Fern goes to India

FREE ONLINE CHILDREN'S STORIES 

This is a shor story about a fox who travel to India. I found this story in this website http://www.storytimeforme.com/player/?id=fern20&fs=0 you can find more of them for your students, they are great because they have the transcription.

Classroom Management

According to the ¹Glossary of Education Reform, Classroom management refers to the wide variety of skills and techniques teachers use to keep students organized, orderly, focused, attentive, on task, and academically productive during a class. This definition is mainly what we learnt after taking didactic courses. 

If you ask to a student who attended a didactic course, what is classroom management? he/she will answer that is the activity to keep the class in order and the act of controlling discipline.  But is that what really classroom management means? Is all about discipline and order for developing a given activity in class?

Let’s give you an example; you are teaching 5th grade students, you have developed some appropriated techniques for controlling inadequate behaviors, you organize the chairs of the classroom in a position students are not allowed to speak with their classmate, and you have to give a two hours English class to 40 students. In order to make all students participate, you plan individual presentations for the class, so each student will make their presentation of any topic. In the first five minutes a big part of the students would be paying attention then some of them will start to talk or to stand up, or throwing some paper airplanes etc, What happened? 
 In this situation we saw that to keep a class in order, on task, and attentive is not just a matter of controlling techniques. Classroom management involves: activities, time management, materials, facial expression,  attitude,  body language. As teachers we can’t think that if we yell on students or talk them “with authority” students will pay attention and behave well, some students are distracted because the way or the shape of the class activities.

I think classroom management is an important topic and through many courses we have seen it as a topic of little importance. If we learn that everything is connected (the lesson plan, materials, discipline, controlling techniques, time management, body language) and if we take into account that everything is important because all those aspects work as a whole body for making a successful class, we will stop to blame students for their lack of interest in our classes.

1. http://edglossary.org/classroom-management/

Did you remember this tongue twister?

"My hat it has three corners,

three corners has my hat; 

and had it not three corners,

 it wouldn't be my hat"

Hello!
In my class with teenagers I did an activity with the tongue twisters we learned in the teaching English to children class.

They are between 12 and 14 years old, that means that they are very competitive.

Before teaching the tongue twister I separated the classroom in two teams and I gave to each team the tongue twister but in 10 pieces. And they had 2 minutes to organize it in the correct way. 

I think they took more than two minutes to resolve it but finally one group did it. Then I wrote the tongue twister on the board and we say it with the gestures representing specific words and omitting some words.

Do you teach little kids?

Hi!
I want to share you these videos I use in my classes with little kids, they really love them.
Those videos are for teaching numbers to little kids.
Enjoy them!