Learning Twigs

Send my lad a 5th birthday gift - your creative ideas!

   

Happy 5th Birthday! Jamie holds aloft his favourite presents - two new Little Einsteins movies. His little sister Hannah wonders where her presents seem to have got to...

Well, our little lad Jamie turned five today. An auspicious occasion indeed in a little boy's life... I remember running around on my 5th birthday in a super-dooper batman outfit, and it would seem this thing for dressing up has to some extent been passed on to the next generation (you'll find out more about that below!).

In any case, this week also marked Jamie's move to a new kindergarten - a brand new one much closer to where we have recently moved. I am wildly impressed with this place (mainly because Jamie is, to be honest), and had a really fascinating discussion with Jamie's new teacher about our shared belief in an emergent curriculum for younger learners. To my absolute delight, watching this teacher's "classroom" in action reveals this is not just "talk" - she doesn't just practice what she preaches, she does it masterfully.

Taking an "emergent" approach with children comes naturally to a lot of parents, I think, and our selection of birthday gifts for Jamie this year is a pretty good reflection of this. But as with anything, I think it becomes deceptively easy (for parents and teachers) to take certain things for granted and not really explore and extend "good practice" as far as we might.

 

So, to that end, I have a favour to ask YOU, dear blog reader!

 

Below, I am going to show you a couple of Jamie's birthday presents which were especially chosen based on interests and "passions" he has been demonstrating a lot of late. The challenge for me as a parent is to not just move on and figure I've catered to these particular "emergences" of interests (by simply doing a bit of birthday shopping), but to see what I can do to help him explore them further and capitalise on opportunities to learn.

I hope you will take a look at Jamie's emerging interests and give me some creative suggestions about what I might do to facilitate more interaction and exploration of said interests. I have already tried a variety of things, but I thought I would throw the doors open and see what drifts in from my readers!

 

1. Flags of the World

   

Jamie's interest in flags has actually been ongoing for years, ever since he became aware he was a member of a bicultural family, with two places on the world map to call home and two very different flags to wave.

That interest has grown in leaps and bounds and was recently set alight when he saw an episode of Little Einsteins featuring the United Nations building and all the different country flags outside it. Suddenly he's interested in all the flags and countries he can "get his hands on" and a common hobby for him is to sit and draw different flags on paper, sometimes referring to flag charts his mother finds for him on her laptop. He can already name several European and Asian countries and identify them by their flags.

For Jamie's birthday, we got him an assortment of about 40 different mini flags from countries all over the world - about half of which he knows and the remainder representing what we thought would be new ones for him to ask and think about. They are cloth prints attached to little wooden poles about 25 cm long, and there are also some little stands he can place them in. We also got an assortment of those little cocktail flags attached to toothpicks (which we figured could be fun in terms of combining his love of flags with different countries' cuisines!), and a wall poster with a map of the world and many flags assorted around the border.

  

So, what do you think we could do to help him extend this interest in flags and foreign countries to explore things further?

  

 

2. Constable James Renshaw

  

At some point recently, Jamie decided he wanted to be a police officer. In a strictly part-time role of course... Happily, we've noticed that he's become fixed on the concept of protecting, helping and maintaining safety standards around the house, out in the yard, and even out on the roads when we drive somewhere. I've copped more than my fair share of on-the-spot fines for perceived driving infringements (like failing to tell a dog to be careful, failing to tell a traffic light what colour it should turn next, and failing to salute and beep my horn when a police car passed us coming in the other direction).

This passion for law and order and protection appears to be - at least in part - an expression of what he sees as his role as big brother to a little sister who is trotting about and getting herself into all sorts of strife.

Our birthday gift to reflect this interest was (as you can see above) a rather spiffing new police uniform!

 

Got any ideas on what we could do to extend and capitalise on this interest in law and order?

 

   

3. Jamie Potter

  

   

Jamie is fascinated with the Harry Potter movies (though we've only showed him some of the earlier ones up to this point) and the whole idea of magic and wands in particular. He makes a wand out of just about anything, and when not playing the back seat police officer role, likes to be a back seat Harry Potter. He changes the colours of other cars, does magic to change the traffic lights, casts spells to have me turn left or right (these do tend to backfire on him from time to time...). Around the house, he casts spells on his little sister (mostly kind ones, thank goodness), "magicks" up amazing pictures, or even manages to make things disappear and reappear (including morsels of dinner sometimes, which is a bit unfortunate).

His spell-casting powers are obviously formiddable, because he even manages to make his father perform all sorts of actions (which might be translated as being high energy around-the-house TPR lessons!).

Jamie's birthday gift in response to this emergent interest was (as you can see above) a full Gryffindor get-up, complete with wand and Potter spectacles.

Where do you think we might be able to go with this one, then? Magic knows no bounds, after all...

   

  

 

I hope you'll be able to come up with some creative ideas to help us further explore and extend these emergent interests of Jamie.

He and his family would consider them 5th birthday gifts of the very best sort!

   

 

:-)

  

 

More Harry Potter lesson materials (this time showcasing an integrated skills approach)

Okay, I've dug up some more Harry Potter oriented lesson materials that were gathering dust in the Raven Vault! Even if they're not quite right for your actual classroom use, I hope at least they can give you some materials writing ideas.

First of all, a series of lesson materials based around the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book (depending on where in the world you live: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone). They are quite high level (post-intermediate at least), on account of the input but also because I basically developed these materials to use as examples in a teacher development seminar (hence wanted it to be reasonably challenging for the teachers, too!). I had just taken over DoS responsibilities at a school that insisted on having different teachers for different skill areas (so learners had four different teachers all focusing on something different - reading, grammar, listening/speaking, and writing; and each teacher used a completely different textbook). I wanted to show the school and teachers how we might use a more integrated approach with united topical content, while still allowing for skill-specific focus. I was also getting reading to implement a more process-oriented approach to the writing curriculum and wanted to show the teachers how this worked through real examples as well.

 

READING & VOCABULARY

HP 1 Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Lived (Reading and Vocabulary)

HP 1 Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Lived (Reading and Vocabulary) - Teacher's Version

   

LISTENING

HP 1 Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Lived (Listening)

HP 1 Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Lived (Listening) - Teacher's Version

SPEAKING

HP 1 Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Lived (Speaking)

HP 1 Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Lived (Speaking) - Teacher's Version

   

WRITING

HP 1 Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Lived (Writing)

   

There's also a nice little cover to go with the materials above if you want to put them together and create a unit 'kit':

HP 1 Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Lived (Kit Cover)

  

But that's not all! (Ready for the free steak knives pitch?)

   

I also found some related materials I developed for an advanced group of teenagers using Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as their main reading material:

   

HP 5 Chapter 1 - Dudley Demented (Review, Summary & Activities)

HP 5 Chapter 1 - Dudley Demented (Word and Expression List)

   

   

All of these materials were exhausting to make, but they worked brilliantly in the classroom (given the massive topical appeal to learners) and I had high hopes of making many more of the same type for all of the books at differing levels of English proficiency. I thought at the time that I was really onto something and I might even get some writing work out of it! That was, until Peter Usborne politely asked in an email me how on earth I'd managed to get permission from the Rowling Empire to feature the actual name Harry Potter on any of my potentially commercial materials... There went that idea!

   

There are some more Harry Potter learning materials elsewhere on this blog, too:

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Media Studies Materials)

   

:-D

Harry Potter media studies activity

 

Well, this is something from the English Raven vault - a resource and approach to integrating the Harry Potter movies into the ELT classroom from some years ago when the HP craze was really approaching astronomic heights. You might find the ideas and experiences here useful if you'd like to incorporate either the same or other movies into your classroom approach.

For a summer intensive course I was in charge of in Korea, teachers came up with the idea that we could let the students watch one of the Harry Potter movies on DVD. Unfortunately, sitting around during paid-for class time to watch a movie (one the students had already seen or could easily access and watch at home) wasn't a particularly popular notion with school administration or the all-important fee-paying parents.

Still, it seemed like such a shame not to draw on something that the students knew a lot about and were all very interested in. That's when I came up with the idea of turning a simple DVD movie viewing into a "media studies" session.

My basic goal here was to take the most recent movie in the Harry Potter franchise (at that time, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), and create an approach and set of materials that would really make the learners collaborate and pay extra close attention to what was happening, what was being said (and why), and what might be inferred. The end result would also be a very "work-driven" looking booklet that the learners could take home and show their parents (who were willing to embrace the idea of enjoyable content and activities - even movies! - so long as there was documented proof of language work involved).

The result was a series of three booklets that looked like this:

 

 

  

We made a schedule of 4 movie sessions (to break the lengthy movie into manageable sections that fit into the overall weekly schedule). Sessions 1 and 3 involved a booklet like the one you can see above, asking the students to work in small teams and complete the questions and gap-fills scene-by-scene as that section of the movie was being played. We put the English sub-titles on to assist the learners, but didn't slow down or repeat scenes from the movie. Learners had a chance to watch the movie again at home (if they wished) and check and improve their responses before checking the work collectively in class the next day. That was an unexpected bonus, as many parents saw their children watching a Harry Potter movie whilst beavering away at a challenging work book, and they were then more willing to embrace the idea of using movies in the classroom.

Here are the booklets for Parts 1 and 3:

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Media Studies Quiz Book 1

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Media Studies Quiz Book 3

 

           

In-between these two sessions, of course, came part 2, and I did things a little differently here to mix things up a little and break the pattern of just watch and answer things. For part 2, the booklet was essentially blank, and as they watched in teams, learners had to observe and come up with their own challenging questions for fellow students. At the end of that watching session, learners exchanged books and it became a homework task to try and answer another student's quiz questions about the movie. This was a nice switch and inserted a nice productive and more independent element to the overall approach.

Here is the download example for Part 2 of the viewing process:

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Media Studies Quiz Book 2

    

That covered parts 1-3 of the overall movie, and for the last quarter of the movie, we just let students enjoy and watch the movie without any specific tasks to do whatsoever.

That was actually interesting, because we found that the students had worked so hard and paid so much attention to the earlier parts of the movie that they really felt comfortable just watching and listening by this stage, and did seem to instinctively pay more attention to it (compared to other movie watching experiences we'd had prior to that - where students varied between zoning out or just not even really caring about the movie at all). I think the earlier attention and work had also really helped them to understand all the essential foundations of the plot and characters, so that by the end section of the movie it all made pretty natural sense to them.

   

From the "language uptake" perspective, we also noticed that students managed to pick up a lot of expressions and pretty advanced vocabulary, and they understood a lot more of the humour in what they were seeing and felt a connection with the characters and story. As teachers found ways to discuss the movie and bring up and reapply a lot of the vocabulary and expressions to use in follow up communication activities, the language and communication payoff was accelerated even more.

Only one real problem with making these books... You have to get the movie, and watch it scene by scene, pausing and often rewinding as you write down prompts for the students to answer. It takes a fair bit of time - but the result is something that is very effective and enjoyable for English language learners!

    

:-)