Carol Read: The SECRET of working with children

Hi everyone!

Today I am going to do a short summary and a brief reflection on a very interesting video, published on the on the British Council’s site, called: The Secret of working with children. It is a recording of Carol Read's talk at the British Council in Warsaw

Her talk covers a range of primary issues and she give us a number of invaluable tips about teaching primary students. Here I leave the link to the video for those who want to watch it. Although it lasts an hour, I sincerely advise you to watch it because it is very useful and interesting.

Link: www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/carol-read-secret-working-children

In the first part of the video, during the first half hour, Carol Read talks about different types of activities that we can use with our students. In turn, she shows how each of them are carried out. They are very varied activities with songs, flashcards, TPR activities, to draw...  She talks about activities that integrate real content, what children already know, so that language and contents are in harmony. 

She also talks about how important it is for teachers to plan our lessons well. In other words, she says we should not use random activities. We have to choose carefully the sequence, taking into account the characteristics of the children. For that reason, she explains the four phases of the Accelerated Learning Cycle:

                                 

In the second half hour, Carol shows us what is the secret of working with children. To do this, she uses the letters of the word "SECRET".

• Sensory acuity: We have to use all the multisensorial information we get from the people who are with us, our students, (gestures, voice, eyes, movements...). So, we have to be aware and decipher what the signals mean. 
• Emotion: Here she refers to emotional intelligences. It means, it's the perception point, the way that we look at the world. She says that there are three positions or perception points, which are: Self-position (I), other people points of view (empathy) and distant position (observe). And she explains that to be good teachers it's best to adopt the third option. 

• Communication: On the one hand, Carol talks about how important is the body language and the influence that our gestures and our gazes have on the receivers. This is because the message is coming through our body language. She also explains that we have to talk slowly and give children time to respond.
  

  On the other hand, she says that we have to take into account how bad negative and positive rewards are. The important thing is to explain to children why it is good or bad and not just say "good " or "bad ". We must give them reasons, give them imput and show them what we value.
• Rapport / Relationship: It is very important that we have a good relationship with our students, but not as friends. In addition, we must do group rapport because we have many children to do it individually. We have to breathe, put ourselves in the third perceptive position (distant position) and act.

• Evaluation: This refers to our own evaluation as teachers, not only to the evaluation of our students. This reflection cycle must be carried out constantly. We can always get better.

• Tactical talk: It is very important to offer them the opportunity to choose whenever we can. We have to give them options and let them decide for themselves. For example, ask them if they want to draw or play. Things like that.

To finish her talk, Carol Read makes a brief summary of the most important of the session and ends by saying the following sentence:

THE SECRET LIES IN YOU!

I have to admit that although I was lazy to see this video because it was very long, I loved it. I think the second half of the talk is indispensable for any teacher. Although it is focused on primary, everything it says in the second half hour, the key to the secret of working with children, is good for any teacher. For this reason, I recommend you watch it. I think I have learned a lot thanks to this conference. I'm very grateful.  

Comment on one article: Kids and stories

A few weeks ago, I posted a post about storytelling activities, in which I explained different activities to do before, while and after a story.  As this year I have been working on the subject of narration this topic, stories, I wanted to improve my knowledge by choosing this article: Kids and stories. It is an article that I found on the British Council’s site for young learners. It is about different types of resources to work on reading (that are quite similar to the listening activities).

For those who are interested in the article, here I leave the link so you can read it. You can also find links with stories and activities that are very useful for young learners. www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/kids-stories

I will not explain all of them because I think they are very well explained in the article. However, I am going to talk about which ones I find more suitable to use in Infant Education and I am going to make a brief reflection on them.

 Activities to prepare children for reading

This kind of activities are done before reading (or storytelling in case of very young children) in order to familiarize students with the text they are about to read. I believe the four activities that are proposed are suitable for carrying out them with young learners.

• Using illustrations: It is always a good idea to help the child understand and visualise the story. We can use flashcards, pictures, photos or even drawings to help improve reading comprehension.
• Pre-teaching vocabulary: As teachers, we can teach first some thematic vocabulary. We can pick up a few key words from the text and explain them or maybe do different activities to practise and familiarise students with the new vocabulary. 
• Introduce the theme: We can also introduce the topic of the book doing different activities. However, I think that this activity can be included in the last activity, in pre-teaching vocabulary.  
• Input cultural background:  I think this is very interesting. But, more than an activity, I think this is essential when you learn a new language.

 Activities during reading

These are the activities that children will have to do during the reading.

• Use a variety of ways to read: Reading or listening to a story is an activity in itself.  For that reason, in the classroom it is important to vary the kind of reading. Nowadays infant education teachers have a lot of resources that we can use to read a story for the whole class. Some stories can be read as texts with illustrations. Other ones can be read to imagine. We can also use a projector, a CD... It is essential that, as teachers, we know how to narrate and tell stories, keep the class motivated, stop at convenient pints to make questions, read with different voices, … 

• Total physical response: From my point of view, TPR is the best way to work with our students, with very young learners. In this activity the story can be mimed while the teacher reads and the children listen.

Post-reading activities:

These are activities that we will do once we have read the story. They provide students a way to summarize, reflect, and question what they have just read.

• Quick comprehension check: As the article says, “It is always a good idea to do a quick comprehension check when your learners have finished reading the story. This may take the form of a few ‘gist' questions about the text in oral or written form, or asking children for a response.” I totally agree with this since I think it is important to see if the children have understood the story.
• Make a poster/illustrate the story: It is a good activity in which the child is creative, expresses himself and shows us what he has learned. It's his way of summing up the story.
• Role-play/acting out: Although I think this is a slightly more complex activity, once the story is over, we can make a small theatre. 

This is the post. I hope you liked it and gave you ideas on how to work the stories in child education.

Carol Read: Ideas for using flashcards

Flash cards are a simple, useful and flexible resource for teaching vocabulary. They are a great way to present, practise and recycle vocabulary. As a future teacher, I would like to show you that there are lots of ways to use flashcards in the Young Learner classroom.

To start, I leave you the following video in which, Carol Read, explains 10 different activities to teach English in primary. I recommend you to see it because she explains how to use the flashcards in a very detailed way.  

The 10 activities she proposes are the following: 

1. Flash 
2. Slowly, slowly
3. What´s missing
4. Magic eyes
5. Lip reading 
6. Flashcard riddles 
7. Flashcard groups 
8. Hands on head 
9. Flashcard chain 
10. Kim´s game

I will not explain them because I think they are very well explained in the video. However, I am going to talk about which ones I find more suitable to use in infant education and my opinion about the flashcards as teaching-learning resource.

 ·       Flashcard in Infant education:

As I said before, the activities we have seen are for elementary school children; I mean, they are suitable for use in primary. Despite that, I would like to talk about some of them because I think we could do them in infant education.

Of the above activities, I would use “Flash” and “Slowly, slowly” activities because, in my opinion, when we use flashcards to introduce vocabulary in the classroom, we have to create some suspense or mystery about the cards. This will help students be more invested and more likely to remember the words.  Students are more receptive to learning when they are curious.

I also think “Flashcard riddles” is a good activity for very young children. It is a guessing game in which the child relates his previous knowledge (colours, numbers…) with the new vocabulary. This is interesting because they learn to relate all the vocabulary learned.

 ·       Flashcards as teaching-learning resource:

From my point of view, flashcards are an essential tool because they make a real impact on visual learners. As Gardner says, there are some types of intelligence. One of them is visual. In this way, flashcards help learners to have a very clear understanding of the word or concept. So, in this sense, flashcards help teachers to draw the visual learners' attention.

Even so, as teachers, we have to take into account that not all children learn in the same way. For that reason, in addition to flashcards, we must do other types of activities to teach vocabulary.  

The Pygmalion Effect and the Power of Positive Expectations

According to what The Pygmalion Effect tell us, the expectations a teacher has about his students, directly influence their academic performance. This can be seen perfectly in this video.

An exam is taken at a school. Then they put the names of all the students inside a hat and they take out several, randomly.  Teachers are told that these children are the smartest or that they have the best results.

In one hand, we can see that children to whom teachers pay more attention develop more skills and learn much more than the rest. This is because teachers create a warmer climate with these students and give them more input than to the rest of their classmates. I mean, they are treated in a closer way. That is, the “favourite” students are the ones who learn the most.

On the other hand, these prejudices cause damage to the other students because, by paying more attention to certain students, they are leaving others aside. This affects negatively since they do not receive enough input to develop all his abilities adequately. From my point of view, this is a contradiction since they are giving more attention or more input to those who do not need it and not the other way around.  In addition, they begin to feel themselves inferior.

Therefore, with this study, the main idea is confirmed: The expectations a teacher has about his students, directly influence their academic performance.

For that reason, as teachers we must be impartial and treat all children equally. Inevitably, as we are human, we will have favouritism towards our students. And, without realizing it, we put aside other children. But we must be professionals and we must remember that our goal is to ensure that all our students develop their skills to the fullest.

How to make a listening for kids

Hello, everyone: 

In this post I will teach you a very simple way to create your own Listening. It is an activity I have done with my classmate Samanta. 

This activity consisted of creating a Listening, for children, and their corresponding activities, based on an aliens’ photo.

The first thing we did was to take an easier picture (because we have focused the activity for pre-school children)  and invent a small story, very simple and repetitive. Once written, we create activities for before, while and after the listening. 

This was the result:

Have a nice day!

English time!

Hi everyone! 

I'm very sorry not to have written in so many months. You will be wondering why I'm writing in English and why this change in my blog. Well, this is my last year of University and I have decided to make the mention in English. For this reason, these months I will write several posts in English. They will be posts related to two subjects: “Narración y dramatización en lengua inglesa” and “Didáctica del inglés aplicada a la educación infantil”.

I hope you like them and they serve you to learn how to teach English (or another language) to little children.

If you have problems with English, DO NOT WORRY.  Search on the right side of my blog the button "translate". Then, select the language that you want and .... ready to read!