September blog 1.0: What am I better at this year?

1. Parent Contact with a purpose

Last year I seldom called parents since the vast majority of parent calls were useless. This year I contacted parents within the first two weeks for little things like goofy or childish behavior during group work or during notes. This year parent contact was awesome since the parents are willing to take steps to improve their child's behavior. I also sent home a few behavior contacts and followed up with a phone call home. As a result, I haven't had many recurring behavior issues.

2. Increasing student engagement without over engaging my free time

I’m trying to keep students engaged without spending hours planning a fun activity that may or may not work out. I thought of the easiest review game ever after I was forced not to do my modified version of the fly swatter game when the poster machine broke one morning. It took me all of two minutes to think of the game and ten minutes to get the supporting materials together.

As a foreign language teacher I want my students to master all aspects of the target language; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Reading and writing are the easy things to practice and assess, but my kids hate listening quizzes and listening activities that don’t involve a song or a video, so this week I got a bit creative with my listening assessment. First I called it a review game, and I told them that the winners get a prize. Presentation is everything, so they were excited. 

I let them pick a partner. Each pair got an answer board with scrambled phrases in the target language and in English. I would call out a number and translation of one of the phrases on their answer board. Students had to work with their partner to write the correct number beside the phrase on their answer board. The group that got the most correct won the prize. 

Why is this review game awesome?

1. Students are engaged

2. Students are quiet (they don’t want neighboring groups to steal their answers)

3. Students are practicing listening

4. I can easily assess listening comprehension

3. A tangible reward

Last year I NEVER gave our raffle tickets since I felt that my kids didn't deserve them. This year I give out raffle tickets for participation. Since participation is required for at least 40% of the class period, I make it rain raffle tickets. I also do a raffle every two weeks with 3 winners from each class period. This year I’ve also included class competitions. This may take the form of “the easiest review game ever” or “learning bingo.” Both options are intra class competitions with a tangible reward at the end of the class period.