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.

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What are your tips for working with young learners?

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.

For the last two years, I have taught English to children, teenagers, and adults in Germany. Teaching English language learners in a foreign country is much different than teaching English language learners in the US. Therefore, I have referenced several of the blogs and websites in my blog roll, which offer such wonderful ideas. My curriculum this year has incorporated several of these ideas. Therefore, I plan to share more about what works in my classes and where you can find these resources. Furthermore, I hope these lessons will help mainstream teachers adapt their curricula for English language learners in their classes or students with special learning needs.

The Challenge

In my courses, my students are given challenges versus homework and these are not required. However, I find most students will meet the challenge, especially if given choices. For this lesson, the students chose to share one of the thousands of articles at the Breaking News English website created by Sean Banville. In order to explain the task I used the Screenr video below which took me less than 5 minutes to do. This Screenr can easily be embedded in any wiki or website.

Breaking News English

Breaking News English is an excellent and free website with several tools for struggling readers and English language learners. The short articles are accompanied by podcasts. Students can easily subscribe to the podcasts to receive frequent updates about news they care about happening all over the world. Furthermore, the website has online quizzes for students, grammar lessons, vocabulary reviews, and so much more! Check out Russell Stannard‘s video of the features to find out more!

In Class

During the class, students shared why they had chosen their articles. Each article topic was quite different! We discussed diverse topics, such as Michael Jackson’s funeral, Anne Frank, water found on the moon, and more. I even showed the 20 second YouTube video of Anne Frank.

We listened to one article’s mp3 without reading the text, read another article without listening to the mp3, then read to ourselves while listening to the mp3 of the article. We took a poll to see which technique was easiest for the students. We took another poll where students picked the hardest and easiest article for them to understand. Then we discussed these poll results. I especially enjoyed the students’ reasons why they thought some articles were easy and some were hard, because these were the same reasons to consider when deciding which English materials to read. On their own they realized they should read materials they have an interest in and some previous knowledge about.

Goal-Setting

Furthermore, we discussed how to best practice learning English outside the class. All the students read or listened to news throughout the day in their native language. Most of the students read newspapers and some read the news online or watched the news on television. The students set learning goals to incorporate into their daily news routine. For example, one student committed to watching CNN English news at least once a week in addition to watching the German news. Another student committed to reading an English and German newspaper at least once a week. Another student said they would try reading Google English news online.

Feedback

When I asked the students if they would use the Breaking News English site to practice their English, all replied yes. The students thought the articles were interesting, easy to understand, did not take too much time, and enjoyed the vocabulary exercises as well as the podcasts! My students’ English levels range from low-intermediate to high-intermediate. When I asked my students on feedback over the lesson, they all replied that they had learned a lot and were excited to try and reach their goals. The only negative feedback was they said I should force them to do the challenges. You can’t win them all!

You may want to subscribe 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.

Each week I tweet several links to new tools I find through the blogs I subscribe to and read! Often, other members of my Personal Learning Network (PLN) will also find these links and provide examples. The best way to share these cool tools, lesson plans, and materials is to post them in a weekly series! If you enjoy this new series, you may want to subscribe to receive regular updates, leave a quick comment of how one of these tools helped you, tweet this, or share this series with your PLN through your RSS reader or Delicious account.

Multimedia Sites

Made up Memories is a site for students to insert their photos into several video adventures. Students choose an adventure such as skydiving, starring in a fairytale, or being a superhero! Mary Beth Hertz was super cool to help me out by creating a skydiving video! Students could create stories about these adventures and post them in a blog or wiki. This site is also very easy for English language users.

My Movie Moment, which I learned about from Ozge Karaoglu, the links queen on Twitter, works the same way with students inserting their photos. However, students get to choose from a variety of video clips from famous movies. Several of the movies they may have never watched and many are not PG so you have to use careful filtering with this site.

Earth Touch provides hi-definition video documentaries of nature. Think of this as the Discover Channel in your classroom!

Build a Jam will let you create and edit music collaboratively. Students sign-up for free and create a band. Then they upload mp3 files created on Audacity or Garageband. This web site could be used to create original music for podcasts, videos, or web sites. However, the teacher has limited possibilities of monitoring which music the student listens to and this could be a problem.

Literacy Sites

Pan Raven is a free site for creating digital stories. Students can use video, music, photographs, and text to create books or stories! Furthermore, the site offers photo editing tools and ways to share the story in a blog! This is another great site for English language learners. Check out Kaleigh Irwin’s Sixth Grade Summer Vacation digital story below!

Storybird is another site that offers students a way to create collaborative digital stories. To find out more information on this tool check out these blog posts. I recommend subscribing to these blogs like I have!

• David Kapular‘s post with a video of how Storybird works.
• Kelly Tenkely‘s post that gives you ideas on how to integrate Storyboard in your classroom.
• Larry Ferlazzo’s post Use Storybird To Create A Story
• Read Write Web‘s very detailed post with examples Storybird: A Family-Friendly Storytelling Tool

Read Print is a library of free online books and poetry for students and teachers.

Challenge:

Use one of these sites to improve a project for the school year!

In my pursuit to improve your personal learning on this blog, I have added a few new widgets. One of my favorite new finds is the Roohit web highlighter, which I learned about at Ziipa. Roohit is more than a highlighting tool. This tool allows you to actually interact with the materials in blogs and websites.

Roohit Features

For Bloggers

Roohit allows:

Classroom Application

Roohit is a fantastic tool for students, which allows students to:

Roohit is note-taking and research 3.0! So why not discard the index cards this year?

Challenge:

Use the Roohit tool to make notes of your favorite blogs and evaluate the tools usefulness for your students.

Would you like me to review another useful tool? Would you like to recommend a tool for me to check out? Please contact me!

Dear Reader,

You may have noticed that I have given my blog a recent makeover. Nearly three months ago I began this blog and thank you for joining me on this journey. In a quest to continually improve the way in which we interact, I have changed the mission, look, and name of the blog. I would like to inform you of these improvements, because I believe as my reader you should have a say in how this blog matures. After all, your tweets and exchanges are the reason why I post!

New Mission Statement

Primarily, I am an English language teacher. So why doesn’t my blog focus on English language materials? For years, I worked in a high school as the English as a Second Language senior instructor. This job meant that I was in charge of the thirty plus English language learners (ELLs) in the high school who came from over 12 different countries and were at various levels of English proficiency. My position required me to collaborate with mainstream educators in meeting the learning needs of the ELLs. When my students began to fail some of the classes, I was allowed to sit in and keep observation journals of the instructional methods used and how the ELLs responded. My observations spurred me to write this blog.

When the teachers only lectured, the students failed. For example, in one class the teacher only lectured and required students to take notes. No PowerPoints or visual aids were provided. Furthermore, the tests were based on the lecture and not on the book. Therefore, my beginner and intermediate level students were not able to pass this class. The teacher did not want to listen to any advice on ways to improve the lessons for all students and not just ELLs. Instead, the teacher requested that my students be moved into another class, because they had no business in his class. I have had enough of these experiences and felt a blog educating teachers on various technologies and methodologies that benefit all learners works best! I believe teachers should facilitate, differentiate instruction, make lessons engaging, teach students to problem solve using technology, create dynamic teaching environments, and have socially and culturally responsible lessons. All students’ needs are more likely to be met in this type of environment. When I collaborate with teachers who already do this then ELLs’ learning needs are met and amazing accomplishments are made. For example, several of my ELLs won awards for their involvement in speech contests, writing contests, robotic club challenges, art contests, athletics, and so much more. The ELLs at my school all graduated from high school and are attending universities! These accomplishments were due to general education teachers who were willing to use progressive methodologies to help all students.

New Name, New Game

I changed the name soon after a received a comment saying that the original name sounded rather condemning. The teacher was joking, but still I began to think about this. I definitely want to boost educators who are reading my blog and challenge them a bit. However, I do not want to make any of you feel as if you are not rewarding the students who enter your life everyday. If you are reading blogs, then you are definitely striving to improve your methods. However, sometimes teachers need a reboot. We need to read or be exposed to items that will energize us and help us self reflect on our pedagogy and instructional methods! At least, this occurs when I read other blogs and enter discussions with my Personal Learning Network (PLN)!

I also changed the name as symbolism for rebooting this blog and the mission. Other changes you will notice that better align with this mission are:

• New header (designed by me! Yippee)
• New template
• New categories
• New posting format
• New widgets
• New blog roll links

I hope you enjoy these changes and will continue this journey with me!

Thank you for all your support!

My challenge:

To better serve my readers! Please let me know what you think about the changes! Am I moving this blog in the right direction?

Would you like to know more about some technology or instructional method? Maybe you are the expert and don’t have a blog, yet? Please contact me to collaborate on a post together! I would also be happy just to feature a blog post or do an interview with you!

Recently, I received a pleasant surprise in my mail box in the form of a very informative and thought-provoking comment from Anne Hodgson in response to my blog, What Works: Cooperation vs. Competition. I had so much I wanted to respond to and thought the Voice Thread format would certainly enliven the conversation. I would love to hear about your personal experiences with using cooperative learning. Do you think competition can be healthy? Do you think society puts too much pressure on students to achieve?

World Map Photo by Su-Laine licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

Please let me know if you would like to discuss any other topics on Thought-provoking Thursdays!

Visit Anne Hodgson’s blog for more insights on her teaching methods!

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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Photo adapted from Flickr by Katiebate licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.0.

Is integrating technology into your curriculum on your to-do list?

This item should be on the top of the list. Technology provides educators with the tools to educate their English Language Learners and mainstream students at the same time. Often, time constraints prevent teachers from integrating technology effectively into the classroom. However, investing the time and energy will make you a better educator and help you meet the learning needs of all your students. Simply, technology is an effective way to differentiate instruction and reach many learners at the same time.

Successful technology integration offers students choices! Read this post for a list of Larry Ferlazzo’s sources for using technologies for English Language Learners. You don’t have to be an expert on the technology. Often, I provide my students with a choice of technologies and allow them to show me how to use the technology!

The key is to integrate technology effectively into the classroom by ensuring the technology supports learning objectives. One way to do this is by using an instructional model when planning your lessons.

Follow these steps:

1. Choose a lesson plan you want to add a technology component to
2. Choose which technologies would best support the learning objectives
3. Choose an instructional model
4. Download a template of the instructional model
5. Copy and paste information you already have into the template
6. Add information you don’t have to the template
7. Develop a rubric to grade the lesson

Or you can choose to try one of the many lesson plans some teachers have already developed and adapt these lessons to your curriculum. In my example unit, I use the NTeQ model to help high school students explore the Olympics. This unit includes modifications for beginner English Language Learners.

Your boot camp challenge for this week:

Spice up one project with a technology presentation. Try designing a class wikipage with the material. If computer access is not available, then try having students work in small groups to create videos using a digital camera. Use a rubric to grade the presentation.