Teaching strategies

Streamline Your Teaching and Unlock Success With These Proven Classroom Strategies

01/24/2024 by admin

This is a Guest Post by Susan Good, a 38-year veteran of the classroom! Be sure to check out her website at retiredteacher.org for inciteful blog posts about teaching and writing!

Image: Pexels

Teaching is an intricate blend of art and science, requiring a well-organized approach to truly flourish. Whether you’re embarking on your teaching journey or seeking to refine your organizational skills, this comprehensive guide from Kinney Brother’s Publishing is designed to support educators in creating a structured, supportive, and stimulating learning environment. Dive into these strategies to transform your classroom into a well-oiled educational machine, where each element is purposefully aligned for maximum teaching effectiveness and student engagement.

Personalize Your Approach to Individual Needs

Understanding and catering to individual student needs is the cornerstone of effective teaching. Maintain detailed records of each student’s progress, preferences, and challenges. In ESL (English as a Second Language) classrooms, for instance, this individualized attention is particularly crucial, as students might require tailored support to bridge language barriers and embrace new communication skills. Personalized tracking fosters a nurturing academic environment, encouraging each student to reach their full potential.

Monitor and Adapt Your Lesson Plans

Teaching is a dynamic process, demanding continuous adaptation and improvement. Regularly assess the effectiveness of your lesson plans, gathering feedback and monitoring student engagement and comprehension. This reflective practice ensures that your teaching methods evolve in tandem with your students’ needs, keeping your classroom vibrant and your teaching strategies impactful.

Cultivate an Inspiring Learning Environment

Your classroom’s physical environment plays a pivotal role in student learning. Design a space that’s not just organized but also inviting and stimulating. Incorporate elements that spark creativity, foster comfort, and reflect the diverse needs of your students, including those in ESL classrooms. A thoughtfully designed classroom is a canvas for imagination, discovery, and growth.

Discover and Implement Your Unique Organizational Style

Effective organization isn’t one-size-fits-all. Explore various strategies and tools to find what resonates with your teaching style and classroom dynamics. Whether it’s color-coded systems, digital planners, or visual schedules, the right organizational approach can turn chaos into clarity, ensuring that every lesson flows smoothly and every resource is right at your fingertips.

Master the Art of Classroom Management

Effective classroom management is integral to a productive learning atmosphere. Establish clear expectations, consistent routines, and positive reinforcement strategies. A well-managed classroom minimizes distractions and maximizes learning opportunities, creating a space where respect, cooperation, and focus are the norm.

Embrace a Paperless Classroom

In the fast-paced world of education, staying organized is essential for educators. An effective strategy is to digitize your paper records and other important documents. Additionally, when it comes to sharing files with staff, PDFs have emerged as the preferred format due to wider compatibility and ease of use. To streamline this process, consider using an online tool that allows you to effortlessly convert these types of files to PDFs by simply dragging and dropping them into the tool – making this the best solution for educators seeking efficient file management.

Break Down Your Goals

Set yourself up for success by transforming lofty goals into smaller, actionable steps. This methodical approach makes even the most ambitious targets achievable, allowing you to track progress and celebrate milestones along the way. In breaking down your goals, you’re not just planning; you’re paving a clear path toward educational excellence.

Set and Achieve SMART Goals

Ambition drives progress, but a structured approach ensures results. Establish Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound or SMART goals for your teaching career. This clear framework guides your professional development, ensuring that every step you take is purposeful and aligned with your long-term vision as an educator.

In the world of education, organization is the silent hero, setting the stage for teaching triumphs and student successes. By embracing these essential strategies, teachers—from novices to veterans—can navigate the complexities of the classroom with confidence and finesse. From personalized student support to smart goal-setting, these practices don’t just streamline your workload; they enhance your impact, leaving a lasting imprint on the hearts and minds of your students. Embark on this journey of organizational mastery, and watch as your classroom transforms into a beacon of learning, inspiration, and growth.

The Science of Reading

03/06/2023 by admin

The Science of Reading is a dynamically-evolving field of study, encompassing a wide range of research with the focus on understanding how humans learn to read and write. Exploring the cognitive, psychological, and linguistic processes involved in reading and writing, researchers are developing more effective approaches to teaching and learning these skills. This body of scientifically-based research, conducted over the last five decades across the world, is derived from studies in multiple languages and within inter-disciplinary fields, such as linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and educational research. As a science-based approach not limited to native-language speakers, the evidence informs how proficient reading and writing skills develop and can be applied in second-language programs, such as ESL courses.

One of the main findings of this body of research is that learning to read is not a single, unified process, but rather a complex and dynamic set of skills and strategies that include phonological awareness, decoding, comprehension, and fluency. When these skills and applied teaching strategies are understood, researchers are better able to evaluate and improve teaching methods and curricular materials. Instead of a “one size fits all” method, the science can be highly individualized, where different readers and writers may have discrete needs and preferences, lending itself to varied approaches to learning.

Because reading is a complex process with many different components and stages, for young children, the learning process is long and gradual, requiring patience and the right support from parents and teachers. Long before a child’s first primary steps toward learning to read, the influence of reading aloud to very young children cannot be underestimated. Exploring text and images, pointing to words and pictures as they are read, begins the process of understanding language through text. For the young mind, phonemic awareness is the first step that leads toward an understanding of the association with the text, the concept of word, and comprehension.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize the individual sounds that make up words. Through picture books, games, and activities such as rhyming, sound matching, and songs, a child develops an awareness of text to sound and conceptual associations working in tandem toward a cohesive comprehension. In the case of teaching young language learners, the physical milieu is no less important. When reading to children, having them physically close allows students to hear and feel the resonance of the teacher’s voice with sounds they would otherwise not be exposed to or have the opportunity to imitate. Encouraging students to imitate these new sounds is necessary to expand their vocal repertoire in the new language. In the earliest stages of language acquisition, if children cannot hear and sense how the sounds are produced, they won’t be able to phonemically individuate, replicate, and associate the sounds to text.

The letter/sound connection is the first step in understanding how text is coded and how the teacher or parent translates text as spoken sounds associated with letters that make up words. Activities using magnetic letters, letter tracing, and primary ABC writing practice are strategies to lead young students toward phonemic awareness. In ESL courses, educators have the dual charge of teaching phonetic associations as well as the vocabulary associated with those sounds, e.g., CAT, DOG, and RUN. It is vitally important that teachers plan early by introducing a phonetically-associated vocabulary base that will eventually become the foundation for future spelling practice.

For the second-language learner, the leap from ABCs and phonetic associations to reading short CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words must be taught with deliberate and varied practice. Instructors may have students whose native-language orthographies define the concept of word very differently, e.g, syllabaries and hieroglyphics. In English, segmenting and blending are important skills that can be taught with worksheets and task cards. Once students are comfortable with sounding out letters to form words and understand their meaning, it’s time to begin putting the words into a context in sentences.

When you begin putting words in context and ask students to derive meaning, it is inevitable that you will encounter sight words. Sometimes called ‘popcorn’ words, they are commonly used words that children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, such as the, is, and of. For example, teaching “A cat on a mat.” necessitates introducing children to sight words that give context and meaning. Because of the frequency of sight words in the English language, once introduced, they become an integral part of the next steps in reading fluency.

As you move from the ABCs through emergent reader activities, you’ll want to have reading goals in place. As a teacher, it is important to be able to recognize when a student has a command of the sounds of the alphabet, achieves the concept of word, is displaying rudimentary reading ability, and finally, capable of decoding and deriving meaning from connected text. These concepts must be developed in this order and practiced to achieve reading fluency. The habits that you build into the children’s learning activities will help them to acquire new words more quickly, build on their knowledge base to infer meaning, and progress more confidently in their studies.

The last step is to help the child develop fluency. This is the ability to read words quickly and accurately while maintaining a collective and concurring comprehension. Children can practice fluency through their own reading time, reading aloud, choral reading, and reading to a partner. Nurturing fluency must be just as deliberate as early CVC word practice. Silent e, digraphs, diphthongs, and categories of words that change with grammar, like pronouns and verbs, must be explicitly taught. The cumulative effect is a fluency that pushes students toward increasingly complex texts and greater academic achievement.

If you are interested in a more detailed discussion on teaching children to read, check out Teaching Sight Words in the ESL Classroom and Teaching CVC Words – How, When, and What. Looking for classroom materials aligned to the science of reading? See the full lineup of phonics-based learning materials from Kinney Brothers Publishing.

In the video below, Prof. Stanislas Dehaene, a French cognitive neuroscientist, discusses how the brain learns to read at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE). The main body of his presentation occurs in the first 18 minutes of the video with a discussion towards the end. I recommend jumping 2:55 where he begins discussing how the brain processes reading as a function.

In summary, and to quote The Reading League website, “this research has been conducted over the last five decades across the world, and it is derived from thousands of studies conducted in multiple languages. The science of reading has culminated in a preponderance of evidence to inform how proficient reading and writing develop; why some have difficulty; and how we can most effectively assess and teach and, therefore, improve student outcomes through prevention of and intervention for reading difficulties.” I highly recommend downloading their free ebook to learn more about the science of reading.

Easy Sight Words – A Closer Look

01/27/2021 by admin

Whether you call them sight words, popcorn words, or high-frequency words, they are, by definition, “commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole or by ‘sight,’ so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode.”

In addition, high frequency words can be abstract, difficult if not impossible to represent using pictures, and especially difficult to understand where meaning may have an inferred understanding through context (something a second language learner doesn’t have the advantage of in early language development.) It can be very elusive to create a clear mental model of words like have and get, both of which can cross several different word choices in a language learner’s native language.

This is why students of English need to be exposed to the patterns of speech and inferred meaning of sight words early on in oral and writing exercises. Inevitably, as you move children from decoding individual words to decoding language in connected text, sight words should be a regular part of your ESL program.

Preview Download
Kinney Brothers Publishing (Amazon)
Donald’s English Classroom (pdf download)
Donald’s English Classroom support materials

Preview Download
Kinney Brothers Publishing (Amazon)
Donald’s English Classroom (pdf download)
Donald’s English Classroom support materials

Preview Download
Kinney Brothers Publishing (Amazon)
Donald’s English Classroom (pdf download)
Donald’s English Classroom support materials

As your emergent readers display rudimentary reading ability and become capable of decoding and deriving meaning from connected text, including sight-word practice is imperative. The habits that you build into the children’s learning activities will help them to acquire new words more quickly, build on their knowledge base to infer meaning, and progress more confidently in their studies.

Teaching Pronunciation

03/24/2020 by admin

As a teacher with limited class time, how can you best meet your students’ needs when it comes to pronunciation practice? With younger kids, if you teach phonics with a rigorous focus on phonemes, pronunciation is built into the program. In this post I detail some additional activities that you and your students may enjoy. When teaching older kids and adults, a bit of time set aside for pronunciation can allow for focused, effective, and enjoyable activities in an otherwise busy schedule. Importantly, consistent practice is key to making a difference in your students’ pronunciation.

There are a variety of downloadable pronunciation games and templates in this post. They are free for you to download and use in class. There are also numerous resource links you may want to return to in the future, so be sure to bookmark this page! As always, if there are activities you especially enjoy using in class, let readers know in the comments!

Let’s begin! I’ll start with activities for younger students and move toward activities appropriate for older language learners.

Read to Your Kids!

When I read a story in class, I seat my kids close to me so they can hear and feel the sounds resonating from me. I often invite students to turn pages, point to pictures, and when possible, participate as a group in the reading of the story. Your kids will be picking up your pronunciation as it arrives to their ears in word inflections, emotions, and the rhythms of the story. A tale well told can make a powerful impression on little kids!

Books are numerous, but here is a short list of 10 books I especially enjoy reading in class. As I’m always on the lookout for new titles, please let me know the books you enjoy for story time in the comments below!

Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
Today is Monday by Eric Carle
Polar Bear’s Underwear by Tupera Tupera
Clap Your Hands by Lorinda Bryan Cauley
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle
Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Eric Carle
No, David! by David Shannon
Excuse Me! by Karen Katz
Cat in a Hat by Dr. Seuss

Teach Phonics!

Phonics and Spelling Kinney Brothers Publishing

Phonics lessons are the cornerstone of my kids’ classes. Over the years, and with intention, I built pronunciation practice into my program and that includes phonics and spelling lessons all through elementary school. From the outset, songs, storybooks, and phonics associations introduce a vocabulary bank I exploit and build on in future lessons. As students progress learning CVC words, long vowel sounds, sight words, plurals, and verb conjugations, I never have to worry about exposing my younger students to enough pronunciation and listening practice.

The result of this isn’t only for good pronunciation delivery. In the beginning, it’s especially important that students learn how to hear me, to be able to individuate the 44 sounds of my language and then imitate how I vocally vibrate, aspirate, and fricitate as an English speaker. So, the path to proper and consistent English pronunciation starts with listening and identifying, and THEN speaking! Phonics lessons will give you a wealth of material and a consistent focus when teaching young children.

Chants and Tongue Twisters

As I mentioned in my post, The Drama is Real, chants have legs! Like songs, they dance about in children’s heads right out of the classroom. This kind of activity isn’t just for younger students. Older kids and adults can benefit enormously from pronunciation activities that include fun exercises like tongue twisters. Remind your students that professional newscasters, actors, and singers use tongue twisters as warmup exercises all.the.time! Check out engVid for 50 classic tongue twisters that will help your students learn to enunciate. And don’t forget rhymes for choosing players! You’ll be surprised how quickly your students will pick up these chants if you employ them regularly.

Icka bicka soda cracker,
Icka bicka boo.
Icka bicka soda cracker,
Out go YOU!

Bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish.
How many pieces do you wish?
1-2-3 and you are IT!

Minimal Pairs

Minimal pair work is essential and a good deck of minimal pair flashcards is worth its weight in gold! Minimal pairs are words that differ in one sound only, like pit and pet. When you teach English words in groups that point out differences as well as similarities, your students will be able to hear the differences that distinguish words from one another. Early phonics lessons like cat, can, and cap, work like minimal pair exercises and shouldn’t be dropped once students learn to read. Minimal pairs are excellent listening and speaking practice for older kids and adults as well. They can be employed in a variety of ways besides testing and assessing.

Playing games with minimal pairs allows students to flex their vocal muscles and exercise their ears. If you’re looking for flashcard activity ideas, check out my 50+ Flashcard Activities. Try a game where students listen to a string of words to identify one that is different. A simple ‘missing card’ activity is easy to set up and can be a real challenge! Put three or four words on the board, have students cover their eyes, and remove one of the cards. Students guess which card is missing. Try silently mouthing or whispering target words during a game. This is good for focusing on and exaggerating mouth positions for English sounds. If you’re in a space that allows for more rambunctious fun, try relays or positioning students at opposite ends of the room for some loud pronunciation practice. Placing a physical barrier between players forces them to listen more carefully and communicate clearly!

You can download a free set of 25 minimal pair flashcards with five sets of words for each sound pair. The flashcards include master cards, pair cards, and individual word cards so you can adapt them to a variety of games and activities. Also included is a PowerPoint template for making your own! The zip file is large, so have patience when downloading. Caroline Bowen, AM, Phd, of speech-language-therapy.com has created a generous online list of words you can draw from when putting together your own minimal pair flashcards and worksheets.

Exit Tickets

The thing I love about Exit Tickets is that they’re a quick way to assess lessons taught or determine lessons that need to be taught. Hand cards out just before the end of class, go through a quick listening exercise and get them back as students go out the door. Voilà! Instant data to mull over!

These free Exit Tickets are aligned to the Minimal Pair Flash Cards above and include a PowerPoint template. I also have ABC Exit Tickets and CVC Exit Tickets available in my online store that I recommend checking out!

Pronunciation Maze

This pronunciation maze is a simple but effective puzzle I regularly use when teaching my kids past tense conjugations and the three -ed sounds /id/, /d/, and /t/. The grid template can also be used for the plural sounds /s/, /z/, and /ez/ and first, second, and third syllable accents. To play, students move from the top-left starting point to the bottom-right Finish by connecting the same target sounds in a maze-like fashion. Use the same board as a warmup or review in a 4-in-a-Row game! Laminate the boards and use counters and you’ll have this game at your disposal for years to come!

You can download three past tense mazes here. The free download includes an answer key, blank and PowerPoint templates for creating your own mazes.

Record Your Students

Recording your students doesn’t have to be for a presentation or speech contest. Having students listen to themselves can be fun, revealing, and instructive! It’s like a sound selfie! Choose an easy reading passage that students are familiar with for individual recordings or a dialogue where students can work in pairs. A simple passage from a fairy tale provides older students with expressive melodrama and fun characters like villains, princesses, and frogs. Remember, many of your adult students are also parents and can be pretty good at reading a children’s story!

Telephone Activity

This activity will give you lots of listening and speaking practice in a unique and challenging format! In short, you’re replacing the numbers of a telephone pad with a set of 10 minimal pair words. First, practice the set of words that appear in the activity. Hand out the telephone sheets to students and practice the words again until students are somewhat familiar with their placement on the telephone pad. With a prepared set of telephone numbers, dictate the words to your students. When everyone is finished, check their accuracy. This is a good activity for small groups and pairs as well.

Download this free activity with six gamepads plus a blank pad and PowerPoint template for creating your own.

Pronunciation Pyramid

This is a classic activity, easy to set up, and an excellent warm-up or cool-down exercise. Starting at the top tier of the pyramid, say one of the two words and have students circle the word they hear. Gradually work down the pyramid until you arrive at a number at the bottom. Ask students what number they ended on and see how accurately they listened! Up the ante on this activity by preparing a list of sentences so students have to catch the words in context.

Three free pyramid games plus blank and PowerPoint templates can be downloaded here.

Phonemic Charts

Phonemic Chart Kinney Brothers Publishing

Phonemic Charts are a wonderful tool to help students make sense of English pronunciation. Click here to download the free chart above that includes a black and white version. The British Council at teachingenglish.org.uk put together a set of free and very large phonemic symbol charts you can tack to classroom walls or reference during lectures. I recommend exploring the British Council website as they have some excellent online resources!

If you want to transcribe words or grab the phonemic symbols for your own resources, check out phonetizer.com/ or ipa.typeit.org/ You can translate or type in the codes and then copy and paste to your own documents. When working with the symbols, many fonts will not support the characters. Charis SIL is a supported font you can download here. If there are other fonts you recommend, help a teacher out and let me know in the comments below!

Charts, Word Walls, and Games

Pronunciation Practice Kinney Brothers Publishing Donald's English Classroom

To maintain an awareness of proper pronunciation, as an intervention when necessary, or for specialized practice, I developed a series of easy charts, flash cards, and games. With age-neutral images and easy vocabulary, I use these with my elementary through adult English classes.

The charts include consonants, vowels, blends, digraphs, ‘r’ controlled sounds, and plurals. Each set also has aligned flashcards, Bingo games, and I Have/Who Has activities. Click here to learn more about the complete lineup of resources from my online store, Donald’s English Classroom. In a previous post, A Game With Legs, I detail the myriad ways you can use I Have/Who Has activities in class!

In closing…

It should go without saying, just doing a couple of activities once or twice will not guarantee good pronunciation or fix the problems your students may be having. Pronunciation is NOT a one-off lesson. It’s also important to remember, language learners will only be able to take in so much pronunciation input at one time. More is not always better. Studies have shown that you can teach as few as 3 to 5 minimal pairs in order for students to show spontaneous generalization to other words containing the target sounds. Focused practice will lead your students to a better understanding of English pronunciation so that an occasional “nudge” will keep them on track.

The important thing is to integrate these activities into your class routine whenever possible and find ways to make pronunciation practice an enjoyable challenge.

For convenience, here is a quick list of the six free downloads in this post from Kinney Brothers Publishing:

You might be interested in checking out Teaching Pronunciation, A Followup. This post details a variety of activities I created for my own classes and available in my online store, Donald’s English Classroom.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

Interactive Notebooks (INBs)

05/09/2019 by admin

There came a point where I had to intervene. My students’ notebooks were a disordered mess and their bags, when emptied, were a junk pile of crumpled papers, loose cards, and past games. Taking action, I began to roll out a program using interactive notebooks.

Be sure to check out my post on CVC Interactive Notebook templates!

What is an Interactive Notebook?

You may have seen references to INBs, ISNs, or INs, all of which refer to a decades-long trend in education called Interactive (Student) Notebooks. The movement has its history in a tradition of notebooking, scrapbooking and early educators promoting creativity and interaction in student learning.

Nature journals (advocated by 19th-century British educator Charlotte Mason) provide an early example of interactive notebooks. Students began with blank notebooks and either drew or glued a plant or leaf onto a page. Then they wrote about it, labeled it, or included a related poem or thought. Ms. Mason’s Book of Centuries is another example where students explored each century with timelines, drawings, maps, and facts of interest.

The History Alive! social studies program is seen as the genesis of the contemporary interactive notebook movement. Developed in the 80s and 90s by educators at Teacher’s Curriculum Institute, History Alive! is a series of instructional practices that allow students with diverse learning styles to “experience” history. Beginning with the idea that students should be allowed to construct their own knowledge, the teachers created dynamic and highly interactive teaching strategies.

So, what is it about interactive notebooks that have attracted so many educators? How do they benefit and what can be gained for students and teachers?

Here are 7 reasons to use interactive notebooks in class by Jennifer Smith Jochen, of Smith Curriculum and Consulting, on the Minds in Bloom blog.

Interactive notebooks teach students to organize and synthesize their thoughts.
Interactive notebooks accommodate multiple learning styles at one time in (and out of) the classroom.
Student-teacher-parent interaction is built and strengthened with the use of interactive notebooks.
Students are building a portfolio that allows for teachers to track growth over time.
Interactive notebooks have students create a resource to use as they continue to extend their learning.
Students take ownership of their learning through color and creativity.
Interactive notebooks reduce clutter in the classroom, as well as in students’ lives.

Getting Started

When setting up an INB, whatever the subject, teachers regularly include a cover page, table of contents, a rubric for grading the notebooks, an agreement between student and teacher for the upkeep of their notebooks, and finally, a strategy for dividing the notebook into school terms and/or units taught.

When working with a two-page layout, the right-side pages are often reserved for teacher input (teacher-generated notes and handouts) and student output is on the left side — paralleling right/left brain activity. American educator and Wisconsinite, Angela Nerby, explains the breakdown of the interactive notebooks used in her 2nd-grade classes in multiple step-by-step blog posts at Hippo Hooray Teaching.

Tips for newbies:

Use sturdy notebooks; preferably with sewn-in pages.
Create a model notebook that you can use for planning and demonstration.
Number the pages from the outset so that everyone is on the same page.
Tape or create a large pocket for unfinished page elements.
Tape or hot glue a ribbon bookmark to the inside back cover.
Use liquid glue or tape. Pages glued with glue sticks quickly fall apart.
Have a place for students to access materials like glue, scissors, and paper. Establish a routine for cutting, pasting, and cleanup.
Take students step by step through the layout process with your demo book and sample elements. Stress from the beginning cutting and pasting techniques.
Carry through with the notebook project! The first year is going to teach you a lot about planning, organizing, and executing your INB. Use your demo book to make notes about what worked well and what needs improvement.

To help get you started, download the above templates that include a variety of basic manipulatives in pdf and png formats. They’re free, and please feel free to use them.

On the Flip Side

What interactive notebooks are NOT:

INBs are NOT a replacement for students taking notes. It is a center for interaction.
They are NOT a replacement for a textbook. However, a textbook can’t give you everything you need when teaching. I began using interactive notebooks for topics that were not covered in the textbook: picture dictionaries, songs and chants, sight word practice, extra writing practice, dictation, vocabulary activities, dialogues, clockwork, and cursive writing practice.
Foldables and flip-flaps can be amazing tools but they are NOT what defines an interactive notebook. What makes a notebook interactive is that an active connection occurs between the page and the mind of the student.

Check out the book, Interactive Notebooks and English Language Learners, by Marcia Carter, Anita Hernandez and Jeannine Richison. The authors write about addressing the needs of second language learners and how an “Interactive Notebook can be used to scaffold content to move English language learners (ELLs) to the stage where they are academic language learners (ALLs).”

Making learning fun…

In this video, Nassrin Rabi, an elementary ESL teacher in Tel Aviv, demonstrates creating a prepositions of place page for her students’ INBs. You can check out more of her videos on her Youtube channel.

This is from Victoria of CrazyCharizma, an educator known for her unique and creative materials for your INBs. Download a free version of the typewriters and try them out in class!

Since Charlotte Mason’s Nature Notebooks, and the exploratory work done by the Teacher’s Curriculum Institute, we’ve moved into the digital age — and it’s pounding on our classroom doors. If you work in a blended classroom or teach online, creating online interactive notebooks in Google Classroom helps students negotiate digital tools that are necessary to their academic and professional futures.

Here is a nine-minute video demonstration by David Lee, an EdTech Specialist at Singapore American School, showing his kids how to navigate a digital science interactive notebook.

If you’ve ever been discouraged or at a loss with your students’ notebook habits, take the initiative and give interactive notebooks a try. Yes, they are a lot of work, but the rewards for teachers, students, and parents are worth the effort!

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing

Drills, Dialogues, & Roleplays

11/09/2018 by admin

Materials and content allowing students to engage in ‘real’ communication, or simulations of what conversations may sound like, should be a goal for many language curriculums. Drills that develop into dialogues, which in turn pave the way for roleplays, provide a rich repertoire of practice activities to nudge students toward more meaningful, and consequently, less mechanical communication. In fact, such activities can hold relevance for students at any level of their studies whether they’re beginners, intermediate, or advanced language learners.

Although controlled by the teacher, meaningful drills allow students to provide information in addition to the correct language form, give reason for speaking, and as a result, are more engaging and motivating than mechanical drills.

Let’s differentiate three types of exercises often used in the classroom: drills, dialogues, and roleplays, with each having their own subset of forms.

Drills are a vital part of language study. Simply put, a drill is a type of highly controlled or mechanical written or oral exercise in which students respond to a given cue. Drills often have no context and exist for the sole purpose of practicing targeted skills. They can be practiced in any order without losing the logic of the exercise. Drills are the easiest for teachers to set up and implement and the exercises students are most likely to forget. Why? Because they’re often mechanical and lack meaningfulness. In other words, students are on autopilot. When working with drills, you’ll likely be using one of three types: repetition, substitution, or transformation exercises.

Repetition drills focus on a specific target where the teacher’s language or target text is repeated with no change; think flashcards and pronunciation drills.

Substitution drills give students practice in changing a target word or employ a grammar structure in response to a prompt or cue.

Teacher: Blue.

Student: I like blue.

Transformation drills involve changing the structure of a sentence.

Teacher: I like to eat cake.

Student: I like eating cake.

As necessary as they may be, drills don’t have to be boring or lack meaningfulness! There are a variety of creative and fun ways to liven up your flashcard drill work, making the activities more engaging and memorable for your students. Check out my 50+ Flashcard Activities for lots of ideas to shake up your usual drill routines.

If you think of drills as a pathway to dialogues, it will significantly influence how you prepare and implement both types of exercises.

While they can rely on the components found in drills, dialogues provide context and, if unordered, lose their sense of logic. Dialogues usually present spoken language in a natural or conversational tone and are typically longer than drills. They’re beneficial for developing speaking and listening skills. Like drills, dialogues are usually exercises for guided, rather than free language practice.

Dialogues can fall into two categories: standard dialogues and open dialogues.

Standard dialogues present students with an A B exchange. They are useful for reading, listening, pronunciation, intonation, and other phonological features.

In open dialogues, the teacher provides only one half of the dialogue with students creating the other half. Surveys are a perfect and extremely useful example of an open dialogue format and give students practice in asking and answering questions.

If you choose to write your own dialogues, keep these ideas in mind:

Use “natural” language as much as possible with idiomatic and sociolinguistic phrases relevant to the students’ age and experiences. “Wassup!” may work well with teens but not so much for retirees.

Keep the dialogue exchanges short enough so that students can easily remember, but long enough to provide context. Three to five exchanges with salutations work well.

A simple dialogue can happen anywhere. Allow an extenuating or teacher-directed circumstance like an emergency or other conflict to provide urgency. Delivering the line, “Where’s my phone?” will be quite different in a supermarket as opposed to coming upon an accident.

Depict situations or reasons for a dialogue that are relevant and useful to the learner. Think of how differently young teens and adults may think and talk about a math test, making a reservation, or a fistfight in the cafeteria.

Allow for more meaningful practice with options for substitution within the dialogue.

Here are some ideas when presenting dialogues:

Before presenting the dialogue, introduce the topic of the dialogue by fielding students’ interest or knowledge of the subject. Providing students with pictures that may accompany or are similar to the dialogue, can warm students up with relevant vocabulary or grammatical structures.

Have students listen to the dialogue and explore specifics about what they heard. If you have no recordings, set up two students to read while the rest of the class listens.

Give students only one side of the dialogue and have students participate in reading and listening.

Have students reorder a dialogue that’s been cut up into its individual lines.

Try out your acting skills and use the dialogue as a telephone conversation where students only hear one side of the exchange. Who was on the other end of the conversation? Mother, teacher, or friend? What questions did they ask?

Perform the dialogue in fictional circumstances. How does the same dialogue change in a library as opposed to a crowded cafeteria, or on a cold day in the park as opposed to a sunny beach?

You may be pleasantly surprised at the willingness of students to play and the creativity they will exhibit if you mine dialogues for expressive and more meaningful practice.

As students become more flexible and rely on fewer cues to initiate or carry them through a given dialogue, they are ready to move into roleplaying.

Roleplay is a way of bringing situations from real life into the classroom. Dramatic scripts are simply extended dialogues grouped into scenes! Semi-improvisational exercises where scenarios are presented with specific outcomes but nonspecific language, are excellent roleplay activities. If your students are ready, full improvisation is an especially enjoyable way of getting students to explore a topic, take on specific roles, and employ learned language in a meaningful and expressive way.

Resources

Download these sample business roleplays from Trends, a compilation of readings and exercises for intermediate and advanced learners. Try them out in class or use them as a guide in developing your own roleplays!

Dialogues For Young Speakers provides guided dialogues and surveys that were created with easy and natural language for beginning students. Check out these sample pages and they may spark ideas for your own original dialogues!

If you need basic drills for young students, download these sample drill worksheets from Q&A, a compendium of question and answer drills with simple present through simple past tense worksheets.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing