Creating expectation and other elements for atrezzo

The way in which you start a reading promotion session has an outstanding importance as the first impression the children get is going to have a huge impact on their attitude, attention, interest and general behaviour.

I, personally, haven't paid much attention to this in the past and I think it is one of my weakest points. However, there are a number of different things that you can use in order to create that sensation of thrill, of expectation that will give us our group's full attention, at least for a while.

For instance, one of our most famous local storytellers has a suitcase full of stories: La Maleta de Leocadio. This is a fairly simple element, but as children are used to have a storytelling session every time you use it, it fulfills its purpose really well.

Other things one might use is a decorated bag, a story box, a balloon piñata, crackers or any other similar elements. Sometimes those elements can serve you to form groups later on, like using different colours for the balloons, or placing different colour papers or numbers, or animals or whatever suits the activity in the cracker. This is an intelligent way of improving your time management.

In addition, one might use other kind of elements that, when used in a recurrent basis, allows the children to anticipate what is going to happen next. Among other elements we could go for a story hat, a story jacket, the story telling staff (as a magician cane), etc. Its strength is taken from the way you use it.

Finger puppets: They can be made with the children as a pre-activity, we can have them made ourselves or we can even paint a rudimentary one with a pen or fine marker on our fingers or thumbs. Even if you have your own, it is still a recommendable pre-activity as it allows the children to participate further later on.

Classroom English page

Like we have said before, classroom management is very important in order to perform a successful session with your class. Previously we have given a few tips and techniques which might be really useful to maintain silence and attention, to form groups quickly etc. However, as an EFL teachers we have to know the proper expressions for those actions and for other situations which might happen in your class. That's why today I'm showing you a very useful link which includes vocabulary and phrases related with the school/class environment.

http://www.finchpark.com/courses/links/classroom.htm

Number yourselves.

It is a very usual way of forming groups. We can start by pointing at the students giving them a number (up to the amount of groups we want to create) and following some sort of order (to the right or to the left when working in circles or row by row when sitting in columns), later on we will ask the students to continue with it (1-2-3-4;1-2-3-4...) till they all have a number. At the end we will ask each number to gather at a different place of the class. This technique might suffer from the subsequent uses problem, just as the previous one. That is why it seem s to be a good idea to introduce different variations (e.g. the first 1-4 are group number one, the second 1-4 are group number two etc.) so it is harder for the children to predict the result.

A colourful class

We used this technique as a way of forming groups during the 09/09 class. The way we did it was by picking the colour of sheet that we wanted to make our name posters. Later on we formed groups according to the chosen colours. It is an interesting technique, specially for very young children, however, I think it might present a few problems and disadvantages: First and foremost, the groups are likely to lack balance (e.g. too many children choose red and nearly any of them brown); secondly, in case we give an equal number of sheets (or tokens, or balloons, or whatever) there might be problems because two or more of them want to pick the same one; finally, children learn very fast how does it work, so in subsequent occasions they might choose the colour thinking of who they want to team up with and discourages the socialization of the group as a whole. On the other hand, it is still and interesting technique as long as we use it with young children and we embed it within a different activity (for instance taking a token from the magic bag when the main character of the story is receiving something), using it to create atmosphere. Picking the colour blindly might be a good idea, specially once they know it might be use to create the groups.