As many of us get ready to do the Circling with Balls/Cards activities to start off the year, or whatever we do to start things off, let us remember what our goals are:
1. To teach the rules.
2. To personalize, including names.
3. To teach some language.
Let us clearly understand that if we don’t do those three things now at the start of the year, in that order, we won’t really be able to teach much of the languages we love so much. I no longer have any desire to teach any of the target language at all until my students are firmly:
a. trained in the rules, and
b. feel that they count as human beings in my classroom.
As I have said many times here, there is nothing more important than the rules in the first few days. For those who may be new to the group, the rules I use are found on the posters page of this site as “Classroom Rules”. I spend much of the first week pointing at them at every single infraction, explaining their importance in English, and calling home every night when a misbehaving student shows any confusion or refusal to comply with each and every rule. This is, again, it cannot be said enough, my number one highest priority. A search of of the Classroom Rules category on this site will reveal many blog posts on this topic. Get the rules in place in the first week, no later than the second week, and you won’t have to mess with them again all year! The discipline will be there.
The personalization piece is not far in importance behind the rules. The Circling activities (cards, balls, whatever) are built to allow you to not only teach and enforce the rules but also to get to know the kids in real and human ways. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. The personalization piece is addressed in PQA in a Wink! but there are many other blog posts here that you may want to look at by searching the PQA category.
Also on the resources/workshop handouts page is a section on naming kids. I want to add to that in this current blog post. Naming kids, using names for maximum effect in a comprehension based language classroom, is an art form. That is all described either in PQA in a Wink! or on the resources page just mentioned.
Remember, as you enforce the rules, you do that largely in English, going back and forth when discussing the cards from L2 (discussion of card content) and L1 (enforcement of rules with laser pointer). However, in those first few weeks, perhaps in the second week when the interest in the cards begins to lose some of its glitter, you may want to do a new name activity that is done entirely in English over one, two or even three days.
Here’s what I suggest in this English only name activity:
1. Give the kids this homework assignment:
– Why did our parents choose your name?
– If you were named after someone, who was it?
– What nicknames do you have, and how did you get them?
– Do you like your names? Why or why not?
– If you could choose another name, what would it be?
Allow a few days for the kids to complete this assignment, bring the information back to class, and discuss in twos, afterwards allowing the other person in the group of two to report back to the big group on the above questions, with interruptions from the person whose name is being discussed of course allowed.
Once everyone who wanted to share has done so, you lead a follow up discussion, asking these questions and giving the kids plenty of time to answer them fully without being interrupted (enforce the rules!):
– Did you notice any similarities in how names were selected for people?
– Did this activity help you to get to know each other better? How?
– Did people seem pleased with their names?
– As you listened, were you moved by anyone’s feelings about his/her name?
– Would you ever consider changing your name? Why?
To close, invite statements of appreciation:
“____, I really liked what you said about your name because____.”
“____, I like your name because____”
“____, I felt you understood when I said____”
Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that speaking English in our classroom in the second week of the year is a waste of time. It isn’t. Try the above. Do it now, in February, if you feel you need to. Just tell the kids we are all tired and we are just going to hang out and speak some English for a change. I’m thinking that this class could help the teacher in our group who just went through that traumatic period with the rude boys. I see this activity of discussing names in English as possibly a very healing activity. Maybe it can knit some holes in the classroom fabric, not to mention give the teacher a golden opportunity to re-teach the classroom rules, which may have taken a header recently, as sometimes happens.
[Note – the other big “getting to know the kids” piece is the Learning Style Inventory, which is described here as well. I would wait to do that until about the second month, when the kids can finally understand why it may be easy or hard for them to understand the target language in your classroom and not feel stupid but see their challenges more in terms of the way they process information.]
Once you have taught the rules and made the phone calls, and personalized the room and talked about the names in English as per the above, and done the LSI inventory, you can say that you are ready to teach the language. You won’t believe the difference when you foolishly just start in teaching the language without doing the things described above.]
[credit for the above naming activity: Jeanne Gibbs’ Tribes, Center Source Publications, 1987 – p. 162.]