Activities to start your school year on the right foot!

 

Activities to start the school year on the right foot.

Part 1: Activities up your sleeve!

By Maria-Araxi Sachpazian, Managing Director Input on Education 

Based on the webinar delivered in September 2022 for IATEFL POLAND

Part 1: Activities up your sleeve!

The first days of the school year are a source of great stress and anxiety for teachers. They offer great opportunities, but they are also fraught with complications. Two factors stand out as one looks at those days: unpredictability and a lot of repressed feelings of sadness for the summer gone by, experienced by learners and teachers alike. 

Here is a SWOT analysis of what those first days can offer us and the threats they pose. 

It is important for teachers to use the first week of classes to build rapport with the learners and foster bonding among the learners. It is also essential to set the tone for the lessons to follow. Therefore, it makes sense for teachers to outline the factors that can cause unpredictability and puts at risk the actualisation of their lesson plan.  Groups of students per class tend to change from year to year, with students moving to other groups and others being moved in. This causes the class dynamics to alter. Therefore, schools should encourage a handover between teachers (previous and new) of students or groups so that precious time is not wasted.  The previous teacher can exchange notes with the new one and give his/her input on the level of the learners and what they are used to. If changes are to be made (e.g. if the students are not used to working in L2 mainly) the steps have to be taken gradually.  

It is equally important for teachers to plan on how to deal with unpredictability. A first step is to plan activities at a level slightly more manageable, so that all learners feel included. This also ensures that learners will not be frustrated and run  home in tears which can kickstart the whole year on the wrong foot.  To ensure that activities can actually take place, it’s best for teachers to carry all their own supplies (staplers, scissors, craft supplies, coloured pencils) and it’s important not to over-rely on students using technology, as this might not work.   

A final note on the slightly more theoretical part of this blog, it is clear from what I have already written that schools need to run an induction program for newly-hired teachers as well as a week of ‘’get-back-to-school’’ preparation for the teachers who are already members of staff. This will give staff the chance to communicate, exchange ideas, discuss how they can overcome difficulties, set up their classrooms and ensure they know how the equipment works.

 The following activities are easy to use and require little or no preparation. Additionally, they are adaptable and can work in very different teaching contexts with learners of different ages.

QUESTIONS PEOPLE ASK 

 The teacher asks students to brainstorm the types of questions we ask strangers when we want to get to know them. We can, if we want, give students a particular context or leave it open-ended.  Learners work in teams and produce 2-3 questions. These are collected on the whiteboard and the class pays attention to grammar slips and phonological issues e.g. the pace of delivery and the intonation patterns of the questions. Then students are put in pairs and they use about 4 of these questions to interview each other. It is important to encourage learners to choose from the pool of questions so that they do not all have the same set. Once the interview is competed, we move on to the presentation stage. During this, learners present their partners. Another follow up is for each student to prepare a poster dedicated to their partner. The teacher can take a quick snap and in the following lessons the posters can be up in the walls of the classroom. Additionally, the teacher can use the information to prepare sentences or a Kahoot! game for students to see what they remember about the others in their class.

Benefits

This is a task that revises grammar indirectly, it is realistic and relevant and gets learners to interact. It really shoots two birds with one stone as the learners are introduced to their classmates, speak in L2 and revise grammar while at the same time getting used to working with varied interaction patterns. 

A CLASS CONTRACT 

[This idea is based on an activity designed by Herbert Puchta]

The teacher gets the students to discuss rules and regulations. Why do we need rules and why is it difficult to follow them? The teacher elicits some frequent and well-known rules e.g. We must not interrupt a person when s/he is speaking. This is written on the whiteboard and teacher underlines must. S/he spends some time revising modals and the exponents of obligation and necessity / lack of necessity. Then the learner are put in four groups and each group has a particular task:

Group A: What the learner must do (obligations and duties)

Group B: What the learners must not do ( 

Group C: What the teacher must do

 Group D: What the teacher must not do 

 

If there aren’t enough students, instead of groups you may opt to work with pair or each group could have both what the people must and must not do. 

Students discuss in their groups and produce about 4-5 ideas. These are collected on the whiteboard, or if the class is techy enough, each group produces a google slide. The class has a group discussion and accepts about 3-4 in each category but they also discuss why certain ideas are rejected. For example, students might write: ‘’The teacher must not give us any homework’’. This will give the teacher the chance to explain why homework is useful. It is also possible to amend the rules that students come up with, to make them more acceptable. For example ‘’The teacher must not give us homework after we write a semester test.’’ A secretary writes down the rules and the teacher (or the learners) type the contract and sign it in the next lesson.

Benefits 

This is the perfect context to revise modals for obligation and prohibition in a realistic way. Learners get to discuss the basis on which they will work and the teacher is given to the chance to explain the rationale behind certain actions teacher take. Additionally, this whole activity happens in English and trains learners to work in groups.

 A SUMMER SNAP

[This activity is based on an idea presented by Ken Wilson]

The teacher asks students to talk about summer holidays. S/he can get learners to talk about their personal experience based on specific questions which are on the whiteboard or s/he can get learners to revise summer vocabulary based on a spidergram (Types of holidays, places to stay, things to do, ways to travel etc). Then the teacher either asks learners to bring out their mobile phones and find a summer photo they are particularly fond of or if mobile phones are not allowed s/he may have asked learners to bring their favourite summer snap. The teacher goes on to give learners some time to prepare their presentation of their photo and gives them particular bullet points, e.g. Who took this photo? What or who can we see in it? What happened before and after the photo was taken?  Why is it your favourite?  Once the preparation stage is over, the learners present their photo and then there is a competition about the photo the class likes best.  

Benefits from this task

This activity is an interesting way to bridge school with the summer that has just finished. It gets learners to use a variety of past tenses which can be revised at some point to provide scaffolding and it also allows learners to revise summer vocabulary and adjectives related with feelings and moods.

OUR GROUP FLAG 

The teacher asks the students to describe the flags of different countries they can recall starting with their own. The class are led into a discussion about flags. How are their colours chosen? The teacher can use the local flag as an example and present the symbolism.  What are the necessary parts that make up a flag?  If the students have their mobile phones, they can surf the internet and find a couple of flags to describe. Once students have described flags and they know what flags consist of, they are put in small groups or pairs, and they are asked to design their ‘’group’’ flag. To do that, they need to find the common things they like, design a logo that is related with their names and come up with a motto and a colour scheme. The teacher can opt to supply white or coloured carboard paper or paper (A4 or half an A3 is preferable). Students design their flag and then they present their rationale behind the choice of colours, symbols and logo.

Benefits

This task combines language with creativity and it’s like a project done entirely in class. As it is related with crafts, it is easy exciting and allows the learners to get to know each other. The lesson on flags is related with geography so there is a CLIL element to the task.  The students will have to ask each other questions to find what they have in common. It is highly likely that when not supervised learners will revert to their L1, but this is a chance we have to take in monolingual classes. This task as well as the ‘’snap’’ task presented above work on learners’ fluency as they give them the chance to present their ideas in continuous speech for about a minute.

As this blog post is already long, I will stop here. Next week we will discuss how teachers can work with material from the coursebooks of the previous year.  

A happy school year to all and remember

that patience is the greatest skill in teaching!

Bibliography 

Harmer, J., (2007). How to Teach English. Essex: Longman. 

 Puchta, H. & Schratz, M.(1993). Teaching Teenagers: Model activity sequences for humanistic language teaching. Harlow: Longman

 Tajzad, M. & Ostovar-Namaghi S.A. (2014). Exploring EFL Learners’ Perceptions of Integrated Skills Approach: A Grounded Theory. English Language Teaching, 7 (11), pp.92-98. [Online] Available at doi: 10.5539/elt.v7n11p92   Accessed on August 16^th 2022.