What if hope could actually change things? What if hope could make a difference? What if hope could mean a better world for everyone?
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This week we have a guest post by one of the latest teachers to join our ever expanding pool of volunteers around the world, Emi Slater. What Emi writes fits in very well with the current trend in the work of the Hands Up Project to focus more on children creating stories, rather than merely consuming them. Over to you Emi...
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The other day I found myself suddenly having to cover an online session in Gaza because I'd forgotten that one of our volunteers wasn't able to make it. I didn't have any specific plans so I began by asking the boys what they would like to do in the session
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A while back I saw a pretty impressive video on youtube and since then the images from it keep filling my head. It begins with a camera shot from space showing earth as a distant object and then gradually moves closer and closer, zooming in on the world, the continent of Europe, the UK, London and then, eventually streets, houses and finally people become visible.
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A few weeks ago I was one of the speakers at the IATEFL Pre-conference event organised collaboratively by the C Group and the Global issues special interest group. Towards the end of the day we were given a talk by Julie Pratten about her project Heart ELT which has set up a school in a refugee camp in Iraq. At the beginning Julie gave us all a blank postcard and told us that we would be doing something with it later. As she approached the end of her talk she asked us to use the postcard to write a message to the children in the camp.
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Most of what I'm doing in my online sessions with kids uses material from here but this week I want to focus on something a bit different. One area of storytelling that I haven't really looked at so far with these posts is working with picture books. With very young learners especially, I've often felt that if all teachers ever did was tell their kids stories from these books, then something very useful would be going on.
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Most of the Hands Up Project's work is with younger learners in Gaza but I also have a group of teenage boys who live in a village near Ramallah with whom I do a weekly session. In the beginning I found it difficult to organise online classes that really addressed this group's needs, but, in consultation with their teacher Atiyyeh, a way of working has emerged which seems to be much more useful.
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Drilling is often criticised for being an old fashioned, teacher controlled activity with minimal cognitive challenge for learners. But the central idea behind it – that of pushing learners to process and reproduce a stretch of spoken language after a model from a more advanced speaker - can, in my opinion, be a very useful component of good teaching.
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Two weeks ago I wrote a post called 'The Game of Jewels' about the strength of activities like Kim's Game, which emphasise the importance of noticing and retrieval. I said that most of my favourite things to do in class are really just adaptations of Kim's Game so, as promised, here's a version which uses the same principles, but which is more suited to teenage learners.
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I love doing activities in class where children feel enthusiastic about contributing. The kind of thing where they've all got their hands up, shouting out 'Ana..Ana.. Ana!' (Me ...me...me). One such activity is 'The game of jewels' as it was referred to in Kipling's novel, or 'Kim's Game' as it has come to be known in the field of ELT.
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