I was reading the Roanoke Times on-line and was really moved by this article. One of the professors who died was a French teacher, and some of her students created a French immersion program at a Blacksburg elementary school in her honor. I was recently asked if I thought Tech could recover from the shootings, and initially I thought it was a bit of a strange question -- of course they (we) would. But as I read this, I saw that even though people are moving forward it's obviously something that still affects everyone. Two of our friends were friends with Jocelyne. It was an absolutely tragic loss, among many others.
Jocelyne Couture-Nowak was a very talented, enthusiastic teacher of the sort who would come home exhausted after teaching young students but still find the time to sew a kangaroo suit to use in class. Her husband saved her teaching props and the Tech students are using them for inspiration to create their own. It's great to see the partnership between Tech and the local schools developing in this particular way. I'm thinking of contacting someone at Harding Avenue Elementary or VT Engage to see if there's anything they'd really like to have from France since it seems that they are trying to expand it to other elementary schools and are asking for more funding. I did my first ESL volunteer work at Harding, part of my student internship and also taught summer school there, so I'd love to help out if I can.
Anybody have ideas of things that might be useful for them?
(cross-posted on Pardon My French)
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
11 Months Later...
I might be ready to dust off this blog. I officially returned to work in September, but I'm teaching so few hours (by choice) that it's really more of a hobby that I get paid for at this point. It's clear to me now that I still love teaching elementary aged students, though.
Today I was pleasantly surprised by my students' enthusiasm for a very quick Mad-Libs inspired Valentine's Day activity that I created in approximately 2 minutes. They're in CE1-CE2 and have had at least one year of English before. I try to give them little cultural tidbits every now and then without taking too much time out of the main language focus, so I talked very briefly about how children celebrate Valentine's Day back home. (I was trapped by one clever student who said, "So, where's our candy, then, huh?" Mental note to self: find the box with the Harry Potter cards and suckers and be ready for this next time).
It's not necessarily the most communicative nor most creative of activities, but it doesn't take long to do and they loved it so much that I'll do it again. The only special material I used was a book of photocopiable thematic stationery for K-3 students, which is basically a bunch of fancy themed borders for students to write in. I've used it several times and they seem to like working with it. I'm sure you can find something similar on the web or just make your own using clip art, but for me this type of book is worth the expense. I initially intended this to be a quick wrap-up at the end since they've been working on body parts and describing people, but I might try to figure out a way to expand this.
At the top of the paper, I wrote My Funny Valentine, and underneath I wrote Your ________ is like a ___________ [repeat 3 times] but that's okay, I still like you anyway. Students had to write 4 body parts of their choice in the first blank, and 4 animals in the second blank and the end result was pretty hilarious to them once they figured out what it meant. I find some French students to have a little trouble at times with the concept "of your choice" ... they want to know if they need to write in blue pen or red pen or where exactly they should write their name and such. Invariably I'll have one or two students who really get anxious about this kind of stuff but today they somehow decided it should be the 4 body parts of their friend that they really admired. Hey, whatever works, and most importantly, whatever gets them started.
They ended up asking for vocabulary they didn't know (a bonus for me), and got some alphabet pronunciation practice in as well. The kid who in an earlier post stuck Mr. Potato Head parts up his nose for laughs last year came up with "Your heart is like a tiger," which I thought was very poetic (even though it was accidental). Then they ended up sharing their poems in English all on their own without prompting, demanded extra copies so they could make more for their friends, and stayed so late I had to shoo them out of the classroom. The real bonus for me was the part when they spontaneously shared their poems, so in the end I guess it was more communicative than I had predicted.
The other teachable moment that I ran out of time for was the possibility of a Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head Valentine story. They wanted to act out a whole kissy-kissy, I love you do you love me, check the box yes or no routine, but it wasn't possible today. I might try and combine the two activities in a situation where Mr. Potato Head has to court Mrs. Potato Head in English and see what they come up with.
I have to wonder if today's success was due to my (ahem) in-depth planning or rather to the fact that the sun was shining and they were in a good mood. I'll try not to think too hard about it.
Anyway, if you have any ideas for improvement, a spin-off activity, or just a general comment I'd love to hear it. ETA: Margie had a wonderful suggestion for a tie-in activity: From Head to Toe by Eric Carle. It covers both body parts as well as animals and provides students opportunities to act out the book. I'm going to use it in our next class. It would have been better if I had read it before making Valentines, but it's still relevant and I'm sure the kids will love it. This is one of my essential books for English teaching in elementary schools.
Today I was pleasantly surprised by my students' enthusiasm for a very quick Mad-Libs inspired Valentine's Day activity that I created in approximately 2 minutes. They're in CE1-CE2 and have had at least one year of English before. I try to give them little cultural tidbits every now and then without taking too much time out of the main language focus, so I talked very briefly about how children celebrate Valentine's Day back home. (I was trapped by one clever student who said, "So, where's our candy, then, huh?" Mental note to self: find the box with the Harry Potter cards and suckers and be ready for this next time).
It's not necessarily the most communicative nor most creative of activities, but it doesn't take long to do and they loved it so much that I'll do it again. The only special material I used was a book of photocopiable thematic stationery for K-3 students, which is basically a bunch of fancy themed borders for students to write in. I've used it several times and they seem to like working with it. I'm sure you can find something similar on the web or just make your own using clip art, but for me this type of book is worth the expense. I initially intended this to be a quick wrap-up at the end since they've been working on body parts and describing people, but I might try to figure out a way to expand this.
At the top of the paper, I wrote My Funny Valentine, and underneath I wrote Your ________ is like a ___________ [repeat 3 times] but that's okay, I still like you anyway. Students had to write 4 body parts of their choice in the first blank, and 4 animals in the second blank and the end result was pretty hilarious to them once they figured out what it meant. I find some French students to have a little trouble at times with the concept "of your choice" ... they want to know if they need to write in blue pen or red pen or where exactly they should write their name and such. Invariably I'll have one or two students who really get anxious about this kind of stuff but today they somehow decided it should be the 4 body parts of their friend that they really admired. Hey, whatever works, and most importantly, whatever gets them started.
They ended up asking for vocabulary they didn't know (a bonus for me), and got some alphabet pronunciation practice in as well. The kid who in an earlier post stuck Mr. Potato Head parts up his nose for laughs last year came up with "Your heart is like a tiger," which I thought was very poetic (even though it was accidental). Then they ended up sharing their poems in English all on their own without prompting, demanded extra copies so they could make more for their friends, and stayed so late I had to shoo them out of the classroom. The real bonus for me was the part when they spontaneously shared their poems, so in the end I guess it was more communicative than I had predicted.
The other teachable moment that I ran out of time for was the possibility of a Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head Valentine story. They wanted to act out a whole kissy-kissy, I love you do you love me, check the box yes or no routine, but it wasn't possible today. I might try and combine the two activities in a situation where Mr. Potato Head has to court Mrs. Potato Head in English and see what they come up with.
I have to wonder if today's success was due to my (ahem) in-depth planning or rather to the fact that the sun was shining and they were in a good mood. I'll try not to think too hard about it.
Anyway, if you have any ideas for improvement, a spin-off activity, or just a general comment I'd love to hear it. ETA: Margie had a wonderful suggestion for a tie-in activity: From Head to Toe by Eric Carle. It covers both body parts as well as animals and provides students opportunities to act out the book. I'm going to use it in our next class. It would have been better if I had read it before making Valentines, but it's still relevant and I'm sure the kids will love it. This is one of my essential books for English teaching in elementary schools.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
On Maternity Leave and Thinking About A Career Change
So, I haven't posted in a while even though I've had topics I'm really interesting in writing about. I just didn't have the willpower. One I may follow up on later involves some really interesting things I learned from cours particuliers during our "Tell Me A Story" lessons...it involved no preparation on my part but they really enjoyed it and I learned a lot about them, plus it covered those dreaded multiple past tenses as well as general fluency.
Another post was about the difference between the Assistant program here in France and the one in Japan. Personally, I highly recommend the JET program(me), so if anyone is looking to be an assistant as an after-uni experience, I say Go To Japan. There is a lot of cultural adjustment to be done, but it pays extremely well for the amount of work involved (or at least it did), it's well-organized, and was a fantastic experience for me. However, both of the French assistants I've met here have been absolutely miserable and one left early because she felt that the schools didn't honor their side of the contract. Just what I've heard. If you're dead set on France, then come along by all means...just be aware that what you may be asked to do isn't what you signed up for, and things may be more expensive than you expect. Maybe I'll get into more detail later on.
Finally, I've often wanted to post about the fact that I don't really enjoy my job as I feel I should. Something is missing. I feel more like an animatrice than a teacher. The resources and time spent with the kids limits what I can do with them, so the classes are just a FLEX approach and that's difficult for me. I loved ESL back home -- the kids were motivated and I saw so much real progress, plus I got to do a lot of interesting projects with them and see them using language in authentic ways. Here, I could sort of do that periodically during the English camps, but then the school decided it would be a good idea to have teachers switch groups throughout the week...so my ability to do a group project just got thrown out the window. Oh, well. One of my expat friends with a teaching degree says she feels the exact same way, so at least I'm not alone.
So, for now, at least, I'm taking a break from teaching. I feel that I'm isolated from other teachers here and had hoped to find a way of communicating/supporting/interacting with each other. It's weird.
Another post was about the difference between the Assistant program here in France and the one in Japan. Personally, I highly recommend the JET program(me), so if anyone is looking to be an assistant as an after-uni experience, I say Go To Japan. There is a lot of cultural adjustment to be done, but it pays extremely well for the amount of work involved (or at least it did), it's well-organized, and was a fantastic experience for me. However, both of the French assistants I've met here have been absolutely miserable and one left early because she felt that the schools didn't honor their side of the contract. Just what I've heard. If you're dead set on France, then come along by all means...just be aware that what you may be asked to do isn't what you signed up for, and things may be more expensive than you expect. Maybe I'll get into more detail later on.
Finally, I've often wanted to post about the fact that I don't really enjoy my job as I feel I should. Something is missing. I feel more like an animatrice than a teacher. The resources and time spent with the kids limits what I can do with them, so the classes are just a FLEX approach and that's difficult for me. I loved ESL back home -- the kids were motivated and I saw so much real progress, plus I got to do a lot of interesting projects with them and see them using language in authentic ways. Here, I could sort of do that periodically during the English camps, but then the school decided it would be a good idea to have teachers switch groups throughout the week...so my ability to do a group project just got thrown out the window. Oh, well. One of my expat friends with a teaching degree says she feels the exact same way, so at least I'm not alone.
So, for now, at least, I'm taking a break from teaching. I feel that I'm isolated from other teachers here and had hoped to find a way of communicating/supporting/interacting with each other. It's weird.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Thinking About Thanksgiving
I'm not sure if I'll do a Thanksgiving lesson this year or not, but I've started looking for good children's books as a starting point for next year. After years in the elementary school I've learned to get better at selecting appropriate children's books -- there are some that are interesting but the language is just too complex, and there are other ones with appropriate language but the pictures and overall storyline are terrible -- so I thought I'd put together a list of potential ones I'm thinking about buying for the future. I do have to say, though, that I don't mind buying kids' books on Thanksgiving because I intend to keep the tradition alive for my own little one(s).
Here in France, I tend to try to find a good blend of a simple book with great illustrations once kids know how to read, and I think I've been successful in incorporating the material into lessons. They're able to start picking out words they know, talking about the pictures, and we're also working on figuring things out through context. Some of the Scholastic non-fiction books I have are just perfect for my young guys, but I'm no longer eligible for Scholastic, unfortunately.
So, here is my potential list of what I think are candidates for a good intro book on Thanksgiving for young learners. I only have seen a couple of pages, so I could be easily disappointed. I worry that the board book format will be seen as a little babyish for some, but no one has ever complained (yet). If you know anything about any of these books, please feel to let me know how you think they would do as an EFL-friendly intro to Turkey Day.
This First Thanksgiving Day by Laura Krauss Melmed
Thanksgiving Is for Giving Thanks by Margaret Sutherland
Spot's Thanksgiving by Eric Hill
My First Thanksgiving by Tomie dePaola
One Little, Two Little, Three Little Pilgrims by B.G. Hennessy
Here in France, I tend to try to find a good blend of a simple book with great illustrations once kids know how to read, and I think I've been successful in incorporating the material into lessons. They're able to start picking out words they know, talking about the pictures, and we're also working on figuring things out through context. Some of the Scholastic non-fiction books I have are just perfect for my young guys, but I'm no longer eligible for Scholastic, unfortunately.
So, here is my potential list of what I think are candidates for a good intro book on Thanksgiving for young learners. I only have seen a couple of pages, so I could be easily disappointed. I worry that the board book format will be seen as a little babyish for some, but no one has ever complained (yet). If you know anything about any of these books, please feel to let me know how you think they would do as an EFL-friendly intro to Turkey Day.
This First Thanksgiving Day by Laura Krauss Melmed
Thanksgiving Is for Giving Thanks by Margaret Sutherland
Spot's Thanksgiving by Eric Hill
My First Thanksgiving by Tomie dePaola
One Little, Two Little, Three Little Pilgrims by B.G. Hennessy
Catching Up
Thanks to both of you who left helpful comments about finding the guidelines! It's nice feeling like I will be able to get a handle on what I'm doing.
This blog has fallen by the wayside with all the other events happening in my life, but I'd like to resurrect it and try to keep it going. I find myself struggling with job insecurity and lack of structure in the environment and wonder if I will be able to continue working like this for the rest of my life, or if it's time to find another career. At times I feel like I'm just not doing a very good job, or at least the job I would like to do, although sometimes the reasons for that are beyond my control. My adult students are nice, but not always motivated and I find sometimes that their expectations of what teachers are supposed to do just don't meet my teaching style. As in, some of them want someone completely grammar-focused with lots of worksheets and I don't get the idea they believe that a mix of some grammar combined with communicative-based activities will lead to progress. I've been told I need to "stick with the book and hit grammar hard" with my new batch of classes, but while some students are okay with this, others are not. I really feel like I am damned if I do, damned if I don't, not to mention the fact that I'm not a "stick with the book and pound away at grammar" kind of teacher. How to please all of the students and thus the bosses? Not an easy path to trod. Business courses are okay but I'm not passionate about teaching presentation/meeting skills for the billionth time, and I just don't have enough real courses with the young ones. On the other hand, I'm grateful I am employed, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.
When things die down, I'll post more and ask a few specific questions I've been thinking about. For now, I'd just like to know any nice things people have done for Halloween with young learners. The Toussaint holiday comes at a time that more or less makes lessons on Halloween too early or too late, so we decided to have our 'celebration' after the fact. I thought it might be nice to have something fun to come back to, but I'll let you know if that was a wise decision. I found some nice activities at FamilyFun.com that I'd like to try, although I did need to ask my mom to bring a few supplies with her when she visited.
Today I bought a copy of Meg and Mog that I'd like to use to get some good language going (I'm still working on getting those kids to understand English can be used to talk about things and is more than knowing the word for the flashcard), so if anyone has used that successfully, I'd like to know. I do know that I have too many things planned for this one class, so I'll have to rank things in order of importance. I definitely want to work in the target language (easy stuff like parts of the face/body and simple "It's/They're" sentences), so some of the craft stuff will probably have to be really quick and easy. I'm tickled to add in a little bit of culture but want to make sure there's still a language focus and not just a random craft, no matter how cute it is, that has nothing to do with what we're trying to accomplish.
I've also made up a quick mini-play that I am determined to get one class involved in...I think they are ready but it's a new step for them and my biggest challenge is to get them using English in addition to playing around with the props. Last week I wanted them to act out the story in our English Adventure unit...they enjoyed the story, they enjoyed playing with the parts of Mr. Potato Head, but I waited until the end of class and they were too scattered to really be able to do the language functions that I know they can perform. One of my gems was busy trying to stick things up his nose, so that was a distraction that I did not predict. Next time I will know and be prepared. Sheesh. On a positive note, I do see kids making progress and I'm pretty tickled with that. If only I could do this all day! I love having reasonably-sized classes and good materials, which is what is keeping me from trying to do this in an actual school. I have heard so many local horror stories from the assistants that I'm pretty put off on trying to work for the public schools.
This blog has fallen by the wayside with all the other events happening in my life, but I'd like to resurrect it and try to keep it going. I find myself struggling with job insecurity and lack of structure in the environment and wonder if I will be able to continue working like this for the rest of my life, or if it's time to find another career. At times I feel like I'm just not doing a very good job, or at least the job I would like to do, although sometimes the reasons for that are beyond my control. My adult students are nice, but not always motivated and I find sometimes that their expectations of what teachers are supposed to do just don't meet my teaching style. As in, some of them want someone completely grammar-focused with lots of worksheets and I don't get the idea they believe that a mix of some grammar combined with communicative-based activities will lead to progress. I've been told I need to "stick with the book and hit grammar hard" with my new batch of classes, but while some students are okay with this, others are not. I really feel like I am damned if I do, damned if I don't, not to mention the fact that I'm not a "stick with the book and pound away at grammar" kind of teacher. How to please all of the students and thus the bosses? Not an easy path to trod. Business courses are okay but I'm not passionate about teaching presentation/meeting skills for the billionth time, and I just don't have enough real courses with the young ones. On the other hand, I'm grateful I am employed, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.
When things die down, I'll post more and ask a few specific questions I've been thinking about. For now, I'd just like to know any nice things people have done for Halloween with young learners. The Toussaint holiday comes at a time that more or less makes lessons on Halloween too early or too late, so we decided to have our 'celebration' after the fact. I thought it might be nice to have something fun to come back to, but I'll let you know if that was a wise decision. I found some nice activities at FamilyFun.com that I'd like to try, although I did need to ask my mom to bring a few supplies with her when she visited.
Today I bought a copy of Meg and Mog that I'd like to use to get some good language going (I'm still working on getting those kids to understand English can be used to talk about things and is more than knowing the word for the flashcard), so if anyone has used that successfully, I'd like to know. I do know that I have too many things planned for this one class, so I'll have to rank things in order of importance. I definitely want to work in the target language (easy stuff like parts of the face/body and simple "It's/They're" sentences), so some of the craft stuff will probably have to be really quick and easy. I'm tickled to add in a little bit of culture but want to make sure there's still a language focus and not just a random craft, no matter how cute it is, that has nothing to do with what we're trying to accomplish.
I've also made up a quick mini-play that I am determined to get one class involved in...I think they are ready but it's a new step for them and my biggest challenge is to get them using English in addition to playing around with the props. Last week I wanted them to act out the story in our English Adventure unit...they enjoyed the story, they enjoyed playing with the parts of Mr. Potato Head, but I waited until the end of class and they were too scattered to really be able to do the language functions that I know they can perform. One of my gems was busy trying to stick things up his nose, so that was a distraction that I did not predict. Next time I will know and be prepared. Sheesh. On a positive note, I do see kids making progress and I'm pretty tickled with that. If only I could do this all day! I love having reasonably-sized classes and good materials, which is what is keeping me from trying to do this in an actual school. I have heard so many local horror stories from the assistants that I'm pretty put off on trying to work for the public schools.
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