Comenius 2013: the end

What a pitty! We are in Ourense, but we are thinking of Cambridge: the 20 degree temperature (here 30 °), in dinner at 18:00 pm, classes with sweet and wonderful Anna Young, in my inseparable companions Isabel, María and Virginie (our Spanish girl), in the rain, the walks around the city, in conversations with Sabina, Irina, Atsuko ... so many wonderful people that we had the opportunity to meet in this two weeks of the Bell Teacher Campus.
Now I have to put order in the pictures, in the memories and also in the tasks. Our idea was to write everyday a post in the blog to tell what we were doing in class, but it was totally impossible due to the intense activity that we had throughout the day. Morning classes, workshops, conferences, tourism, and cultural excursions in the afternoons and in the weekends ... so many things to tell you do not know where to start. We will be rearranging all the material that Anna Young provided us and the different ideas she shared with the class. In each of the former entrances write a summary of what we did that day. Could we make a new post with the current date, but we respect the principal idea and complete then the information pending.

I feel very lucky because had it not been for this assistance I received the Comenius program probably would never have the chance to take a course as complete as offering Bell Cambridge. Classes perfectly designed, the height speakers Martin Parrott and Jeremy Harmer and wonderful people from all over the world. Rarely have the opportunity to share conversation with colleagues from Japan, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Peru ... and know how to work our colleagues in other countries. A totally enriching experience that allowed us to open our minds to other forms of teaching, more active, dynamic and participatory, away from the comfortable textbook.

Never forget all that live, learn and share in these two weeks. Never.

Days 11 and 12: Cuisenaire Rods

                                                      About 100 new words in two weeks!

Thursday, August 8

The first activity of the morning you know it has to do with vocabulary. The sun and the clouds, which were empty on the first day, now are full of interesting words that have been drawing attention to each of us: evensong, Toff, brolly or hubby are some of the terms that we will not longer forget .

Thursday, we make first a small debate in class: which do you prefer, dogs or cats? We make two groups, one supporter of  puppies and another prefer cats. From here, each of us has to discuss with the partner about this: which of these animals is better or which  company gives less problems. In pairs, we have to argue and give our reasons to try to convince the other person that our choice is correct.

Then, we have to do three groups: one with people who have dogs, other group with peopel who have cats  and one for people who do not have pets. In these groups, we initiate a debate about the corrections that the teacher should do: when to do it, the reason for correcting and who should make them. Amid the debate, the teacher  says the word carota, a term that brings  all what we should review in the  activities carried out by students .

C-content/argument

A-accuracy/use of grammar and vocabulary

R -range of language

O-organisation/paragraphs ( intro , main body and conclusion )

T- task Achievement

A- appropiacy ( register / style )

In the second session of the morning, we discovered a fascinating activity: Cuisenaire Rods. The Cuisenaire rods are normally used in the world of mathematics, but, lately, also used in language teaching, especially the so-called Silent way method that uses silence as a teaching technique. The teacher conducts the necessary silences in his speech and thus invites the student to speak once that he or she feels safe in the development of the task . The Cuisenaire rods can be used to create stories, to learn vocabulary, intonation, spelling ... On our YouTube channel about Bell Teacher Campus, we have several videos with the activities that made ​​Anna Young session with Cuisenaire rods.

             
                                                 Activities with Cuisenaire Rods

Here we leave some of the links we recommended our profe.

Speaking Activities

Speaking extra

Reading extra

Spelling City

Afternoon : workshop with Anna Young ( Splng , Spelng , Spiling ... A creative approach to spelling ) . Activities with letters to build words .

 Friday, August 9: Last day  : (

Today we work with all of the words you select in our mural vocabulary. We put them on the table, beside a picture of a traffic light. If you know the meaning of the word, place it near the green traffic signal. If you do not know, red in color. At orange, we put those terms with which we have doubts. Among the groups, try to remember the meanings of all the words.                                                                                                        

                                                                       The light


More activities to develop vocabulary:

-A person has to give the definition of the word that touches and others have to guess what it is.

-We place all the words on the table. One fellow thinks and defines a word. The others have to quickly grab the card with the word corresponding to its definition.

Game-points: draw on paper 25 points. We need two contestants and a referee. The referee reads definitions and the contestants have to guess the word. Person who can draw first a line between two points. Win  who ends up making a square.

                                                                              Dot Game


Poems-named: create poems with the names of classmates. Here I leave you the poem made ​​about me ...

We ended the class with delivery of certificates and giving to our wonderful teacher, Anna Young, a tiny detail (full of affection). Next, we place the farewell ceremony at the Auditorium.


 
In the afternoon, last excusión the beautiful town of Bury St Edmunds

And finally, awesome farewell party!

Day 10: journalist

After doing the usual review of vocabulary, we continue with the binomials. One person reads the beginning of the binomial and other has to say the second part to complete the expression:

                                                               Back and - Forth

We continue to work on vocabulary: one person says a word and the other must give the definition of that term.

The dice story: a paper, write six locations, six famous people, six ways to travel, six activities to do on vacation, six things that can go wrong on holiday and six ways to end the holiday. We took the dice and up to six times the number that comes out at a time, will mark the parts of the story that we create. To us, we have the following items:

                      Paris - Beckham - by car - trecking - loose your wallet - Buying souvenirs.

Journalist: we have a peculiar picture one for each group. We are journalists and we have to look for information about the news (6W). We make questions, then we  write them  beside the photo and change them with another group to write the answers.

                                                                    Our story...

In the afternoon, Plenary Talk: Jeremy Harmer and Yes, But Why Do we need teachers at all? Interesting information on these links:

Hole in the wall

SOLE

And then ... Punting on the River Cam!

Day 9: to talk more

Recall vocabulary.

We have colored paper, dice and chips. In three papers of different colors, each of us writes an important date in our life, a touristic place in our country and our favorite word in our language. In my case: 1977, Santiago de Compostela and "bolboreta". Then put those words on the table and built a board with them. We took the dice and the person who touches, speaks for 30 seconds about one of the words ( the other person tries to guess the meaning of these three elections).

The most important part of the class is when we take the issue of contemporary English. The creation of new words is something fascinating in this language. From Brangelina to brolly, veggie, Wags, Bridezilla, de-friend ... and not forgetting the binomials: hustle and bustle, odds and ends, wine and dine... We have new words from blending, clipping, loanwords / borrowing or acronyms.


In the afternoon workshop: Poetry with Jim Carmichael. Escape to The Orchard Tea Garden and visit to Cambridge University Bookshop.

Day 8: Multiple Intelligences

Days 6 and 7: weekend trip to London (London Eye, Stamford Bridge) and Oxford.

New week and eighth day in Cambridge. We keep collecting vocabulary for our mural.

Debate in circle. Put the chairs in two circles and talk with the person you have in front of you. What are the five senses? What are the nine intelligences?

Senses V-visual (sight) A-auditory (listening) K-kinaesthetic (touch) O-olfactory (smell) G-gustatory (taste)

 To use the senses in class: Neuro Linguistic Programming.

Teoría das Intelixencias Múltiples, Howard Gardner.   

  Affective Filter.

Teaching for Success, Mark Fletcher

Fun Class Activities, Peter Watcyn-Jones

10 Commandments for Motivating Language Learners

 Who are you in the picture? You have to invent the lives of people you see in this picture and try to guess which of this characters  wants to choose your partner. In that part of the picture you would like to be?

                                                         Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

 Describe the same picture but with different points of view. One likes the city, the other field ...

                                                                         New York

Image of famous person in two parts. We have to find other means of descriptions, without saying the name. Once we have, we do a short interview (90 seconds) to try to get information about that famous.

Ranking: list of dangerous sports, to magical places, with tips for unemployed people ...

Preview: think about how you can be someone (Charles, the chocolate maker).

In the afternoon, Cultural Talks: Toff, keys and middle-classes: the British class system, with Lindsay Warwick.

Day 5: pronunciation

Last day of the first week. Recall vocabulary before, like every day. Today pronunciation. Practice the sounds of English. The teacher distributes letters with the  phonemes and we pronounce them in different words. We do groups of families according to the affinity of sounds. The book, Ship or sheep?  by Ann Baker helps us in this task of identifying the minimal pairs. Also what happens in this video lets you see how important it is for a speaker to distinguish these sounds good ...

 Another activity is to look for  words in a picture, select them in the lyrics of a song or group verses.  In class, we work with this song by Noah and the Whale.

Again, the teacher wants us to move the class and gives us a paper with a verse of the song. When sounds this single verse, we have to get in line to complete the song.

Before the end of class, one of the companions showed us this video with the accents and their problems ...

In the afternoon we have an interesting excursion to Ely to see its impressive cathedral and enjoy a tea at Peacocks Tearoom.

                                                                       Ely Cathedral

Day 4: philosophy for children or Thunks

The first thing to do is remember one of the words that came yesterday to put the mural vocabulary. Then continue with a new activity, in this case My friend Tessa. The task is to say what things have in common sentences that the teacher is saying. "My friend Tessa likes swimming, but she does not like water; she likes beer, but she does not like wine; she likes running, but she does not like walking ..." All the activities and things Tessa likes have the double letter (swimming, beer, running ...). This is related to Thunks, a kind of philosophy for children who want to take advantage of the critical thinking of the children.

We continue with the class and passed back to the vocabulary. Now we try to present the words in different ways to better understand its meaning and remember the relationships established with other words. We can use the definitions and background, photos, antonyms, mime, scale graduation ... but always remembering the initial MPF (Meaning, Pronunciation and Form). In this session appears the concept of Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis that relies on that to learn a foreign language, it is more useful study the vocabulary and placements of certain words than study  the grammar. To see how a few words, with verbs that are usually or structures that appear, we can go to the page Just the word and there, to enter the word coffee in paragraph Combinations, see all the statistics related to it. Another tool that is used for this type of activity is The Collocations Dictionary. Once you enter the word in this dictionary, are its main combinancións with other verbs, adjectives or names. In addition, there is a wide range of apps such as My Word Book, The Learn Pronunciation or Learn Bots.

The trick that gives the teacher to memorize new words we learn is to relate their sound with a word that sounds similar in our language, connections between the mother tongue and the language they are learning (Psychology for Language Teachers) .

And in the afternoon a new workshop, this time with Lindsay Warwick: What did you say? Helping Students listen. Then visit to the Botanical Garden and to end the day, a Shakespeare's play at outdoors. It is to celebrate the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival and have the chance to see in the gardens of Homerton College the play A Midsummer Night's Dream. A real delight!