You may not know that I also teach 2 to 10 year-old students English. When I began teaching in Germany, I had a tough time acclimating. I thought I would be able to work with the children since I had taught young learners in the US English and science. I remember teaching a group of 14 seven to eight year-old students. They climbed the walls (oddly there were racks on the walls), fought a lot, and flew paper airplanes everywhere. I went home after a 9 hour day and cried. I wanted to quit. I have a fighting spirit, though, so I went online to research lessons and ideas. Throughout the four years that I have been teaching in Germany I have collected some great research, resources, and tips to make me a much better English teacher of young learners! I recently shared these tips in a Pecha Kucha (PK) presentation at the recent Virtual Round Table Language E-Conference. You can catch the rest of the recordings of all the presentations from this great event here.

What is a Pecha Kucha?

A presentation technique invented in Japan by architects Klein and Dytham. About 14 presenters or less deliver back to back PowerPoint presentations that must total 20 slides auto-advancing every 20 seconds. The PowerPoint presentation is only 6 minutes and 40 seconds so the content is highly visual and meaningful. For this reason, these events are gaining popularity at several conferences and have now entered the education conference scene! Enjoy my PK: Survival Tips for Teaching Kids English!

Glogster or The Tools I Use in My Classroom

My Survival Tips

1. Channel in your inner child!- Can you identify the 2 members of our personal learning network in this slide?
   • Have the ability to act silly – I often dress-up when reading books, play charades, make silly voices and faces, and sing and dance!
2. Wear the right gear! Don’t dress to impress! Dress for a mess!
3. Children love to play pretend games!
4. Have lively music that is easy for the children to understand and that you will enjoy singing very loudly to!
5. TPR- Total physical response is a must for every lesson. Find out more by reading this post.
6. Puppets are great for children, especially when you incorporate the puppet in every lesson.
7. Play board games, physical games, and online games- We play Twister, bingo, English Raven’s games, and more!
8. Include stories from great children’s authors and make the reading time fun. Check out my class wiki for various books and the themes they support.
9. Use colorful flashcards and play games with the flash cards.
10. Color with a purpose! Give children a task to see if they can follow directions, such as telling a child to draw a circle and color it yellow. Without direction, I’ve had children color on the wall and on me!
11. Incorporate drama activities such as mime and improvisation games.
12. Felt boards are great for having children piece together what happened in a story or to learn new vocabulary.
13. Finger plays like the Itsy Bitsy Spider work wonders. Read this post on how to digitalize your finger plays using Blabberize.
14. Trust kids with technology! My five year-old students complete online activities each week which I put in a wiki. Kids love technology and will repeat what they learn.
15. Explore the outdoors with scavenger hunts.
16. Use realia- My students play Bingo with pennies from the USA. Introduce real world objects to students from an English speaking culture. Play Show-and-Tell!
17. When all else fails, have fun!

More Resources

These are more resources to help you teach young learners.

EFL Teacher’s Kit for Surviving Kids- In this post, I explore more tips for working with young learners.
Learning Beyond Walls- Games and Wikis!- In this post, I explore how to use wikis with young learners.
Character Development Using Voki Speaking Avatars- In this post, I explore how to use Voki speaking avatars to get young learners to think about character development for digital storytelling.
What Works: Cooperation vs. Competition- In this post, I explore how cooperative learning improved the culture and behavior of my young learners.
Getting Children Involved with Edtech- In this post, I explore using Voicethread for class collaboration projects.
Mobile Motivation: 17 Digital Storytelling & Literacy Apps/ Resources for Kids- These apps will have your young learners speaking English using a mobile device.
Parent Release Form for Publishing Student Work Online
Parent Release Form for Publishing Student Work Online PDF
VoiceThread Tutorials and Tips for Educators
Glogster Tutorials and Tips for Educators
Voki Tutorials and Tips for Educators
Digital Storytelling Tutorials and Tips for Educators

Challenge:

Try any of these resources with your young learners.

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to subscribe for FREE to receive regular updates!

What are your tips for working with young learners?

December 1st edition!

My guilty pleasure is…. Twitter… as you can tell by this weekly series, What Did They Tweet?

Kid’s Digital Stories

@JohnMikulski’s students have created beautiful digital stories using Storybird. Storybird is one of my favorite applications that you can read about here! John describes the project which has students write a short story in which the protagonist discovers something he/she would have been better off not knowing. Please read the stories and leave these students comments on their stories. Below was one of many of my favorites!

The Tower on Storybird

Using Scenarios in Your E-learning

This brilliant Slideshare presentation provides a wonderful reflection of how we design our instruction. Although the focus is on e-learning, this really relates to the instructional design of all courses. Cathy Moore challenges us to reflect on our instructional methods to answer the question, “Are we teaching our students to solve problems?” This presentation was tweeted by @EthanKuniyoshi.

View more documents from Cathy Moore.

Project Peace for Students

@ddeubel has created an international global project for students everywhere! If you are looking for an easy project to connect your students with other schools worldwide, then you may want to check out the details here. Join the ning, choose 1 of 8 songs about peace, download the song cards, have students decorate them, then make a video! Here’s an example of one of the video projects.

Find more videos like this on PROJECT PEACE

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference

One extremely valuable part of Second Life is the various free conferences you get to attend. @barbsaka, an amazing educator who has attended several Second Life conferences, tweeted about the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference taking place on March 12-13, 2010. Last year, over 3800 educators attended the event. Below is an example of what you can expect. If you feel comfortable with your Second Life skills, the conference is looking for volunteers, paper submissions, and presentation proposals. If you are new to Second Life, please join the SLife is Life ning where you will find educators like @barbsaka and me willing to show you around.

Dec. 4th Students Save the Rainforest!

This Friday, December 4th, at 12:25pm GMT, your students and you have the opportunity to ask Javier Dril Bustamente, a native of the rainforest, questions about saving the rainforest via twitcam. DM @chickensaltash to participate in the project. This will be a wonderful opportunity to get students involved in a project that helps them reflect about their responsibility to protect the planet.

Add the people in this post to your PLN by using this mass Twitter tool. Just copy and paste this list!

ddeubel, JohnMikulski, ethankuniyoshi, barbsaka, chickensaltash, larryferlazzo, kalinagoenglish

If you enjoy this series, you may want to subscribe for FREE to receive regular updates!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out these posts with a more extensive list of favorite tweets:

• Monthly Best Tweets by Larry Ferlazzo.
• Monthly Tweets by Karenne Sylvester, Kalinagoenglish.

Challenges:

Leave a comment for the children’s stories or have your students leave a comment! Join many of the other collaborative projects in this post! Attend the free Virtual Worlds Conference in March!

What do you think of these tweets? Leave a comment below!

Every week, I share my favorite finds in this weekly series! Test these tools out. If you want instant access to these fantastic websites connect with me on Google reader!

IGNITE: A New Way to Present

In a previous post, I shared my Pecha Kucha Youtube playlist. I now have added an IGNITE playlist. IGNITE is Tim O’Reilly’s adaption of a Pecha Kucha except the entire presentation is only 5 minutes. I found this IGNITE video, Adapting with Technology, by Mark Argo on the Speed Geek Learning website which was tweeted by Diana Dell. Find more great IGNITE presentations by visiting the Speed Geek Learning website.

PinDax: Online Message Board

Sign-up for the free message board tool, PinDax! This message board service allows you to embed sticky notes with videos and audio files. You can also access your message board on your smartphone or embed it in a blog! Below is the demo board displayed on the website! Have fun exploring! A similar tool to Wallwisher, with a better design and features.

Kindersite

While attending the Virtual Round Table Conference, I learned about Kindersite. Educators and parents can register for free and have access to various tools for young learners learning various languages from English to French. These resources include comic strips, games, lullabies, songs, stories, and more.

Planbook Edu for Creating Online Lesson Plans

PlanbookEdu is a tool for online lesson planning. Register for a the free basic service and have access to the premium service for 30 days! Some of the features include the ability to attach files, check spelling, export to Word or PDF, access from anywhere, and share with others. The template looks very easy to use and I believe this is a great tool to get educators to lesson plan. Each year, educators repeat the same lessons so this tool with additionally save an educator lesson planning time in the long run.

Google Wave Index of Education Waves

Have you got Google Wave fever? I do and have added several people to various education waves. However, you can follow various education waves yourself by visiting the Wave Education Index. There are several waves listed to choose from, including some of my favorites:

Even More Cool Links

• For a list of cool websites, check out Ozge Karaoglu’s series, Faves of the Week!

Challenge:

Use one of the tools! Leave a comment if you found the tip useful or if you noticed a problem with the tool! Join one of the education waves if you are on Google Wave!

You may want to subscribe for free to receive regular updates, leave a quick comment of how one of these tools helped you, tweet this, or share this series with your Personal Learning Network (PLN) through your RSS reader or Delicious account.

When I first began teaching English to children at the beginner level of English proficiency in Germany, I had quite a challenge. You can read about my tips for surviving teaching EFL children in this guest post I recently did on Barbara Sakamoto’s Teaching Village blog. In the US I had taught English to mostly adults, college students, and high school students. After my first trying days, I searched frantically for resources for teaching very young beginners English. This year I was fortunate to come across Jason Renshaw on Twitter who is the creator of English Raven. When I checked out his website I was amazed by the various resources available to teachers and had to share hoping to help other teachers looking for an effective curriculum for young English language learners. Moreover, Jason provides videos and explains the methodology behind the materials.

Flash Card Games

Every English kid’s teacher knows the value of using Flash cards. Several flash cards are available on the website. English Raven takes this method a step further by adding several games children will enjoy playing with the cards. Our favorite game is the Noah Ark’s game. Below you can see a pair of my older students helping me find the animal pairs. My students were not familiar with Noah’s Ark but still loved the game and spoke the words aloud! We drew and decorated a large boat together in the shape of the arc. I drew the lines for the rooms then told my five year-old students to help me find the wife or husband of the animal to live on the board. I began by saying, “Here is Mr. Bear? Where is Mrs. Bear?” The cards are color coordinated with a blue animal card for the males and a pink card for the girls. The children were super excited and began finding pairs on their own saying, “Here is Mrs. Bear!” Then I mixed the cards up again and they helped each other find the pairs naming the animals aloud. For the older children, they collaborated on which animals should live together and which animals could not live together.

Podcasts and More!

English Raven provides numerous listening quizzes, word searches, and phonics sheets. However, my favorite materials for my older students are the short podcasts. My 8 to 10 year-old students easily listen and read along to different stories about whales, cars, world news, and more! I have never seen podcasts included for young learners before. In addition, you can use these podcasts as a basis to have the children try to make their own podcasts. This is a project I am currently working on and will include in a future post!

Why I’m a Member

I have researched and paid quite a lot for English resources for my young English language learners, which is why I wrote this post. Teachers do not make a lot of money and if I would have known about this resource ahead of time, I would have saved a lot of money. At English Raven, you actually get a great bargain, because Jason allows you to pay what you can for a year membership! That is extremely generous! With this membership, you get a collection of quality materials and advice from Jason. I have dmed him on Twitter several times with questions or advice on teaching a theme and he has always been very helpful! Below is a video on how you can become a member.

Check out some of English Raven’s free materials for Halloween! Recently, the older kids and I played the guess the costume game.

If you liked this post, you may want to check out my glogster, EFL’s Teacher’s Kit for Surviving Kids.

You may want to subscribe to receive regular updates, leave a quick comment of how English Raven helped you, tweet this, or share this series through your RSS reader or Delicious account.

Is this your first visit, then I invite you to check out the rest of this weekly series, What Did They Tweet?, in which I post some of my favorite educational tweets.

If the mindmap is not coming out in the RSS reader, you can click on the image to go to the original mindmap.

Power of Twitter

Marisa Pavan shared a magical post this week about the power of Twitter. In the post, you will read about Marlooz, a filmmaker and reporter, who had her laptop taken at a conference. Her Twitter PLN came to the rescue and started a collection to buy her a new laptop! My own PLN has been fantastic about making me feel better when bad things in life occur. Stories like these show that Twitter is not a waste of time or all about self promotion as some believe. Instead, Twitter is a way to gain support, knowledge and inspiration from amazing people.

Edtech in Schools

Teachers can use educational technology to inspire their very young students! Ozge Karaoglu demonstrates how to use various tools with kindergarten students in her class wiki. Her tweet shows another example of how her young English language learners in Turkey use technology to learn English. Check out the video!

Little Elephant from ozge karaoglu on Vimeo.

For an idea on how to set-up your wiki page for your classroom, check out Jason Fournier’s Algebra wiki. Wiki’s are better as class websites than stagnate pages. You have various ways to embed and set-up the tools you will be using throughout the school year. Moreover, you can get parents and students involved through various tools. Jason has a parent and student survey set-up as well as Edmodo, Engrade, Google, Delicious, Weseed, and Audio Pal.

Eric Sheninger, a principal at New Milford High School, has shared his Delicious links with students. What an innovative idea! One student let him know he used the bookmarks for his Calculus homework!

Lesson Idea

I love tweets that inspire lesson ideas! Crista Anderson shares a wonderful website. Time magazine lists cover stories back to 1995. English language learners can reflect on where they were when certain news occurred. These cover stories could also be used in various content classes. The teacher can have students make a timeline of cover stories on a specific topic, create their own cover stories of an event, or write an article to go with the cover story. Each cover story comes with a lesson plan and is available in Spanish.

Add the people in this post to your PLN by using Russel Tarr’s mass Twitter tool. Just copy and paste this list!

mtranslator, ozge, s1mpl1fy, NMHS_principal, cristama, larryferlazzo, kalinagoenglish

On the mindmap, click on the earth icons to follow the links to the Twitter profiles, blogs or websites! You can also make this mindmap smaller or larger and move it around. If you enjoy this series, you may want to subscribe to receive regular updates!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out these posts with a more extensive list of favorite tweets:

• August Best Tweets by Larry Ferlazzo.
• The Blogosphere, the Twitterverse (ELT 08/09) by Karenne Sylvester, Kalinagoenglish.

Challenge:

Create a Delicious bookmark for your classes or a class wiki!

Would you like to recommend a favorite tweet for next week? Please contact me to share your favorite Tweet! Please mark the tweet as a favorite so that I can find the tweet!

Happy Labor Day!

I have noticed the mindmap is not coming out in the RSS reader so I have included the image as well. If this is your first visit, then I invite you to check out the rest of this weekly series, What Did They Tweet?, in which I post some of my favorite educational tweets. On the mindmap, click on the earth icons to follow the links to the Twitter profiles, blogs or websites! You can also make this mindmap smaller or larger and move it around. If you enjoy this series, you may want to subscribe to receive regular updates!

Games Children Play

Chad Calease shared a beautiful video about the game of tag. In the video, people from all over the world share their personal anecdotes and feelings about the game of tag! This tweet came as a response to a tweet about Marisa Constantinides’ post about the power of play for education. In this post, Marisa lists several games that children play and explains the learning involved in each type of game.

New Teacher Survival Guide

Giselle Santos shared a link to the Discovery Educator’s New Teacher Survival Central! Many of us have started a new school year and know someone who might benefit from this site. In several schools, new teachers are left to learn the ropes for themselves. Teaching is a tough job and for many new teachers they find out that teaching is a lot more work. Moreover, they find out that their students are not what they expected. If you have not been able to get these teachers on board with Twitter, then try sharing a website that you found through Twitter!

ESL Links

Larry Ferlazzo shared the exciting news that BrainPop ESL has just launched and is free! Larry also provides useful information and an honest evaluation of the BrainPop website in this blog post. BrainPop is an excellent website to use with students in every subject. The website is appealing due to the almost comic like characters and multimedia presentations. However, the website only offers free access to some of its content.

Burcu Akyol shared a link to a list of wikis to use with English language learners. I love wikis and will usually retweet those others have created. Wikis are extremely user-friendly and provide the educator with a variety of options. Students can easily add content to wikis, which engages them! Parents will usually enjoy a wiki, because they can leave comments and interact on the website as well!

Jason Renshaw offers various curriculum materials for English language learners on his English Raven website. Several educators including Larry Ferlazzo have commented on the usefulness of Jason’s materials. He has spent years creating these materials and is now letting teachers decide what they would like to pay to use these materials. If you do not have enough time to create your own materials for English language learners and want to find materials that will engage them then consider checking out the English Raven website!

Add the people in this post to your PLN by using Russel Tarr’s mass Twitter tool. Just copy and paste this list!

englishraven, burcuakyol, larryferlazzo, feedtheteacher, marisa_c, shapah, kalinagoenglish

If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out these posts with a more extensive list of favorite tweets:

• August Best Tweets by Larry Ferlazzo.
• The Blogosphere, the Twitterverse (ELT 08/09) by Karenne Sylvester, Kalinagoenglish.

Challenge:

Share one of these links with a fellow teacher. Give your Twitter PLN the credit!

Would you like to recommend a favorite tweet for next week? Please contact me to share your favorite Tweet! Please mark the tweet as a favorite so that I can find the tweet!

The Problem

Although I have taught English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) for several years, I only began to teach very young children two years ago. You may have read in one of my earlier posts how my initial experience was quite unsuccessful with children climbing  on the wall, literally! However, I am not one who gives up so easily! I have learned quite a bit since then and have employed various methodologies and instructional methods, such as cooperative learning. However, this year my goal was to integrate technology effectively in the classroom. With children as young as four years-old this can be quite  a challenge!

Why?

The children are less of a challenge as the barriers teachers face daily when pursuing such a hefty ambition. These barriers include providing answers to the following questions:

• Which is the right technology to support learning goals?
• How do I get this technology?
• How do I create an effective lesson plan using technology?
• How do I get my administration on board?
• How do I get parents on board?

PLN at Work!

My philosophy, as you may know from reading this blog, is that Twitter leads to great collaboration! One of my favorite collaborative projects came in the form of a VoiceThread with like minded teachers Ozge Karaoglu and Marama Stewart. These two educators have accomplished amazing feats with their very young students, which you can view when looking at their class wikis and blogs. Originally, the idea was proposed by Marama who teaches in New Zealand. We met through the Classroom 2.0 Ning I joined soon after hearing about the site from Twitter!

The idea was to find a way to encourage my German students to use the English they learned. I had the children do drawings of their favorite animals. The parents were assigned the task of having the children practice the English at home. Although only two parents allowed their children to participate, in September more will allow their children to participate after viewing the VoiceThread below. Ozge, who I met through Twitter, joined the project with her kindergartners’ Elephant story. Already, the story has inspired Marama and I to add more to the project.

Why I Love the VoiceThread Project!

This collaborative effort has been very successful for several reasons, including:

• The children’s identities are hidden!
• The children’s work and use of English is the focus!
• The children are encouraged to share stories globally!
• The children learn about other cultures and see how technology works to create these connections!
• The parents get to see the amazing advantages of using technology in the classroom!
• The project continues to grow and add momentum.
• Other students across the world can connect with our students.
• The technology is easy to use, especially for very young students!

All our collaboration was performed through e-mail, Twitter, ning, and VoiceThread! If you want to learn more about our work with very young students, please visit the following links:

• Marama Stewart’s wiki for teachers
• Ozge Karaoglu’s wiki for her kindergarteners
• My English Story Time Wiki

Challenge:

Ask yourself, “Who from your PLN can you collaborate with for meaningful projects?” Set a goal to collaborate with this teacher to promote change in your school community.

Would you like to share your collaboration anecdote? Please contact me for an interview or to connect your students to our VoiceThread project!

Many of you may be acquainted with Alfie Kohn’s radical views on creating a noncompetitive classroom environment. When I first read his controversial views on education, I shook my head and rolled my eyes. This response was in reflection of some of my teaching habits. Yes, I reward students with external awards, such as stickers, prizes, and grades.

Kohn’s theories also made me reflect upon my educational practices. Self-reflection is the first step to change!

Photo by Max-B licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

My Comedy of Errors

At the time, I co-taught at an English camp for German speaking children. The class consisted of 20 children between the ages of six- to seven-years-old who spoke and understood very little English. On the first day, I received a less than warm welcome. The children ran around the classroom flying paper airplanes. They climbed the walls! They ignored me, since I knew as much German as they knew English. The worst part of the week was that one little boy was treated as an outcast and the children were quite cruel to him. We experienced many behavior problems. Everyday, fights occurred.

The second year I was asked to help at the English camp again. This time I decided to try Kohn’s idea to make the classroom more cooperative versus competitive.

The Transition

First, I set-up learning stations and group work areas. Then, I put the students into groups of three. Since we were learning about Native Americans,these small groups represented their tribes. Each student was given a role and responsibility in the tribe. Each day the tribe was given a mission. Furthermore, we only played cooperative learning games and activities. My co-teacher looked at me strangely when we played the cooperative learning version of musical chairs! However, the children enjoyed this much better than the original version.

My Growth

This experience in a cooperative learning environment was one of my best teaching experiences. The children learned English. We experienced no behavior problems, no fighting, and no cruelty. Instead, the children helped each other. At the end of the camp, I actually received hugs from all the children. They wanted to return the next year!

Your boot camp challenge for this week:

Reflect upon yourself as an educator, by taking this teacher effectiveness quiz. Ponder the results. Can you improve in any area?

Do you have a teaching strategy, tip, or lesson that caters to diverse learning styles in the classroom, including English Language Learners?  Please, include a comment!

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