Merry Christmas

         

 We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Seven up!

Classroom management!

An effective classroom management has to take into account the following tips:

• Know what you want and you don’t want
• Show the students what you want to create you want; Create expectations
• Correct the student’s behavior periodically
• Create rules in the classroom
• Develop an effective praise:

ü Is expressed sincerely, spontaneous and using non-verbal gestures

ü You must not compare with other students

ü Encourage students to appreciate their accomplishments

•  For an effective parents conferences:

ü Documentation about the child’s behavior

ü Maintain eye contact

ü Be a good listener

ü Ask the parents for his input regarding the student

ü Giving parents some concrete ideas for behavior management at home

•  Monitoring the entire class
• Gaining the students’ attention
• Move around the class
• Establish a line between teacher and student

Do you want to know more about classroom management?

http://www.teachervision.fen.com/classroom-management/behavioral-problems/26200.html

Think about it...

If we want our learners use the language to express their opinions and ideas and, in short to communicate them with people, teachers should develop activities according to this objective. 

We have to take into account what our aim is when we are designing our activities.

What do you think about that? 

Are you agree with the boy in the picture?

P H O N I C S

How to teach your children to read using phonics

It is very useful to teach your students the phonics in a relevant and funny way.

                                                                                

It's time to improve your phonics! 

Look at the following pictures...

Anxiety in the classroom

Many students become anxious just before a test and/or they get nervous when they have to give a prepared speech or presentation in front of their partners. Such temporary feelings of anxiety are instances of state anxiety. However, some students are anxious a good part of the time, even when the situation is not an evaluation, for that reason, we have to take into account some tips to achieve a good and relaxed atmosphere. 

We suggest some tips to prevent the anxiety:

• Educate and inform the students about anxiety
• Provide an open-communication classroom, where all the students should participate and all the ideas are good to learn
• Teach and discuss the positive strategies and techniques to be relaxed with the students
• Allow students opportunities to practice and apply useful strategies to get over the anxiety. For instance, allow students to use stress balls during class or listen to soothing music while taking exams. Using this strategies may reduce tension and anxiety in the classroom.
• Model positive ways to prevent and manage anxiety
• Provide an effective praise
• Teach students to focus their attention on a specific object

Finally, we suggest an interesting video about "learned helplessness", in which we can prove how students feel when some students in the class know how to do an activity  and they do not. In this video, the teacher gives different exams (one very difficult, and another one very easy). Then, s/he asks the students; who have done the first question, and the students with the difficult exam get surprised when they see that some students done it (without know that they are different questions). After that, the teacher gives the same exam to the whole class, and, even doing the easy one, some students do not know the answer. It is possible that this student group after this situation are frustated... What do you think? 

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Storytelling!

Storytelling can be an interesting tool very useful in the classroom.

It is helpful to begin the class with the teacher playing the role of storyteller or maybe by inviting a proffesional storyteller into the classroom, due to the fact that it will be very motivating to the students. 

Students usually love stories, and teachers should take advantage of this fact to teach the new language. Teachers should  use some strategies to facilitate the understanding and oof the students (games, gestures, redundancy, pictures...)

When learners are listening the stories, they are developing listening skills and vocabulary, increasing concentration, developing imagination and, also, they are more motivated to read. If the learners are telling the stories, we are improving the oral language skills, the expression, the motivation to create new stories, etc.

We suggest some stories of the website; http://www.starfall.com

The little red hen

Chicken Little

Mr. Bunny's carrot soup

The little rooster

Lemonade girl

Integrate storytelling into other subjects 

While language arts and the creative arts are obvious areas, stories can help us to understand other cultures and other times. They can easily be integrated into history or geography. If we chose the stories carefully, they can be integrated even with maths or science. We have to take into account that this activity develops the social competence in our students and, if we chose an interesting topic and develop the activity in an appropriate way, we will be able to develop a lot of competences.

But, it is when the learners become the storytellers that storytelling makes a great contribution to the classroom.

Improve your Reading!

In this activity, we can see the most common questions in a reading comprehension but; are they useful to develop the reading skill?

If you reflect on the kind of activities that teachers used to develop with their students, we can notice that we are developing the lower order thinking skills (remember, understand and apply)

What about “analyse , evaluate and create”? We need that our students reflect on their learning and also, they need to be competent to create in reference to their own ideas and opinions, to make decisions and evaluate each situation and to analyse whatever that they are interested in.

In this way, maybe it is necessary to review the Bloom’s taxonomy.

We suggest some questions/activities:

-          Create a new ball for the dog. Decide the colour and what the dog will do with it.

-          Do you think cats and dogs play in the same way? Why (not)?

-          Suggest other toy to my dog and try to persuade him that this one it is better than the ball.

What do you think? Can you suggest us any question/activity according to the High stages?

Assessment: Videos

Hi again! This time we want to share with you our ideas about the videos that we had to see!