Writing skills in the foreign language class 📝

As teachers, we can make writing fun for our students! Here you have some writing activities that I work with my students and they have really enjoyed it.

📩 Writing cards and letters is real-life writing with a purpose. Every time there’s a holiday, we normally use this method to get the students to write and have fun while doing it. The children design and write cards for different holidays, for example, for Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day or Christmas. This practice will also help the students learn the standard format for writing friendly letters. Moreover, we write cards or messages when is someone's birthday. In this case, the message can start with, “I wish you…” So we give the students an specific pattern and then they can express their message.

💻 Story challenge. This is a fun way to practice writing and typing while they are using ICTs. What I normally do in my lesson is to project a Google Doc and call up a student to write a short sentence.  The next student will add on to what the first student wrote.  One after another, the students work together to write a short story. It is important that the story has sense. In this way, they feel like real writers.  I also use a digital composition notebook to use with this strategy. 

Here you have the link for the digital composition notebook ⬇️

https://minds-in-bloom-inc.ck.page/17737c32f2

📲A very useful application to practice writing with students is Word Fun World. This app includes fun games to practice and learn key vocabulary. In addition, it includes hidden rewards that will motivate the student to keep playing, as well as a dictionary of images to review what they have learned. 

Reading lessons 👀 📚

There are many different places a teacher can look for good reading lesson plans. Teachers that come to class well-prepared can be confident about spending a productive hour with their students.

✅ Sight Word Sticks

Fluency in reading the sight words is a great contributor to reading proficiency. Choose twenty sight words that you’d like your kindergarteners to become fluent with. Write the words down on ice cream sticks. On the remaining sticks, put a picture of a book, a dancing kid and a surprised face. Put all the sticks together inside the container. Have the students sit in a circle and pass the container around. Each kid draws a stick and calls out the word written on it. If the word is correct, the stick is put in the center of the circle. If the kid does not get the word right, the stick goes back into the container. The kid who pulls out the ‘book’ must take a second stick and form a sentence using the word. When someone pulls out a ‘dancing kid’, the entire group stands up and does a one-minute dance. When someone pulls out a ‘surprised face’, everyone yells ‘Busted!’ and puts all the sticks back into the container. Continue playing until you feel your students have had enough reading practice.

✅ Rhyme time!

Looking to turn your children into whiz kids? Rhyming is a great tool to help kids discover and explore alphabets, words, and language. Exposing kids to rhyming early on will help lead them to read and succeed!

• Paper Plate Puzzles : Have the children write two words that rhyme next to each other on a paper plate. Above each word, either draw or find and paste pictures of the two rhyming objects. Repeat this process for six rhyming pairs. Cut the paper plates in half with different patterns so that your child can try to find rhyming pairs and put the puzzles together.

• Attracted to Rhymes : Looking to put all those free flimsy magnets you get in the mail and at the fair to good use? Transform these freebies into hours of fun for you and your kids. Brainstorm a word list together that includes words from multiple parts of speech. (This doubles as a grammar lesson in parts of speech as well. Be sure you include nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, and prepositions on your list.) Write or type your word list on sticky computer labels. Attach your labels to the magnets and trim each magnetic word. Then, enjoy some serious rhyme time as you and your child arrange the magnetic words into little bits of rhyming poetry!

Active listening skills for kids 👂

Developing good active listening skills for kids of all ages is an important life skill. Sometimes it can be difficult to get your children to listen, so why not try these fun listening games?

Learning listening skills through games is not a new technique! Generations have used this way of teaching through traditional children’s games like Simon Says, Mother May I, Freeze tag, Red Light Green Light…in fact, most of the childhood games handed down from generation to generation has a listening component!

1. DIY TELEPHONE. Some times the easier and less complicated toys are the ones that the kids will engage. Making our own “telephone” is one of those DIY Toys that the children will have fun exploring and playing with!  

2. THE RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT GAME. This game is a great way to practice listening to simple instructions and help your kids walk in a contained manner. We make a red light “dice”, using circles of green, yellow and red paper as the lights.   Each side of the   tissue box is a different “light”.

For the lights that aren’t “lit” we drew dark lines over the circle, making each of the four sides different:

• Green Light for go
• Red Light for stop
• Yellow Light for slow down
• For the fourth side we added a one-way arrow

They would roll and then yell the next direction to the "riding" child who would have to “obey” the light.   It was fun watching them break to a halt, or race ahead, even at times having to reverse if they accidentally drove past the light.

3. WHITE NOISE AMBIENCE LITE is a free app by Logicworks.  It is wonderful app for listening exercises and games. Have the children close their eyes (we use the following chant to do listening exercises/games): “Close your eyes and open your ears, listen carefully…see what SOUNDS you can HEAR!”. Then, we will play the sounds from the White Noise App one at a time. See if the children know what/who is making the sound or where the sound is being made.  Have the children heard the sound before?  Is it a familiar or different sound to them?  Why do they think the sound is what they determine? Finally, we will print, laminate, and cut apart the sound cards.  Show the children the cards and play the sounds again. Choose a child to pick out the card that matches the sound being made.  When all cards are matched to the sound it makes, the game is over. Here you have some example of the sound cards I use:

  

BreakOut to practice Speaking 👄📢

The time has come to design activities that we are going to include in our Break Out Edu and that improve oral skills and collaborative work. I have been testing and carrying out activities with many of the tools that the course offers us. They are very easy to use and give you the option to create countless resources, not only to create Break Outs but to work on any type of content in the classroom👏👏. After this opinion, we will design a Genially to be able to include the different activities that will make up our Break Out Edu.

To create the tasks, we will establish a linear sequence, that is, a pre-established order. Thus, each group must always start with the first of the challenges and, only when they manage to decipher it, will they be able to continue with the second, and so on. One of the tests will consist of the students having to get a password, but how? Well then, they will have to form a puzzle that will reveal the identity of an important person in history.

Here is the link to see the puzzle ⬇️

https://im-a-puzzle.com/#/play?difficulty=4&gallery=&mode=11&url=

In this case it is Roald Amundsen, who was the first person to visit the South Pole. With this explorer's last name in capital letters, students will be able to open a padlock (https://eduescaperoom.com/enigma/CoedMJXEUbSs) that closes a box containing invitations to take a free South Pole Tour, in which they will learn fascinating curiosities. I have designed this online tour with the Tour Creator tool, which allows you to generate educational experiences in virtual reality quickly and super easily.

Here is the link for you to enjoy a South Pole Tour ⬇️

https://poly.google.com/view/c3-fsqZqw8p

When the students finish the BreakOut, they will have time to prepare a presentation in order to explain their classmates what they have learnt about important people around the world.

On to the next challenge! 💪

This is me! 🙋

Hello everybody, my name is Alberto Fuentes Martínez an elementary school teacher and PE specialist.  I love my job and I spend many hours of the day with it almost without realizing it. Since my beginnings as a teacher, I have taken a variety of courses to develop skills in the domain of technological skills and learn about the application of teaching aids that generate and facilitate learning. I want to improve my teaching practice day by day and improve my work as well as update myself, since interculturality is increasingly in our society and in the classroom. That's why I'm here! ☺

Therefore, in the following entries I will provide materials and resources to work on the 4 language skills in English: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Of course, other skills such as pronunciation, grammar, spelling or vocabulary all play a role in effective communication. Now, let's get into it!💪