8th of February - question test

Oooohhh.... Those questions...

I prepared a test for the class that was similar to the last one they took. It looked like that:
Question Test #2

While I gave them lots of credit last time I corrected the tests really strictly this time and just put the achieved points into the "lehrer office" and gave them exactly the grades that they were given. The average was 4.83 and that's a whole lot better than last time. In my reflection about the last question test I wrote that the average would have been below 4 last time so about a grade less than this time.

But what really, really hit me was how half of the class did with exercise 7-18.
Many of those kids, even the best ones in class did not realise that this was about deciding if the had to use the auxiliary verb or the "to do". So they started with "Is it sunny...", "Are they happy?", "Go you to school today?" and so on. So many of them had only 10 out of those 24 points because 5 of those 12 sentences are with auxiliary verbs. But then with the next exercise, they used the "to do" and the auxiliary verb perfectly... Why is that?



While I was correcting those tests, one boy came to the room and asked me how he did. So I asked him what the question was for "you go to school today" and without having to think he said "Do you go to school today?". Well they know this??? Why did all run into the same trap in this exercise??? Was it because I started with two sentences that had an auxiliary verb? Where they so into just swapping verb and subject that they just went on? Well I can see some of those kids bumping their heads on the desk when they get back their tests and I feel sooo sorry! That's 14 points that many of them just threw away. And those 14 points meant 1.25 grades.

But still, here are the grades:
3x 5.75 / 3x 5.5 / 1x 4.5 / 4x 4.25 / 2x 3.75 which is an average of 4.83

If almost half the class had not fallen for that exercise, the average would have been 5.4 which would have been a great success compared to the 3.85 from the first test. Maybe I should have written as a title that they should choose between the auxiliary verb and the "to do" but since we have done this exercise a thousand times I thought that was clear.

This makes me think of something I read by Vera F. Birkenbihl. I'm sitting in a cafe at the moment so I don't have those documents here with me but I'll just write what I still remember:

Birkenbihl describes our brains like knowledge networks. For some topics we have lots of knowledge strings and for some topics we have very little. The more we know about a topic, the easier it is to knit new knowledge strings into the network (so the easier it is to learn). Now while those networks are quiet big in adult's brains in children's brains there are many little knowledge network islands that are not liked together yet. Some American doctor found out that this is the reason why children have difficulties to show what they can during test situations because they cannot just "jump" from one island to the next. Especially not when they are under pressure. Just by the age of 10-13 kids kind of knit their little islands together in order to get a big mainland.
Birkenbihl makes a impressive example but I don't know how much sense it makes in English ;-) Well if a child had the topic "beer brewing" in class and heard the word "Blume" (= Flower, that's how we call the white foam on a beer in German). Now there is a test and the same kid had to answer something about this flower than it might be that its thoughts jump on the "garden flower island" instead of the "beer flower island" and there it will get stuck. Especially when stress rises. So the older the child the more likely it will be able to leave this island but very young children will be stuck on that island for the rest of the test and won't be able to answer any questions on the topic of beer no matter how well they had prepared. That's just the way our brains work. Only when they walk back home, and the stress finally falls off them they will remember the question and the answer they had not been able to give and they will feel extremely stupid.

So could it be that with those first two statements being with auxiliary verbs I led some of those kids onto the "swapping island" and they couldn't leave it? Well that's definitely worth thinking about and it will be worth thinking about how to avoid that. But grades are made. Report cards are printed and this test did not affect the final great of those kids so there will be some moaning in class but there will be no harm for anyone.

5th of February - Unit 2 test

This Unit 2 test had three parts: listening, reading and writing.

Those tests are out of the official young world teaching material. I have to admit that I was a little worried about the reading because we left that whole topic of people migrating completely aside but since we really practised the "have to" topic a lot and since we talked a lot about animals I figured that this would kind of even out.

Listening:
The commentary that comes with the Young World tells you exactly how to correct and grade it.
10 Pts = 6
9 Pts = 5.5
8 Pts = 5
7 Pts = 4.5
6 Pts = 4
5 Pts and below = failed

So for each correct answer they got a point. In some cases it was clear what the answer was and in some cases they had to write freely. In the second case I just gave them half a point for a correct part of the answer when there could have been more to write. That's how I got the 0.25 grades.

The class did great! They got an average of 5.35 which is pretty impressive! I got 4x 6 / 2x 5.75 / 4x 5.5 / 1x 5.25 / 1x 5 / 1x 4.75 /1x 4 / 1x 3.75


Reading:
According to the commentary the test was to be graded like this:
12 Pts = 6
11 Pts = 5.75
10 Pts = 5.5
9 Pts = 5
8 Pts = 4.5
7 Pts = 4
6 Pts and below = fail

The 5.75 is my interpretation. It could also be that 11 would have meant a 6 but it's just not 100%. That's why I added the 5.75.

The class did great! I got 3x 5.75 / 5x 5.5 / 4x 5 / 2x 4.5 and 1x 4 (one girl had the flue) That's a average of 5.2!!! That's amazing! So there was no reason to worry. Those kids are quiet good readers even though we didn't practise reading too much this term. This will definitely be more on the schedule next term. My main focus was really their speaking because they hardy spoke at all.

Writing:
According to the commentary this test was to be graded like this:
20 Pts = 6
19 Pts = 5.75
18 Pts = 5.5
...
12 Pts = 4

The class got 4x 6 / 1x 5.75 / 7x 5.5 / 1x 5 / 1x 4 and 1x 2.5 (with one girl missing) that's an average of 5.32!!! But the 4 and especially the 2.5 hurt! Well the guy with the 4 just formulated sentences like "I have to do going to school" and I did point that out to him, when I handed back those papers they had written about two weeks ago. And the one with the 2.5 hardly ever used the the "have to" at all. She used wrote "They have pets." "They have brothers and sisters." But thank goodness I did the reading with them because there she made a 5.5. I did not write the 2.5 on her test neither, I just wrote "insufficient".

Well overall I'm pretty impressed by how these kids did on those three tests. For some time I wondered if we had done enough on the topic because we spent so much time with those animals and with the question drills... But after correcting these tests I'm relieved. They have really learnt a lot :-)

4th of February 2016 - another animal game

Since I made this lesson on a Thursday, I was alone with the class and this is quiet a challenge with this one boy that's freed of learning targets.

First I introduced the last topic of the question booklet to them -  the negative questions. But I did that very briefly because I'm not going to put it in the test since we won't have any time to work on them on Friday and on Monday there will be their question test. So we just did the exercise together.

Than we chanted the "things you have to do" together and I mainly helped this boy to keep up with the audio. After that I asked the class do discuss with their neighbours what they had to do and what their parents, friends, neighbours had to do. I tried to find a mix between walking through the class and helping this boy but that was rather difficult.

After that, we played another animal game. I had the same expressions on the blackboard again:

"as large as"/"larger than"/"smaller than"
"as much as"/"more than"/"less than"
"as fast as"/"faster than"/"slower than"
"as long as"/"longer than"/ "less long than"

And I asked them to figure out what we needed before that to formulate a question. This time they were not the animals themselves but the had the animals as pet. So we needed third person singular...

Is it ...
Does it weigh ...
Is it ...
Does it live ...

This time the game was not as satisfying as the first time because I was sitting next to this boy and helping him to formulate and answer questions so I couldn't really watch the rest of the class and way too soon the first boy was finishes and I knew that he didn't questions us (me and this boy) at all. So what they did was not only asking those questions to a couple of kids but trying to copy names from their lists too. Well the lesson was about finished and I didn't want to bother playing it again.

Last but not least I gave them back their memory stick and each of them had the following four files in a folder:

1. Recording as MP3
2. Recording as MPEG4
3. Their English text normal
4. Their English text with 2.5 line spacing

I had printed out their texts with the 2.5 line spacing and went through the class asking them to share with the others, how many pages they had. This I did to show some of them, that they had way too much text! Some of them had 1 page and about two lines on the second page and others had 4 pages.

So homework till next Thursday was to read the text partly along with their original German text, highlight those English words they did not understand and spend 20min with any translating tool (dictionary, leo ...) to look up as many words as possible.

So just a quick outlook on the last three English lessons of this term: Tomorrow there will be their Unit 2 test, Monday there will be their question test and on Thursday there will be there Young Learners Placement test. Well at least that one will be fun. They don't know this yet and they don't have to prepare for that. That's just for me. I meant to listen actively to some of those texts from Unit 3 but I'll do this at the beginning of next term. It's just too much at the moment...

29th of January - the animal game

Today's lesson was all about the animals that the kids made fact sheet about. I put them all together on a table chart without sorting them in any way.

At the beginning of the lesson I started with the next topic in the question booklet although I think that I would not include this in this "question workshop" anymore if I did it again. But now it's in there and I wrote the following scrambled sentences at the blackboard.

like / you / pizza / do

from / are / Germany / you

I asked the kids to close their eyes show me with their fingers, witch word the sentence would start with, and then, and then, and then... For the first sentence it was the "4", "2", "1", and "3" and for the second the "2", "4", "1", and "3". They all got it right and I let two kids explain why that was the case and they answered both with decent explanation that the question started with the verb to do or the auxiliary verb.

Then we came to the active and fun part of the lesson. I handed out those table charts. The sheets were printed on the front and back with the same table. I also distributed a little paper with each animals name so that each kid got an animal that the others didn't know (not the animal they are having their presentation on). And I showed them some chunks I wrote at the blackboard.

Are you - "as large as"/"larger than"/"smaller than"
Do you weigh - "as much as"/"more than"/"less than"
Are you - "as fast as"/"faster than"/"slower than"
Do you live - "as long as"/"longer than"/ "less long than"

At the blackboard I had the three examples underneath each other and the "are you/do you..." in front of it. With these chunks I sent them through the classroom with their table charts to find out what animals the others were. The fasted to find out all the names could ring the bell. They were all really motivated asking their classmates many questions and it was fun walking through the classroom listening.

The only problem was, that they didn't get finished at the same time and sometimes had to wait a little till they found the next partner to ask questions but they dealt with that just fine and made sure that they went to the next available person as soon as possible since they wanted to be the first to find them all.

So at the end of this lesson each child had actively used questions lots of times and they all got the highest score on their "flag-list".

On Monday I planned to play the same game again but with them imagine that they had pets so the had to use the 3rd person singular to ask about instead of the second but I felt soooo bad that I had to stay home. So, I'll do this lesson on Thursday. I'll think about putting them in a rotating circle and giving them a certain amount of time they had with each partner to find out what he was. But then I'd have the same problem with the fast ones that they have to wait... And it kind of regulated itself so I might just leave it open again. I'll have to think about that again.

25th of January - Question Drill - things you have to do.

Question Drill
We started our lesson with another question drill. This time it was about formulating questions to given answers. I had prepared the following answers:

• Yes, I like dancing.
• No, we are not from Germany.
• Yes, you look good in this dress.
• No, I am not worried about the test. 
• Yes, I would like to play soccer this afternoon. 
• No, he is not in my house.
• Yes, he goes to school. 
• No she does not like chocolate.
• Yes, you must do this. 
• No, you aren't a good team. 
• Yes, he wants more.
• No, you are not good enough.
• Yes, I would like to come to your party.
• No she doesn't like animals. 
• Yes, you have to clean your room. 
• No, my car isn't dirty.

So I read each one out loud and picked kids to give me the question. Even though I only picked each child once, they all raised their hands as soon as they knew the question. Because I'm still counting the numbers of where their flag is at the end of the lesson. I have to admit that I was quiet amazed how well they did. They got most forms correctly using either the auxiliary verb or the "to do". When it came to "my house" or "your party" I pointed at me or them so the realised that they needed to ask for "your house" and "my party". For a homework they got page -7- of their question book incl. correcting it.

have to
Then we chanted the "things we have to do" from the Young World Pupils book. I interrupted them after a few lines and asked them to speak louder and they did. After that they made an exercise in the Activity Book about "have to" where they had to formulate sentence with "I have to...", "My teacher has to..." and so on.

Then I put them in pairs and asked them to interview each other. "Do you have to brush your teeth?" - "Yes I have to brush my teeth." / "Do you have to wash the dishes?" - "No I don't have to wash the dishes." That way the practised asking questions and using the have to. They did great and there was a lot of English speaking going on in the classroom. I walked by the desks and gave them thumbs up after overhearing their conversation so they could raise their flags.

Then I wanted to hear a sentence each about things they had to do.

For the last 10 minutes of the lesson I handed out some papers and asked them to write as many sentences as they could, without looking at the examples in the Young World, about what they had to do, what their parents have to do, their pets have to do, their siblings have to do etc. I told them that I would give each of them an individual feedback about it, so they knew what they have to be careful with.

Right before the lesson ended, I collected these papers and looked at them at home. They did really good. There were very few errors where they tried to use the continuous forms of the verb like "My pet has to going..." I'll point that out on Friday... With the pet, some used the word "food" as "to eat" and some as "to feed" so I will point that out as well. Very, very few forgot the "has" at 3rd person singular. Actually the mistake that was done the most were the possessive determiners. They heard the "brush my teeth" and wanted to use this with their sisters, their parents but didn't know the "her" or "their". So this will definitely be worth looking at with the class.

8th of January 2016 - 22nd of January - several lessons

OK, I got a little behind in writing about my English lessons in those two weeks and I try to remember as much as I can by writing a summary about them. They won't be as detailed as they usually are but I'll have the most important parts in there. I won't sort them by date but by topic to make it easier to follow.

Animal - Presentation
Friday, 8th of January - I went with the class into the computer room to introduce the google translate to them but this was nightmare and I would never do it this way again. Allowing them to write a German text first made everything way more complicated out of the following reasons:

• They could easily copy-paste texts out of the wikipedia in order to make their texts long enough so that some of them turned out to be way to long. Some texts even had those wikipedia links in it... 
• Well google only works, if you enter easy sentences. With those complicated sentences that the kids sometime took out of what ever pages they had found, google was just creating horribly wrong sentences with way to complicated words in it. 
• Another issue was their spelling. The ones that wrote their texts on their own usually made some spelling mistakes which google could not translate. So what google did was to translate part of the sentence, add the original "unknown" word, and translate the rest of the sentence. So it's pretty clear, that those translations didn't turn out like they should have.
• Many realised by reading through the text, that they misspelled a word and just translated that single word in google which made the sentence even worse. Instead of translating the whole sentence again.

So I made these points clear to the class and announced that we would be in the media room again on Monday 11th and that they should have decent German texts ready by then. One boy (as usually) had been finished with the English text already because he did it at home or had it done by his sister or parents... So it was not really as successful as I hoped it would be.

Monday,  11th of January - Again I gave them time to work on their presentation in the media room. They had to make sure to have their texts on the USB Stick to work on at home and to have all pictures printed out that they wanted to have on their posters. The boy who was finished helped the others like all the other kids that finished their texts. By Friday I wanted them to give me all their memory sticks with the English and the German text on.

Friday,  15th of January - The kids worked on their posters. Even though they only had to fill in this fact sheet, glue some pictures on it, and write the name of the animal they didn't manage to finish the poster in that lesson.

Monday, 18th of January - I gave them 15 more minutes to finish the poster and copied them all down to a A6 size.

Friday, 22nd of January - I just handed back those A6 Posters to the kids and they had to formulate a few sentences about the size, speed, weight and live expectancy of their animals.

I realised that I would never ever get them to do the presentation before the winter break and so I announced on one of those days, that I would go over their texts and have them recorded by a native English speaking person and that they would have enough time to practise their texts, since the presentations would not take place before break.

In the meantime I had help from a true angel!!! Kate, our au-pair from the US went through those English texts and turned them into real English texts, taking out all the bad language that google translate had come up with. I have no idea how I would have managed to do that without help. So this is a lesson that I have learnt. I could not do this with long, complicated texts like that. Well on the aims that I have given the students at the beginning of this project I wrote that they were supposed to write a SIMPLE German texts and I think it would have worked with this simple text but since I kind of lost track on what the kids did and since I let them use the computer it all went wrong. So next time I would allow them to research in the internet but then write their own easy sentences in handwriting making sure that they could not just copy. Or I would provide them with lots of chunks in English and had them try to write the presentation in English right from the start.

What we still have to do is to record those presentations and I planned to decode them all. But I have to admit that I don't know when I'm supposed to do that. But it's still my aim because I think that it is really necessary that they understand their speeches... But I might just get them to do this themselves in another Thursday lesson. I could prepare their texts with very wide line spacing and let them find the words they don't understand themselves because it would take me forever to do all those texts myself.

Questions
I'll keep this short because I pretty much followed my schedule about the questions the way I wrote it in one of my last posts. Always on Monday I introduced a new topic, gave them homework for Friday and made some sort of drill where they all had to use the practised topic. I started having some doubt about the effectivity of this way of learning when another teacher told me that they were having difficulties completing their homework but then I was highly surprised how well they did in class. I think the issue with the 3rd person singular was probably the most difficult for them. I'm curious about how they will do next Monday when I test them.

"Have to do" something
We chanted the "things you have to do" several times at the beginning of the lessons and most of the times I made them use the "have to" with their own duties.

Listening comprehension
I made another listening comprehension with the class about one chapter in the book we are reading in German. This time I didn't give them three possible answers but a statement they had to judge with true, false, not in the text. I don't have the book with me at the moment, but I will insert a picture of the chapter when I'm at home. I let them read through the questions and clarify vocabulary. They had become great in asking for vocabulary clarification and I don't even have to remind them to ask in English. I explained the unknown words with other words until they could tell what it meant. Then I read the text twice. The first time rather slowly and the second time in a normal pace. When I corrected the test I realised, that most of my statements were wrong or not in the text. I will make sure next time, that that there are more true sentences too.

4th of January 2016 - listening grade, question drill, working on texts

First of all:
A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYBODY!!!

LISTENING GRADE
At the beginning of lesson, I announced, that I'll have a class list ready where every child could write down the number they reach on their flagpole by the end of every lesson. I will count all those numbers together and that they will influence their speaking grade.

QUESTION DRILL (Preparation)
I felt sooo bad after the last English lesson, when I confused them a lot with my flow chart. Now I adapted the flow chart. So here is the question flow chart we work with until the winter break. I stopped counting how many times I have actually changed it over the holidays. The last change was made this morning around 4 o'clock ;-) I reduced the auxiliary words I expect them to know down to:

• be
• can + could
• must
• will + would 

I also left all the question words and the past tense away although I didn't delete the "was and were"...
Instead of writing "use the auxiliary verb" and "use the "to do"" I made that clearer by writing "SWAP auxiliary verb and subject" and "ADD do or does". Instead of the "did" I made a separate colon for the 3rd person singular and I added the negative question form.

This flow chart became the cover of the following booklet I printed as brochure and stapled it together. With this booklet, I'll go through all the different cases step by step... My time plan till the holidays is the following:

Mo 4. January	Q Drill – Auxiliary verbs 1
Fr 8. January	Q Drill – Auxiliary verbs 2
Mo 11. January	QD – Main verbs 2
Fr 15. January	QD – Main verbs 2
Mo 18. January	QD – Mixed 1
Fr 22. January	QD – Mixed 2
Mo 25. January	QD – Answers 1
Fr 29. January	QD – Answers 2
Mo 1. February	QD – Scrambled Sentences
Fr 5. February	QD – Negative Questions
Mo 8. February	Question Test

 
The first four weeks, I want to use some time on Monday to introduce the topic (like today), give them a few exercises to that topic for a homework till Friday and then play some game on Friday...

QUESTION DRILL (today's lesson)
I handed out strips of paper with the following statements on:

• WE ARE ON TIME
• THEY ARE 17 YEARS OLD
• SHE IS FROM ZURICH
• I CAN HELP YOU
• SHE WILL WIN THE FIGHT
• MY CAT WOULD EAT THIS

I copied the sentences three times on A3 and cut them into strips. Each child got one strip and I asked them to take out their scissors and cut off words in order to be able to make questions out of it. While walking through the class, I realised that at least half the students made a cut between all the words but some of them realised, that they only needed to cut off the first two words and swap them.

Even though I saw that some kids had it wrong I stopped them and started... Since they all wanted to raise their flag I didn't have trouble getting volunteers to tell me their answer. So the first two I had to guide a little, to get what I wanted: "The statement was 'we are on time' and the question is 'are we on time?'" - "What did you do" - "I swapped the 'are' and the 'we'" - All the students had to give me this answer and all of them could raise their flag. Funnily, those who got it wrong before we started realised pretty fast, what they had gotten wrong and changed it before I called on them.

I think they really got it this time and they had fun doing this. What a relief after the last lesson's disaster. So I gave them the exercises 1-4 on pages 2-3 in their question booklet for a homework. I'll think of a game to play with them on Friday so they can show what they have learnt.

ANIMAL PRESENTATION
It took me a little longer to get through the questions than I thought but I think it was well worth it. So they had about 20 minutes left to work on their texts. Since they were all in different stages, I asked those who said, that they had finished their German texts to get together in pairs and read the texts to their classmate who should take the time AND check if he or she had covered all the required information. All the others could work on their texts. It took non of the kids who thought that they had finished longer than two minuted to read their German texts and I made clear to them, that I wanted them to speak for at least four minutes in English and didn't accept a two minutes speech and two minutes of goofing off and just showing pictures. Of course they won't talk as fast in English as in German but they will need at least a three minute long German text.

I planned to ask them to finish their German texts by Friday but felt bad because they didn't get too much time today. So I told them, that they would get about 30minutes on Thursday to work on their texts but that they needed to be finished by Friday. So their homework was to get their texts far enough to be able to finish them on Thursday. This homework includes to read it at least once to their parent, siblings, pets or whoever - taking the time.

FURTHER PLANS WITH THIS PRESENTATION
I thought a lot about how to translate those texts in English and I want to avoid frustration and wasting too much time because really my main aim is that they can hold a presentation about their animal and that we have 17 different animals with different sizes, speeds etc. to compare in class initialising the grammar section of this unit. Plus I want them to have their recordings for at least two weeks before having their presentation.
So I thought about what I would do if I had to translate a text into a different language that I had a German version of. I would put it into https://translate.google.ch/?hl=de knowing that those translations are not really reliable and work from there with changing and correcting. So this is what I'll do with them on Friday after the question game.This way I'll have all of them at the same stage by Friday and kids with longer texts are not punished with more translating work. I'm planing to decode the texts for them so they know exactly which of their German sentences turned out to what kind of English sentences...

So my plans till the winter break are (very briefly) about the following: I know it's getting a little crowded with all those presentations but they won't take more than 5 minutes each. But 20 minutes plus Active Reading + Questions is pretty much but I'll change that when I see that it's not working.
___
For some reason I cannot write underneath the table chart I inserted, but this it where it should be... It's at the end of the blog...
___

I want them to have the recorded text for at least 2 weeks before they have their presentation so I'll have a pretty tough week from Monday to Friday and I hope I can get all those things done. But somehow it always works ;-)


The last day of school, I'll let the class do another Oxford YLPT like I did at the beginning of the year to be able to see if they have improved their English skills. I'll go on with my English teaching the way I started it, but I'll have to get my Bachelor Thesis finished. So I'll stop writing such a detailed blog after winter break and start putting it all together.

Th 7. January	Finishing German text
Fr 8. January	Google Translation
Mo 11. January	Working on English text – Handing them in.
Fr 15. January	Creating Factsheet about Animal – Unit 2 - Giving back the texts incl. decoding, incl. MP3 recording...
Mo 18. January	Unit 2
Fr 22. January	Unit 2
Mo 25. January	Unit 2
Fr 29. January	Unit 2 Test
Mo 1. February	4 Presentations / Active Reading Unit 3
Th 4. February	4 Presentations
Fr 5. February	4 Presentations / Active Reading Unit 3
Mo 8. February	Question Test
Th 11. February	4 Presentations
Fr 12. February	Young Learners Placement Test 2