post-it fun for all ages.

Good morning one and all.
I'm sure you've all used and enjoyed one of 3m's finest inventions; the gloriously underrated post-it note. Be it as a reminder to pick up milk or an effort to get your son to remember to take his PE kit out of he washing.
How many of you have used it in a classroom situation? Quite a few I imagine.
This week I've been teaching clothes to my youngest students, body parts to some teens and idioms of the body to my adults. Whilst flicking through ideas online I saw people drawing outlines of their students on the white board and labelling them. I thought this might be a bit of fun. Rather than drawing around my students though I simply plunked them on a chair at the front of the class, gave each team a different colours set of post-its and got them to set about sticking them to the model at the front of class. After I saw that the kids enjoyed it so much I cranked it up a notch and tried it with my teens. A roaring success again. Finally it came to my adult class and as we all know adults are the biggest kids of all. They all got mega involved and were tearing around the classroom trying to stick their idioms to their classmate. Thankfully none of them had found a pain in the ass or being a right tit. That could've caused a complaint or two.

give it a shot. I guarantee every so gel student will have a blast.

Till next time

What's that sound?

Good day one and all. A blog post with some new content, how strange I hear you cry from the rooftops.
Here's a little activity I love to do with all ages and levels. It's on of the more interactive, tactile, jumpy around activities we talked about at the conference on Saturday.
I like to choose my two sounds from the minimal pairs list. (Check the slides on the STRIP PowerPoint #jazzhands)Next I stick them on either side of the room and elicit what each sound is and draw students attention to their mouth shape when using the words.

The next step for my is to run through the words I am about to use in the activity. I usually do this with a simple slide and some coloured board markers. I get students to work in pairs and decide which colour is which sound. With the slide pìctures you can see two examples.

When the students are up to scratch with the words, their sounds and meanings I split the class into two or three groups.  There is a team leader who picks the words (which have been cut up and put in a cup) then they say the word to the next memeber of the team. Player two attaches a piece of blue tac to the word and passes it to player three. Again repeating the word. Player three then must say the word and stick it under the relevant phoneme stuck on the wall without looking at it.

When the time is up students sit down and check each others answers. The winning team is the one with the most correct answers. to push the students a little further I give them three minutes to then write a sentence or paragraph using as many of the words freom the previous activity. After three minutes each group has to read their sentnnces aloud.

I've found this last bit of drilling, in context, really helps improve the use of the sounds in question and since i've implemented this final part I've seen far fewer mistakes in the pron. Especially with the 3: sound. No longer do students talk about their beerday and their birthday is something we can all talk about together.

right that's all for today. It's great to be back blogging again. With some real content. I hope you find it of some use.

til the next tim