Murder in Gorky Park - a mystery in the Past Simple

My 9-11 year olds have been learning the Past Simple and have become so expert in the past forms that we are now beginning to hear things like, "Did you went...?", "What did you ate...?", so I decided it was time to focus less on the verb form and more on the question form. This activity is based on six students but is adaptable for more, and requires a role card for each student and a table in which to collect their findings.

Lead-in: I asked, "What did you do at the weekend?" We had a brief discussion. Then I announced that there had been a murder at the weekend in Gorky Park. "Ooooh!" "And you were all in Gorky Park at the weekend, so the murderer is one of you!" (Lots of giggles)

Grammar Focus: I told the students that they were going to interview each other to find out who had been where at the time of the murder. Because I wanted to focus on the question forms, I had the students complete questions with the correct verb forms, eg. What time .... you ........ (arrive)? Just in case, we verbally drilled the answer form too.

Task: Each student had a role card with information about the time they arrived and left the park, the colour of their cap and shorts, what they took with them and where they were exactly in the park. Nowhere on the cards did it say who the murderer was. They asked each student the same questions and filled the information in to a table.

Conclusion: When all students had a completed table, I asked them to look at their information and compare it with the police's description of the murderers. To make it more interesting for the students, I had two murderers. I then read out that the murderer had been wearing a red cap and blue shorts, had been standing by the fountain etc. Following the facts they had collected, the students were able to work out who the murderers were.

As the students were mingling, they initially relied on the pre-prepared questions, but with time they started asking the questions freely (and correctly). The whole activity took about 25 minutes and provided a fun drill alternative. Since this class, the kids have repeatedly asked me if they could play 'The Murder Game' again. The task is adaptable for different grammar points and topics. We have since played: Who will win the lottery? (Future Simple) and Who is hiding the Leprechaun? (St. Patrik's Day)

Feeding time

I have just spent an hour making top hats. If you're British, you know exactly what I mean. Basically they are marshmallows dipped in chocolate and topped with a Smartie, and they're every child's favourite birthday party treat. If you're still confused, here's a picture of them:

But I don't have a kid and I'm not going to a birthday party. I have 13 teenagers who I see twice a week, and who I love to feed with all manner of sweet things.

So why do I spend my Sunday afternoons thinking up what to surprise them with? Well firstly, it's just that - it's a surprise. The wonderfully cute thing about my teens is that, no matter how often I bake for them, they are still really surprised every time. The best present is an unexpected one, and I get an unbelievable high from seeing their amazed faces. I guess Russian state school teachers don't bake too often...

Of course food can be a reward, for example, I think I first started baking for my kids when they got high results in a test. But I also like to use food as part of a game. For instance, I already wrote a post about using a chocolate advent calendar to give my kids CAE Use of English tasks. A mouthful of chocolate prevents students from asking their neighbour for help and forces them to deal with their task on their own.

Sweets are also a great way to divide up the class. One of my first days as a teacher I observed a colleague doing the following with a group. She wrote 6 topics from the coursebook on the board, and beside each a colour. Then she offered each student a coloured Skittle, and depending on the colour of sweet they had chosen, they had to speak on that topic for 30 seconds. Of course there are many other ways to decide which topic each student will receive, but using sweets just makes a nice alternative, and we are, after all, all about varying our activities. I prefer to have students work in pairs rather than speaking in front of the whole class. Sometimes I allow them to choose 2 or 3 sweets right from the start, and then they can choose in which order they want to address the topics. This is a good idea if I want to give them marks for their speaking, because they can speak first on the topic that they consider to be the easiest, and by the time they reach the 'harder' topic, they have satisfactorily rehearsed the structure and functional phrases necessary for their presentation, and are better able to deal with the themes that they feel less confident about.

Finally, I really believe food goes a long way towards helping with affectual issues. Working in a private school where student retention is important, I am always concerned about creating an atmosphere not only conducive to better learning, but also of enjoyment and friendship. I am sure that even the shyest student relaxes for a moment when he takes a big bite of chocolate cake and is therefore just that bit more open to his next speaking task. I like to hope that as he is savouring my sponge, he is forgetting just for a moment to panic about the upcoming listening task. And for the time that the group is partaking of my culinary experiments, there are no conflicts, no less-liked students. Everyone is equal and united in the same activity - eating.

PS. One word of warning: sugar highs lead to very deep slumps. Don't give too much food at the beginning of class or you can kiss productive activity goodbye. You will have a frenzy of chat for 15 minnutes and then the rest of class you will have to just stand by and watch as they slide slowly off their chairs into a sugary coma. Believe me. We've been there.

Can Christmas Activities be Useful?

It's the first of December. Where did the year go? The snow has hardly started to fall in Moscow, I'm still recovering from 'opening' the new academic year, and yet we already have to start thinking about parties and decorations and presents and... Christmas lesson plans.

Why celebrate Christmas in the classroom?

Well, the main reason in my school is that the kids will expect it. If I don't do something Christmassy, I risk being classified as the Boring One, the Humbug (yes, I'm sure some of my teens know what that means!).

Like Halloween, the value of which I had to explain to some parents in an official letter, Christmas in the classroom is not an opportunity for the teacher to evangelise - although I wish I could - but an essential part of life in an English-speaking country. Even if you do not celebrate it, you could not avoid it if you found yourself in London over the festive period. And there, I've just proved another point, that the vocabulary surrounding Christmas is so widely used that our students have to be aware of them or miss out on a lot of natural conversation coming up to December 25th.

So we can just watch a Christmas video, can't we?

I'm not against video in the classroom if it is restricted to short sections and accompanied by a task, but I personally struggle to find interesting videos, so I am going to take a different tack.

Inspired by the Supermarket.

I found the greatest Advent calendar in Tesco's last week. So great that even my mum approved of the 9 pounds I spent on it. But it's a very sturdy thing, and if I get 9 years out of it in the classroom, then it will have been more than good value.



It's a tree made of 24 boxes, each of which has a drawer filled with chocolates. Little do my darling teens know it, but the chocolates are soon to be accompanied by task sheets. The idea is that they will choose a number, but before they can eat the chocolate, they will have to complete whatever task I have added. As they're a CAE prep group, I'm thinking: creating word families (Use of English Part 3), comparing photos (Speaking Part 2), writing a five-line essay (focus on topic sentences and essay structure for Writing), sets of Trios (Use of English Part 5) etc.

Disadvantges: not personalised. For some the task may be very easy, for others, a nightmare. Also, do I bring out the tree only on Christmas Eve and have them all do their tasks at the same time (obviously more time-effective this way) or does a different student take their chances each day as we go through December (logical from the point of view of an Advent calendar, but somewhat unfair to make some wait)?

Advantges: I can increase exam task practice is a fun way that will not create resistance. The activity is guaranteed to interest the class and I am sure they will never forget the word Advent calendar again! Bringing something other than the textbook is always exciting, but the tasks are academic enough to satisfy the students who 'just want to practice the exam!)

Other Christmas-inspired activities

There are any number of worksheets, handouts, wordsearches etc out there devoted to Christmas, but doesn't it become a bit repetitive to offer a crossword of target vocabulary every time we have a national holiday with somewhat unusual words? Here are some other activities I'd like to try:

Christmas food. I have high retention because I feed my kids. Seriously. This year they requested Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and I am also planning to introduce them to Christmas Pudding. We can investigate the history of Christmas pudding and other festive dishes (they all love cooking as well as eating) and write a report on them or a review of the Pudding (Writing Paper). They can choose which dish best symbolises Christmas for the cover of a cookery book (Speaking Part 3).They can practice their advanced adjectives that we have recently been working on to describe their feelings when they smell the cooked pudding, recall their favourite festive food or talk about their associations with the New Year holidays.

Two of my students have confessed to making their own Jamie Oliver-style videos. I think this would make a great research project, perhaps over the holidays, and the listening practice and vocabulary gained when they watch each other's clips will be a nice addition to the regular course vocabulary.

Christmas Tree competition: The language involved in planning and executing a project to construct their own Christmas tree will cover a range of functions: suggesting, agreeing and disagreeing (politely!), giving clear instructions etc, not to mention the lexis of building materials (transparent plastic, rotating light bulb) and actions (sawing, trimming, cut a jagged line). And above all the opportunity for spontaneous language practice is huge. As they started planning last week I was thrilled to see how engaged my class was, how they spoke to everyone, not just their usual partner, and how much they interrupted each other to build on each other's ideas, whereas in a usual class they typically wait politely for one student to finish their long-winded idea before adding their own. They were truly listening to each other and collaborating, not simply adding another suggestion to a list.

More Christmas activities to follow.... :-)

Post-it feedback

A common complaint among our students is that they don't receive enough feedback from their teacher on their progress. If I ask the teacher, however, they invariably say that they do give regular feedback, so perhaps the problem is not whether it is given or not, but whether the students recognise it as such.

So how can we make feedback more obvious, and therefore beneficial, to our students?

We don't really go in for report cards like a regular school would. For many teachers our feedback is limited to verbal comments and short notes at the end of essays. In the first case, we may fail to be specific: You did that role-play really well! while in the second case we may be too specific, making comments related only to the fulfilment of that particular task.

One colleague mentioned that in the high school where he worked before joining us some teachers used post-it notes to give children specific feedback on the current lesson. It was a no-fuss method: the teacher silently made notes throughout the lesson and then stuck the notes to the desks as he passed through the class. Apparently it was so popular that childern were clamouring for their page every day, and were genuinely interested in reading the teacher's remarks.

I decided to try this with my teenagers.

What worked:
Individualised comments, specific to each student and to the current lesson.
The students were amused when they read my notes.
Negative comments were not made in front of the whole class.

What didn't work:
In our small class, the students could see very well what I was doing, and as it was the first time, they were interested and distracted by what I was doing. They wanted to see the pages immediately.
I found it hard to put notes on a specific page, rather than all on one page, because I had to search for the appropriate student's name.
I kept forgetting to write my thoughts down, so I didn't have comments for everyone.
I now do not have a list of comments on the lesson, because I've given them away!
I wonder where those notes went to? To the bin?

Follow-up:
I need to think this process through to the end. How are these notes helpful if the student simply reads it at the end of class and then throws it away? How can I systematise this process? How can I be sure that the advice will be followed?

Consequences on the Computer - Part 1

I guess most of us have played consequences at some point in our lessons. If you don't recognise the name, it's that activity where a student writes the first line of a story, prompted or otherwise, folds over the paper and passes it on for the next student to continue.

Consequences is good for motivating students to write, helping uncreative students develop an imagination, handwriting practice, reading practice...

To be honest, this isn't the kind of activity I was thinking of giving my Advanced teenagers today, but suddenly I wondered whether I could give it a modern twist on our class blog.

The advantage of using the blog is that it will encourage my class to check it more often, to see the next line of the story. They could even all be online at once, vying to post the next sentence before their classmates.

The disadvantage of course is that they can see the story as it develops, so there is no element of surprise at the end.

I could get around this by asking them to do it in class time, where each student will have, say, only 90 seconds to write the next line, forcing them to skim the text or just pay attention to the last line. The previously written part could actually be hidden from view until the end.

What I'd like to do most is take all the students to the computer room, give them a computer each, and have the students change computer after every line, instead of swapping papers. Fast typing in another alphabet is a useful skill for my group. If I were more familiar with twitter, that would be a third option for Consequences on the Computer.

If we do one of these activities, I'll post our results...

Blogging with Teenagers

To encourage teenagers to continue studying as we approach the end of the academic year, our school has launched a class blog competition. As my class has long finished the coursebook and also taken their exams, I thought a blog would go down really well.

Why do I like the blog idea?

• It's a rolling activity that keeps students interested from one lesson to the next.
• It allows students to choose how much or how little they want to contribute.
• It is completely personalised writing, as students choose the topics.
• It allows free expression.
• It is a genuine interactive task because students can comment on each others' posts.
• It creates class unity.
• It allows the teacher to assess their writing informally - and the students don't even know. :-)

But... my teenagers were not amused....

"Yeah, we did that in school."

"I had a blog about three years ago, but I don't write anything now."

"What's it for?"

Yet again the old-fashioned teacher has tried to get inside the teenagers' heads and failed....

However, they livened up somewhat when I mentioned that it would be a class blog, not individual. (Hmm... so they like working together.) And they positively got excited when I gave them the first task. (I have never seen the whole class take out their notebooks and write down the homework!)

Task 1: Find a famous person, living or dead, with the same name as you and write their biography as if you were this person.

• I got two queens, a princess, a sports commentator and a painter.

Task 2: Post a painting you have strong feelings about and explain why.

• Such a variety of artistic tastes. I never realised my group thought so deeply about art!

Task 3: Read four short texts and comment on the one you find most interesting.

• I then planned a lesson based on the text that was commented on most.

Check out our beautiful blog!

Feeling sorry for PET candidates....

Well, I'm feeling sorry for some PET candidates at the moment. Luckily, not any from my school.

I was invigilating the PET exam at the weekend and was very disappointed to see how unfamiliar they were with the format of the exam. Their level of English wasn't a problem. They simply had never seen a PET exam paper before.

Some of their questions:

How do you spell accessories? (Don't they know I can't help??)

Is it a problem if I write more words than this?

What do I write in this part?

Can I write on the exam paper?

What do I do here?!

What is it that makes teachers care so little about their students? Teachers who go through the motions in the classroom but never stop to check whether the students have actually aquired the necessary knowledge?