Archive for the 'Teaching Resources' Category

Apr

Hot Seat!

I’m a believer in using games to educate and reward. I have a class of first graders whose favorite game is a spelling bee. Who would have thunk it?

Hot Seat! comes courtesy of a coworker. It emphasizes speaking and vocabulary. It’s a simple game that uses nothing more than a marker/chalk, a chair and a word list.

I’ve played this both as a team game with points and a just general activity. Place a chair under the board. Have one student sit in the chair so they can’t see the board. Either the teacher or another student writes a word on the board. The students not on the “hot seat”. The rest of the students have to describe the word on the board for the other student to guess.

If you play in teams, put a limit on the time to give clues. I disallow sign language no matter what. Depending on the level of the class, the clues can be single words, phrases or full sentences. Sometimes it’s fun for higher level classes to be limited to one word at a time because they have to work cooperatively to give the clues.

When I teach domain specific knowledge, such as science, I use the chapter or unit vocabulary as the word list.

If you try it with your students, let me know how it goes!

posted by Kathryn in Activites,Fun things,Games,Language,Speaking,Teaching Resources,Vocabulary and have No Comments

Jul

Classic Tales

One of my favorite series to use for teaching reading is Classic Tales by Oxford University Press. They are well written and illustrated. They are nicely leveled and reinforce vocabulary. There is a cassette tape and adtivity book for each title. They are fairly short, 18 pages of story text with a similarly sized activity book. They are inexpensive.

The kids really seem to enjoy doing the story books. They study reading with their Korean teacher, but often they use books that only have a paragraph or two followed by questions. There’s nothing wrong with that. But reading an entire story, a real book, gives many of the kids a sense of satisfaction they don’t get with shorter passages.

I enjoy teaching them because it breaks up the monotomy of teaching Language five days a week. With my afternoon language classes, I’ve gone to doing reading on Tuesday and Thursday, language on Monday and Wednesday and writing on Friday. All three skills are so closely tied, that it makes sense to teach them like that. I often use the story books or writing activities to reinforce what we learned in the language book.

Overall, it’s a win – win situatioin.

posted by Kathryn in Reading,Teaching,Teaching Resources and have No Comments

May

Star Student Bag

This is a trick I learned while working as a substitute in the US.

Sometimes kids need motivation. Awe, heck. Lots of times kids need motivation. Whether it be motivation to behave or do good work, they still need it. In an ideal world, that motivation would come from within. But this isn’t an ideal world.

At the beginning of the term, I was having real problems with the behavior of students in Dewey Class and Einstein Class. I had never tried the Start Student Bag as an ESL teacher, but it did work well for me when I was a sub. The idea is to reinforce the good behavior rather than punishing the bad behavior. Way back when I was an undergrad in the Psychology department, I learned that reinforcment is generally a more effective way of changing behavior, as opposed to punishment.

So how does the Star Student Bag work? Well, you need a small bag, some strips of paper and some prizes. When a student is doing something good (behavior, participation, work) you give him or her one slip of paper. The student writes his or her name on the paper and places it in the bag. At the end of a specified time period, you draw a predetermined number of slips out of the bag and those students get a small prize. Prizes I’ve used include stickers, erasers, pencils, bookmarks and pens. I never spend more than about a dollar a student. I find a good rule of thumb is to have one prize for each four students. My classes usually have 12 or 13 students so I generally give out four prizes. As to when to give out prizes, I do it once a week because my classes only meet for 25 minutes.

Star Student Slip (pdf)

Star Student Slip (odt)

Star Student Slip (doc)

posted by Kathryn in Activites,Little Campus,Students,Teaching,Teaching Resources and have No Comments

Feb

Save the Words

see more puppies

I came across “Save the Words” a few days ago (warning, obnoxious website). The premise is that words that are less common in every day language will be removed from dictionaries. The people who made this site want to save those words from exclusion. I doubt the site would do much to save some of these words. However, it could serve as an interesting teaching tool for advanced students. Many of the words can be analyzed to find their meaning from the word roots. This is something I’ve worked on a bit with some of my more advanced students.

Personally, I adoped “nidifice” (noun: a nest)

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Language,Teaching Resources,Web sites,Writing and have No Comments

Jan

The 12 Days of Christmas — Korean Style

On Christmas Eve, I took my turn in the cycle of teaching Ivy. Not wanting to do a boring discussion class (oh how I hate trying to get teenagers to talk), I decided to turn them loose on The 12 Days of Christmas lyrics. We listened to the song a couple of times and I told them they could work in pairs or small groups to come up with their own lyrics. The catch was the things they used as gifts had to be tied to Korea in some way. Here’s what we came up with in the end.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a big pot of spicy kimchi.
On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me, two shots of soju.
On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me, three orange restaurants.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, four Taekwondo belts.
On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, five hand phones.
On the six day of Christmas my true love gave to me, six lovely hanboks.
On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me, seven rolls of kimbap.
On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, eight bags of ramyan.
On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, nine taxi drivers.
On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, ten chewy rice cakes.
On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me, eleven English hagwons.
On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, twelve bowls of rice.

I think it’s really cute. True, some of the things aren’t unique to Korea, but they are popular here. Try to find anyone over the age of 7 without a hand phone (aka “cell phone” to you westerners). I’ve seen quite a few elderly men and women with them. And the taxi drivers? Well, that was my contribution. Every time I get into a taxi I say a quick prayer to get out in one piece.

posted by Kathryn in Activites,Fun things,Holidays,Korea,Korean Vocabulary,Language,Little Campus,Lyrics,Music,Students,Teaching,Teaching Resources,Writing and have No Comments

Dec

How much?

As a math activity, I had C1 attempt to figure out how much all the gifts from the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” would cost. I found current prices (pdf) for each on the web. Seriously, what isn’t on the web these days? I then made an Excel file to help the kids calculate the total cost.

12dayschristmas