Some staff find session two the most difficult of the three. Not so Coogee Primary, who had their hands up, their minds engaged and their learning in top gear. For these staff, they had already disengaged from past bad grammatical habits and put aside the old ideas that verbs were doing words, or that you couldn't join a comma and and. They were willing to learn new content and skills and were being ably led by Warren Bell, Marilyn Lamplugh and Alanna Burton. Well done, Coogee!
0 Comments
Over the four schools and nine demonstration lessons I have visited (and given) in the last three days, something has become curiously apparent. The Shoebox content and methodology can suit children who learn differently, who see the world through different eyes. We are all familiar with these children and the particular methodological requirements they place on our teaching practices.
At two of these schools, I was advised by the principals and teachers that I would have five such students in two of the classrooms, and I was delighted that I was only able to spot one of them. Why? Because the other four found the colour-coding of Shoebox and the hands-on methodology so clear that they engaged fully and in fact, actually did better than some of the other students! Both teachers and principals were amazed and delighted. While Shoebox was never designed or intended as a methodological tool for such students, it appears to work. I don't have the research background to understand the learning processes here, but perhaps the colour coding, sequencing and clear structure make it easier for students who learn with their eyes and hands rather than with pencil on paper. Oh. I should point out that other students enjoyed it as well, and I was tickled pink when a Year Two boy described the lesson as 'breathtaking!' His teachers should be delighted for his vocabulary alone! After the first Quick Reference Card was finished, I got excited and kept going. Now there are five available for download so that teachers can have quick and easy access to the key points of a Shoebox sentence, the various word types, and other information.
I also got tremendously excited by a comment made by a Year One teacher recently when she said that her students did not know what nouns and verbs were, so instead of them having to unlearn their previous (false or incomplete) definitions, they could simply start with the correct ones. I chatted with my wife (a Junior Primary teacher) and we devised a little game and activity to help junior primary students understand and internalise the principles of sentence construction. If you are interested in a demonstration of how this works, let me know and I'll visit your class. Based on the recommendation of a teacher at St Mary's in Boyup Brook, I have just completed the first of the Shoebox Quick Reference Cards, with the idea that a teacher can print, laminate and file these cards for easy reference. They contain simple, colourful graphics on the basic principles of the Shoebox 1-2-3 Rule, and will hopefully make it easy for teachers to understand the principles without looking through the full Shoebox Grammar Teachers Book.
More to come. I just had an enormous amount of fun teaching grammar to the Year Sixes at St Pats and the Year Fives at Our Lady of Fatima schools in Fremantle and Palmyra respectively (yes, I just used the words fun and grammar in the same sentence.) Thanks to the staff and students of both schools for two fully engaged classes who listened, learned, thought and discussed; I was sad to leave both classes.
I've just spent a delightful morning as the guest of Our Lady of Mt Carmel PS in Fremantle, where I was invited to give lessons for the Year One and Year Three classes. It's always wonderful to get back into the classroom and interact with students and especially wonderful if I can share some Shoebox. I shouldn't have been surprised how quickly the Year Threes picked up the content; after all, they have so much less to UNLEARN, so what we regard as strange grammatical ideas that go against the old (mythical) ideas of Noun = Person, Place, Thing; a Verb is a Doing Word etc are just regarded by the Year Threes as normal learning. Their educational storehouses have a lot more space than those of adults, and children are a whole lot more excited about filling their storehouses.
The other thing that was very noticeable, as expressed by the Year Three teacher, was that children learn much better by discovery. When they were confronted by the sentence "Playing soccer makes John happy" they worked out that 'Playing soccer' is a noun because it goes into Position One, regardless of how much it looks like a verb. They also discovered that 'is' is a verb because it goes into Position Two, never mind that it thoroughly demolishes the old standard of a Verb is a Doing Word. The Year Ones also, apart from having huge amounts of CUTE, were also delightful as they figured out that we need Positions One and Two, that capital letters go in the Yellow box and the fullstop goes after the Red Box, just the same as the red light tells Daddy when to stop driving. Thanks again, OLOMC! Next Tuesday marks a rather exciting day for Shoebox as I travel down to Manjimup to address a group of teachers from 12 different schools at their network PD day. After speaking with a network principal a month or so back, who invited me to do a demonstration lesson in one of his Year Four classes, he also invited me to nominate as a presenter for the PD, which I did, and the Shoebox brochure was distributed around the 12 network schools. I was astonished to get the news that 45 teachers, principals and other staff had signed up for a 2.5 hour course on grammar!
It will be wonderful to get back to the country; I always enjoy the different atmosphere of country events, particularly from schools which have small populations of less than 50 students, and where every student's name and background is known. The next day, after I drive back, I am booked to do two more demonstration lessons, so it's going to be a busy week! For all the teachers out there, both primary and ESL, you will know how I feel with this next post.
I started with a new low Elementary class this week with a wide-ranging nationality mix: Czech, Korean, Thai, Brazilian, Italian, Turkish, Saudi, Indonesian and a Cuban brother and sister. These are apparently the lowest level class in the school at the moment. I've only got them for two weeks total (10 teaching days) and yesterday was Day Four, so I thought I would use some Shoebox techniques to get them moving with their past simple. At the end of Wednesday's class, I asked them to write diaries and bring them in for Thursday. They DID. Almost every one of the fourteen students wrote a diary and gave it to me to mark. I can't begin to tell you my delight when they used most of the teaching points (Past simple regular and irregular, After that, compound sentences, infinitive of purpose and coordinating conjunctions) correctly. There were high fives, fist pumps, grins of delight and even some teacher dancing. Wonderful. Sheer teaching happiness. I've just returned from a country town, where I did a full day Primary PD for two local schools. It's always wonderful to see teachers' faces light up when they see grammar in a new way, and I really enjoyed hearing them discuss how they can use Shoebox in the classroom. Thanks also to the teacher who suggested the Quick Reference cards (a fantastic idea!) which is next on my to do list for the Members Library.
I usually switch off in the car on the way home and listen to music. This time, however, I was so fired up by the Quick Reference card idea that is started me thinking about new ways to run PD workshops and also to sequence lessons in the classroom. Thanks again to those two schools! I'll see you both shortly. I was talking with some ESL teachers recently, and they commented that they didn't really know grammar as well as they would like, an important professional matter since they are expected to teach it. I've been doing Professional Development workshops for some time now for primary teachers, so I thought it would be worthwhile to run one focussed on grammar for ESL teachers. For the average person, talking about grammar for a day would be the most boring day imaginable, but for me, the chance to help teachers understand our baffling but beautiful language is rather exciting.
So, if you are an ESL teacher and would like to dig a little deeper below the myriad grammatical rules and exceptions to uncover the foundational principles of how our language was originally built, come along to one of the two workshops on December 7 or January 11. Register via email to greg@neogene.com.au or go to the Store / ESL. |
Archives
October 2017
Categories
All
|