Play, Learn and Grow Together After School English Project
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The Play, Learn and Grow project is an ongoing language learning project for Elementary and Preschoolers organized and managed by Pegasus One language projects via Mrs Nives Torresi an English Language Teacher.
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Play, Learn and Grow Together After School English Project
- 2. Play, Learn and Grow Together An After School English Speaking project by Nives Torresi
- 3. Aim of the Project For young elementary children After school as a time to learn something new To see English as a means of communication Making it fun with games and music Prepare for a final recital
- 4. Layout of dates, participating children, age group Dates of the Project Number of 90 minute lessons Number of Children Relevant age group Date Lessons Children Age 04/11/13 – 16/12/13 7 9 7 10/02/14 – 14/04/14 9 8 7 20/10/14 – 16/12/14 10 6 8
- 5. Project syllabus Words, Numbers, Days Telling the time Simple phrases Playing games Listening and reading along
- 6. Play Activities carried out in a playing atmosphere
- 7. Games to create ‘movement’ What’s the Time Mr Wolf Goldilocks and the 3 Bears
- 8. Songs and Dance The ABC Song
- 9. The Busy Buzz Song Sing-along in groups
- 10. Learn Activities based on Learning the English spoken language
- 11. Key to enter the classroom
- 12. Numbers, dates, days, months, seasons …
- 13. Word activities, Reading, Listening …
- 14. Grow Together Activities for home and Preparation of Recital theme
- 15. Concept board to use at home too! Teacher Board Individual Student Boards
- 16. Italian to English First language into Second language
- 17. News Cast Live News Report Good evening welcome I am Mario - Junior Reporter for 3B NewsCast, and I will talk about the Fabriano Crime Report. One week ago in Fabriano there was a bank robbery of the Banca delle Marche and 2 robbers ran away with €100,000.00 (one hundred thousand euro). They used plastic weapons, guns and rifles. But the bank workers did not know the guns were plastic. The police never found the money or the bank robbers. Today after more than 5 days there was another bank robbery and the police were able to capture the robbers and save the bank from losing the money. Thank you for watching this news cast. Mario signing off. News Report Good afternoon everyone I am Michael, Junior Reporter 3B NewsCast – Reporting on Fires in our city. There were many Fires in the mountains of Fabriano last summer, that destroyed most of the trees. We followed the in the foot steps of the Mountain Co-operative which planted more than 2,000 new trees. But even today there was a fire that destroyed the Town Sports Centre. They town Mayor has decided to donate another building for the Sports centre and the town’s Basket Ball Team to use as their home ground. Thank you for listening to this FIRE UPDATE News Cast Michael signing off.
- 18. We created our very own Badge
- 19. We took our places at the front of the class We opened the show with a song We introduced ourselves one by one The last one was the first to present After our presentation we danced and sang to a song We watched a slide show of our Project We welcomed Parents and Friends
- 20. Thank you Prepared by Nives Torresi for IATEFL YLT SIG Webinar online at WizIQ
- 21. Bibliography of links http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer- sheet/wp/2015/01/17/test-weary-second-grader-schools-state- school-board-is-that-all-that-matters-to-grown-ups/ http://www.ted.com/talks/geoff_mulgan_a_short_intro_to_the_studi o_school http://www.osea- cite.org/class/SELT_materials/SELT_Reading_Krashen_.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~hakuta/www/LAU/ICLangLit/NaturalAppro ach.htm http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/ http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education? language=en
Editor's Notes
- Hello my name is Nives Torresi and I’m going to take you on a small journey to discover the special language project that has been running in my town for the second consecutive year with relative success. The motto for this project was to get the children to learn as they play while growing together as a class. English as a language and as a means to enjoy and play. The idea of the title PLAY, LEARN and GROW Together was ‘borrowed’ from an online image, and was chosen specifically for this project. The idea for the project came into being when some of the Parents from the School Association for the district contacted me to create a special project to get their children to ‘like’ English as a Language. Wanting their children to feel comfortable with the English language from a young age which would in any case make their learning the language only easier while continuing on in the school system. The other important factor is that Parents are keen on their children ‘picking up’ the correct English pronunciation as spoken by a native English person.
- The Parents asked for a course concentrating on perfecting the pronunciation, creating a fun atmosphere for learning and a final recital. The day and time would be once a week for a 90 minute lesson to be carried out in the children’s own classroom but as an after school class – also because only a select group of Parents were keen on the idea and prepared to pay an out of pocket fee to cover all the expenses. My aim was then to prepare a project that was well rounded without too much stress on grammar – the children were already studying English Grammar using an approved school textbook for their age level. Going on what the parents had requested I set about creating the ‘objectives’ of the course which were to create a language vocabulary adapted to their age; ensure that the time in the project was seen as a time to learn something new without repeating their daytime lessons; to look at the English language as a means of communication and not just a subject for school purposes and then to make all this as much fun as possible using games, music, LIM (interactive whiteboard), normal blackboard, with a special final recital for their parents.
- The dates of the first year project were divided into 2 sections, one before the Christmas period and one following the season’s holidays. The opening session saw 9 participants and the second session of the same year had 8 participants. The final recital was held after the second session. The opening session of the second year saw 6 participants for a total of 10 after school lessons plus the final recital for another 2 hours that covered the whole program. The children were very content and were definitely much more at ease the second year than they had been the very first year.
- The children were already studying English as a subject with a proper textbook during their normal school class, so the After School Project syllabus was created to reinforce some of the ‘easier’ themes such as general usage words, numbers, days, months and seasons. Telling the Time is not something that is taught until the 4° grade elementary school, but I thought of adding it as a ‘game’ via “What’s the Time Mr Wolf”. Then we learnt simple phrases that the children could relate to such as I like pizza, I don’t want ice cream, I’m hungry, I’m sleepy, and so on which were then encountered in Goldilocks and other listening and reading stories. Every lesson had at least 15 minutes devoted to ‘listening to a story’ – either directly online or from a book. Playing a game in every class was essential for creating that very relaxing atmosphere, to avoid the children feeling like the afternoon class was an obligation and not something of choice. Depending on their initial mood it would either be at the beginning of the class or towards the end, however they would nudge me if it seemed like we were taking too long on another activity.
- Playing is an integral part of learning for children of any age, but especially the 7 to 8 year olds in this particular After School class, it was important that the children envisaged this whole experience as one of learning new games by using English to play those games. In this way the English language spoken or sung or used to play a game in the class became an easy way to learn something new. The tables and chairs were always moved around to make room to play or dance or sing along. Even the desks became a ‘round table’ where the children worked as if in one large team or in two’s or three’s when the activity required it, as it turned out children working together in teams tended to nudge each other to getting the activity done.
- The first year the children had their own ‘clock’ and used the clock to play games, the game was of course What’s the Time Mr Wolf and we only used the o’clock response for the hour times (no half past or quarter to etc.) just the hour clock. Also enforcing their use of numbers in English. This game was particularly enjoyed and the children were always asking for a second round. The Goldilocks story was the final recital for the first year, during rehearsal time the furniture in the classroom was moved around to re-create the Bears’ cottage using plastic bowl and mugs and paper masks for the bear characters. I used the ‘movement’ time in the class to keep them focused on the activity, children have a hard time sitting still, and trying to keep them seated in the afternoon when other children are playing in the park is very difficult.
- Songs and Dancing was another way of getting the children active while learning, so the theme song for the first year was the ABC Song from British Council. I’m not a singer and so I relied heavily on Songs from sources such as British Council. We devoted about 30 minutes to dancing and singing along to songs that were available on the British council website. We did the ABC song the first year and although the final verse was difficult all the children remembered the song a year later easily without using the follow text on the screen. All songs for the After School Project were used directly online at the British Council website.
- The second year I felt they knew enough to move them up to a more complex song like the Busy Buzz Song which lent itself well to creating groups of 2 to sing-a-long and dance to the various actions in the song with repetitive phrases. The children each wrote down their verse to memorize in their exercise books copying directly from the projector screen. Then some would request to sing along and dance on their own to show the others that they had memorized the verses and practiced the movements copying the ‘busy buzz bee’ dance.
- There were also activities based on increasing their knowledge of the English language as opposed to the textbook approach, so using Krashen’s natural language acquisition method the classroom became a stress free environment where English was a spontaneous result of the words or phrases emerging from the games, stories or specific activity. Sometimes the specific activity involved drawing a picture to depict a group of words or simple phrases.
- A weekly class ‘key’ was created from the words used in the class on that day to be memorized and remembered for the next class as a means to enter the classroom, one of the first ‘keys’ was “How many students are in English class? There are 6 students” The children would beat each other at arriving in time to be the first to ‘recite’ the phrase, however memorizing didn’t exclude understanding the phrase, which was in itself a little exercise during the lesson. The phrase would be created by the Teacher but encompassing the ‘natural words’ emanated from that day’s lesson either through a story read together or a song or an activity to do with words and numbers.
- Numbers, days, months, seasons or dates, were a natural occurrence for example at the beginning of the class the children liked to tell me the day or date in English and then take turns to write it on the board, the seasons were broached as a matter of fact like “the leaves are falling from the tress because it is Autumn” and so on. The best part for the children was the actual activity of writing it on the teacher’s blackboard!
- All the word, reading or listening activities were done online at the Learn English Kids website by British Council. The children took turns in doing the interactive activities as there was only one computer for the classroom. The children just loved their time on the computer and felt rather grown up doing the interactive activity intuitively, I would sometimes just sit back and let them go one at a time while the others watched the projector screen to see what their classmate was doing … and they would each learn from one another which was as exciting to them as the activity itself.
- The activities to ‘grow together’ included preparing and researching their own individual presentation for the end of project recital. The 2014 year recital was based on being a Junior Reporter. Each child chose their theme for their news cast, created a folder to collect and gather information, added it to their online whiteboard and practiced reading it in class. Initially the children concentrated on what they wanted to talk about in their native language and then with my help we translated it from Italian to English.
- Looking for a free ‘board’ tool to use at home I came across Concept Board, it didn’t seem too difficult to use however I did prepare a video tutorial so the children and parents could learn to use it together. As the children were 8 years of age and most parents don’t like their child to be in front of a computer on their own I thought to find something that could motivate parents and child to work together even using separate computers. It was a fun activity for home study. The theme for the final recital was Reading the News so the children used their boards to upload images and news report in English, then I downloaded the board in pdf and each child had their own printed board in their file to read at the final recital.
- Some of the children knew immediately what they wanted to talk about for their own news cast, others had to talk it over at home, however the first step was writing it down in their notebooks. Then using a dictionary online or paper back we got to work translating the text. The children looked up the words and then I helped to show them how to put the words into English sentences all the while using the projector screen so everyone could watch each other’s progress.
- Here are two examples of the news report prepared for the recital, the children took care to annotate the ‘sounds’ for correct pronunciation – I allowed them to interpret the sound as they heard it and didn’t think it appropriate to teach them English phonetics at such a young age.
- We created a badge and added it to all the boards and printed work, the children chose the colour theme as a team effort too. It was wonderful to see the group and team work that solidified their own friendship outside the school environment.
- The final recital went off quite well, the children welcomed their parents and friends, showed them to their seats, then the room lights were dimmed and we all sat back to watch a musical slide show of their work and photos taken during the whole project. The audio video presentation ran for about 20 minutes, then after a nice applause the children took their place at the front of the classroom. They opened the show with a song MERRY CHRISTMAS, then each child introduced themselves walking away leaving the first presenter to sit down at the news desk and read their news report. One by one they read their report in a calm and well-mannered pose. Then we put on the Busy Buzz Song and the children danced and sang along – moving to the actions in the song ‘rafting, surfing, biking, etc.’ We continued with the another 2 songs. When the recital was over the children showed their project folders and all their work to their very proud parents.
- Thank you for listening. Pegasus One is my Language Teaching company based in Italy. Thank to Tom Hodgers for applying TTS to this presentation and making the video. This is Nives signing off till next time.
- A list of bibliographical references. The slide presentation is available in the WizIQ public library.