A blog from Hands Up Project volunteer and storyteller, Cassandra Wye, full of brilliant ideas for storytelling with young learners. Thanks, Cassandra!
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This week we have a very inspiring blog post written by long term, Hands Up Project volunteer in Beit Hanoun Prep Girls UNRWA School Gaza, Rinan Jamal. Rinan joined us for last Saturday's SaturPLAY live together with some of her brilliant students.
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One thing about chanting is that is encourages use of connected speech: it challenges learners to speak in chunks, rather than in isolated words. This is a central idea of the Lexical Approach. When chanting words flow into each other, and pauses occur naturally between chunks of language, rather than after each word (as often occurs in the speech of beginners).
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Last week I was looking at how talking with children about the pictures they've drawn can be a useful thing to do in a classroom. This week I want to explore a slightly more structured activity which works with this idea.The picture dictation has become a classic language teaching activity. I can't remember where I first heard about but I've been using it ever since I first started teaching more than 25 years ago.
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In the course of my career, I've been lucky enough to observe a vast number of language teachers in many different contexts, and many of the things that I do as a teacher, or teacher trainer, are things that I learnt whilst watching other teachers at work. This week I want to explore a very simple but effective activity for working with young learners, which I first saw when observing Maha Sharba’s class at the Arabic club for kids in London.
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I've just come back from a very fulfilling week in Occupied Palestine, running a course called, Teaching English through Stories with a group of teachers from Gaza, Hebron and Ramallah.
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This week I started working with a new group of children in the Azraq camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan. It’s taken a while to set this up and I was really pleased to be finally going ahead because it seems that Azraq so far hasn’t had the publicity or the resources that the Zaatari camp has been given.
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