Sad Mouse - Mark's story (an activity)

This is a lesson plan I developed for my TP teaching. It focuses on transforming words from one part of speech to another (so for instance happy, happily and happiness) and correct usage of the forms in sentence. The whole lesson is designed around a story. Recommended level of students is intermediate.

1) I begin with telling students what we are going to do today (create a story) and tell them two pieces of information about the main character (his name is Mark and he is not happy). Then I let them brainstorm both questions and answers using question words (What is Mark's job? Why is he sad? Where does he live? etc.) We end up with a basic idea of the character.

2) I show students a slide with several pictures depicting reasons why Mark is not happy. I let students discuss in pairs what I each picture represents. Afterwards, they share their ideas with the whole class.

3) After the these two warm-ups designed to intrigue the students, I get to the main aim of the lesson. I begin by making a table on the whiteboard with three columns - nouns, adjectives and adverbs. I give them an example on the first line, such as surprise, surprised and surprisingly. Then I hand out pieces of paper with a short text on them:

The students will find ten words in bold in the text. They are asked to determine the correct part of speech of each of the words. This way, they see the different parts of speech in use in the text. Next task of theirs is to rewrite the sentences by transforming each word in bold into a different part of speech. This task requires a bit of invention from their part but it is good for practicing working with the language. It is important to stress to the students that they may change the sentences any way they need in order to work the given word in the sentence. So the first one might be: "Mark didn't wake up happy because his dog sadly ran away the previous day." Or a more fancy version: "Mark woke up with sadness in his heart..."

nouns	adjectives	adverbs
happiness	happy	happily
sadness	sad	sadly
possibility	possible	possibly
honesty	honest	honestly
patience	patient	patiently
surprise	surprised	surprisingly
hope	hopeful	hopefully
luck	lucky	luckily
amazement	amazing	amazingly

4) Students will watch a three minute video (I subtitled mine but can't make it public for copyright reasons). Then, they are asked to summarize the video in five sentences. A screen with the events in the video in several steps was provided to guide them.

After they're finished, they will need to insert one noun, one adjective and one adverb form into each sentence. They may choose from any word from the text from the previous activity or choose from suggestions on screen:

The sentences may go something like: Mark patiently waved at people, or With luck, he met another person in costume, or He angrily kicked a street trash bin.

At this point, the lesson was taken over by my colleague who went on teaching phrasal verbs that has to do with the topic of relationships and Mark and the girl in the costume became a couple. As homework, the students were asked to finish the story any way they like. There was also an interactive element, because we asked them to include a part where Mark leaves a message for her girlfriend on an answering machine and the students actually recorded this message with their own voice using Vocaroo and pasted the link to the recording directly into the story. I think this was a nice way to make otherwise common task more engaging.

The idea behind this lesson plan was to give students idea of how are nouns, adjectives and adverbs commonly used in an English text (they often mixed these parts of speech in the past) by presenting them with the text in the activity n.3 and then make them work with the language autonomously in the activity n.4 without any guidance.
During the feedback however, it was pointed out to me that more guidance would be appropriate. So I would suggest to include another activity for smoother transition between n.3 and n.4 and to basically take it babysteps with students.

Notes from Class Management lecture, 14th November 2013

Class Management Ideas

a lecture by Anette Igel (igelanette@yahoo.co.uk)

• the rules should be established in the very first lesson of the school year
• keep the rules positive, as few “don’ts” as possible
• it is a good idea to let students come up with the rules themselves by brainstorming and only guide them to what you actually aim for - all IN ENGLISH! A lot of grammar used just in this activity (turning negative sentences into positive ones, etc.) - there is a notion of responsibility among the students for the rules if they are actually the ones who came up with them
• Activity - Anti-rules: Let students come up with the OPPOSITE of what is expected of them in classroom (“Speak out loud whenever you feel like it.” vs. “Keep quiet.” etc.)
• see to it that rules are followed (it usually takes only one example and the others will get the message)!
• Activity - Pyramid discussion: Split the class into small groups of two, let them brainstorm six adjectives for a given topic, then join groups to a larger one and boil the adjectives down to six again, repeat until the group is not the whole class again and then put the remaining (and supposedly the most essential) adjectives on board.
• keep your personal attitudes and feelings outside the classroom, your personal viewpoints affect your professional judgment and performance
• Activity: give students some answers first and them let them brainstorm questions for these answers - practices forming questions and choosing the correct tense.

• Activity: Dictation: Ask students to put down fifteen numbers with the following things (example follows):

1 - green (favorite color)
2- crappy (type of weather)
3 - Karen Gillan (favorite actor/actress)
4 - Peter (favorite boy/girl name)
5 - July (favorite month)
6 - train (favorite mean of transport)
7 - dog (favorite animal)
8 - pizza (favorite food)
9 - the Netherlands (favorite country or city)
10 - jeans (favorite piece of clothing)
11 - coffee shop (favorite type of shop)
12 - running (favorite activity)
13 - hacky sack (favorite object)
14 - beer (favorite drink)
15 - happy (favorite mood)

Then dictate them a short text with numbers in it. They need to replace the numbers with the stuff they have written earlier:

It was a crappy day in July. I was in the Netherlands and I was drinking some beer. Suddenly the phone rang. It was Karen Gillan and friends. They were happy because I was late. So I put on my green jeans and picked up hacky sack. I made sure that Peter, the dog, had some pizza, and left. I quickly travelled by train and went to coffee shop. When I arrived, I was surprised to see my friends were running there.

• Activity - Getting to know each other: an activity to remember everyone’s name - acronyms out of students’ names are made into somewhat truthful sentences that describe them, make these into posters and hang them around the classroom. Check grammar of the sentences as well!

Anette is

Not

English

Though she

Thinks in

English

Mirek

Is

of Rather

Energetic

Kind

• Activity - The best homework excuses: how to deal with students constantly apologizing for forgetting homework - the first student has to put the excuse on paper (“My dog ate my homework.”), this paper will be hanged in the classroom and every time someone else forgets the homework, he or she must come up with a new apology (it doesn’t substitute the homework but at least it makes them use the language in some way)
• how to deal with a noisy classroom: after entering the classroom, put several page/exercise numbers of students’ text book on board and announce this to be the homework, then, during the lesson, reward good work by erasing one number in time, this will give the class the notion that the better they behave, the less work they will have to endure at home (it is a good idea to keep the most essential exercises that you actually DO want as the homework on the top and keep them there)

Notes from Oxford seminar, 4th November 2013

Here follow my notes from Oxford Professional Development seminar for secondary teachers from the 4th of November 2013, MZK in Brno. More about the seminar and the speakers can be found here.

Learning to Fail - Failing to Learn

Gareth Davies


How can we teach students how to fail?

• marking is not the end of the process but in fact the beginning
• reward and praise good attempts
• change our language (don’t use the same phrases constantly - fail, mistake, wrong,…)
• allow “cheating”
• students decide what is good enough

Marking

• focus on the wrong answers as much as the correct ones
• why did the student make the mistake? what was his conjecture? this helps the teacher to understand his students’ thinking

Praising

• there should be equality among students in one classroom, even though the weak students usually need more encouragement and the good ones might feel discouraged for receiving less praising by doing a better job
• over praising can be dangerous if misplaced, if it’s justified and the students have good results and the improvement is apparent, it’s fine

Cheating

• students shouldn’t cheat the process of thinking and simply wait for the correct answers
• finding out the answers any other way (internet, answer sheet, copying from a friend) is a part of the process of learning and therefore ok

Activities

• reverse activity - teacher fills in gaps with some correct and some incorrect words and students are asked to find the mistakes
• information gap - students work in pairs, As get a text with gaps, Bs have the full text, their goal is for the student A to fill in the gaps with the help of B student
• come up with a mistake - students will receive a correct sentence, they will need to make a mistake in it and then give it to other groups to let them find the mistake

Classroom management ideas

• espionage - during a brainstorm or an activity, students will go spy on other groups in order to come back with the correct answer
• mistake day - have a given day when you won’t be correcting mistakes but only praising for good things
• Points for effort - let students know they will be rewarded for wrong answers as much as for the right ones
• quantity, not quality - more is more, the more the better
• I won’t accept your first answer - tell students they have more than one go for the exercises

Activities that Work

Jeremy Bowell


Students don’t speak English if

• they aren’t used to speaking in English
• they make a lot of mistakes
• they don’t have enough preparation for a task
• they don’t know what to say
• they are worried about their pronunciation

Activities

• Characters - students first come up with words or numbers, then these are given meaning (name a fruit –> this is your first name, name a female movie star –> this is your wife, etc.), based on this meaning you practice phrases, you talk to other people and find out stuff about them, communicative activity, students ask real questions but don’t feel embaressed to speak because they are not themselves, they are in the character, it builds confidence, a lot of practice (name a fruit, name a vegetable, name a number from 1 to 100, name your favorite movie star, yes/no question

• Coat of Arms - present the students with a number of objects or pictures and ask them to figure out the story or link behind them (ticket from a city, a postcard from different country, birthday postcard, cinema ticket, a medicine, a photograph, 

• Prove it! - present students with several statements (Everyone had breakfast this morning. Two students went to bed later than 11pm last night. No one went to the cinema last week. More than 50% of students have done their homework.), then let them prove they are correct by mingling around and asking others.

• show students answers and their goal is to come up with the correct question related to you (Pálava - What is your favorite place in the Czech Republic?, 11pm - What time did you go to bed last night? etc.)

• particular topic, e.g. Food in the UK - three columns, what they know (Fish and Chips, Afternoon tea, Cottage Pie), what they want to know (What do they eat for breakfast? What do they eat on special occasion? What is the most popular food in the UK?), what they learned (a place to put down all new information)

• Make your own crossword (practicing vocabulary) - name something you read (BOOK)

• Break it up (looking at texts) - break up the text into paragraphs and let the students guess some words in the text

• Reading circles - students read a short text and each has a different role and task afterwards (summariser summarizes the whole text in 50 words, word master underlines key words and new words in the text, connector relates the text to local issues, questioner asks additional questions about the text), in addition, there can be a role play (selecting ideally the strongest of the students) with a character related to the text, the rest of the class asks the character questions

• Cartoon stories (speaking activity) - provide a short cartoon without text and let students come up with a story to the pictures, interpret each individual picture in turn, describe and interpret the events in each frame

• fly-swating - this can be used for teaching vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, basically anything; words are either right on the whiteboard or on stickies, students form two lines and compete, you provide definitions of words, antonyms, phonetic form of the words on the board etc. or read a text and they need to grab the words as soon as they see it

A trip to Paris (reading activity)

1) Discuss with your partner the following questions:

a) Is Ellie still in France at the time she’s writing the letter? How long has she been there?

b) How many times did Ellie visit Paris in the past?

c) Would you say that Ellie is more interested in sightseeing or shopping?

Is André still travelling with Ellie and Lucy?

Summerize each of the three paragraphs of the letter in a single sentence.

#1 .................................................................................................................................

#2 .................................................................................................................................

#3 .................................................................................................................................

Look at the examples of the Present Perfect from the letter. Match them with the uses of the Present Perfect:

We’ve been here in France for about two weeks now.

My friend Lucy is really happy because she has met a handsome French guy.

I have always wanted to visit Paris.

to talk about a past action without saying exactly when it happened

to emphasise a present result of something that happened in the past

to describe something that started in the past and continues in the present

Ask your partner using the correct tense:

about his/her travel experience with France/Paris.

about his/her dream city that they visited or they are going to visit.

about his/her love affair with a handsome stranger from another country.

 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 

Do we use Present Perfect or Past Simple when:

Something happened in the specific time in the past.

The time of the action in the past is not given or known.

A past action has results in the present.

The past action is not linked with the present.

Complete the rules with the correct words in brackets:

We use the Present Perfect to talk about actions that (are happening now / happened in the past) and have clear consequences in the (past / present).

We use the Past Simple to talk about actions that happened in the past and (we know exactly when they happened / we only know they happened at some time before 

download the whole activity in .pdf