864. Nice summer classes



One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “Today I’ve started a short course of English that is part of a summer program of the center where I teach. The students are five boys so far, of 9 to 11 years.
They’ve been frisky and jumpy, but OK to teach. I’ve tried to rope the students in games. During the class – everybody wanted to participate – I decided they could implement the games themselves. So one by one they directed the games, while their classmates were saying the responses; they’re were eager to intervene.
One kid is 9 and he naturally needs to stand up and move. So we also played Simon says: they love this simple game. You can see some simple games on post # 259; type the number on the 'search' box. With practice you all in class can have fun.

Before the class I had thought of being more demanding with discipline, but they’re having a vacation course, and, like I said, I had no big problems to conduct in the class. Other games were competitions, short gap fills on the whiteboard.

They’re eager to play vocabulary competitions between them; sometimes all the class as a whole makes a team, which fights versus me as the other player: they would relish to win in a vocabulary competition versus me. The lexis can be ‘foods and drinks’. These are simple games that serve as revision of the stuff they learned in their school this academic year. They screw their brains so as to say more words than me. I can assure you sometimes it isn’t that simple for me to win.

This summer my goal with kids is for them to make longer contributions than single words: phrases, sentences, conversations, small presentations. For this latter activity they can describe a picture from a magazine after I’ve done it several times.” / Photo from: travellerpoint com. Alhambra palace gardens, in Granada, where I live.

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