It's all well and good to know that you have a topical unit, but then you think about teaching on Monday and realize that you have no plans, no direction and no idea what you're doing when the bell rings. So I thought I'd post on what I do when I start thinking about the direction of a unit.
The first thing I do is identify where the holes in my knowledge are. For this particular unit, I knew that I knew absolutely nothing about magic, so I purchased a book on magic, and then I read it. I let what I read guide me to the next step.
What was my end goal? What do I want students to understand? I determined that I wanted my kids to know how the Romans saw magic and magicians and why, and that I wanted them to understand how we see magic and why.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
A unit in my classroom, part 3
The next week of magic class looked like this:
Day 1
We re-watched each of the clips, and I began to use the vocabulary in the types of sentences and sentence-strings in which they were going to see them in the original text.
The previous night, I had written three summaries: one of each video. I included statements in the summaries that were blatantly false, and others that could be interpreted as true or false, depending on how you read them. They are at school, but on Monday, I'll attach them here. I put one of them in large letters up on the screen (you could do this with a projector, a doc cam, or just by writing) and had the kids sit in pairs with one facing the summary and one facing away. The first student began to read, slowly, to the second student. When the reader read a lie, the second student pointed rudely (on instruction from me :D) and said, "Mentiris!" That student then had to provide the correct information. The reader then had to begin at the beginning of the sentence and read it correctly.
When I hit the bell, the two stood up and switched roles, whether they'd finished or not. They then began again at the start of the passage. It gives students who are struggling a little more with the listening to then have the chance to read the passage for themselves, and it provides repetition for both of them.
After they'd read the passage the second time through, I got up and read the passage, and they got to call me a liar. It meant that I heard various corrections for various errors, and the kids got to hear how other students interpreted various statements. Then we voted on which correction we liked. At the end, we all read the corrected one together. We got through two of the three.
Day 2
We did a running dictation of the third summary - Hocus Pocus. In pairs, student select a runner and a writer. I post the text down the hallway (I always post two copies in opposite directions so it doesn't get overly crowded in the hallway). The runner runs down the hall, memorizes everything they can in the first sentence, and brings that information back to the writer. The writer writes all of this. The runner's job is finished when s/he has conveyed all the information in the first sentence. The two then sit and illustrate that sentence.
Then, they switch jobs. The writer does the runner's job and the runner the writer's.
Any time the group had questions, they sent a runner to me. I sat in a centralized location so that
(a) the kids always knew where to find me and
(b) it never appeared that I was too busy to talk to them, because I was surrounded by a group.
When they finished, I checked their work for spelling, missing words, etc. The first group to get their work to have no errors at all got either a Jolly Rancher or two extra points. (you'd be shocked at how many wanted the jolly ranchers.)
Day 3
Day 1
We re-watched each of the clips, and I began to use the vocabulary in the types of sentences and sentence-strings in which they were going to see them in the original text.
The previous night, I had written three summaries: one of each video. I included statements in the summaries that were blatantly false, and others that could be interpreted as true or false, depending on how you read them. They are at school, but on Monday, I'll attach them here. I put one of them in large letters up on the screen (you could do this with a projector, a doc cam, or just by writing) and had the kids sit in pairs with one facing the summary and one facing away. The first student began to read, slowly, to the second student. When the reader read a lie, the second student pointed rudely (on instruction from me :D) and said, "Mentiris!" That student then had to provide the correct information. The reader then had to begin at the beginning of the sentence and read it correctly.
When I hit the bell, the two stood up and switched roles, whether they'd finished or not. They then began again at the start of the passage. It gives students who are struggling a little more with the listening to then have the chance to read the passage for themselves, and it provides repetition for both of them.
After they'd read the passage the second time through, I got up and read the passage, and they got to call me a liar. It meant that I heard various corrections for various errors, and the kids got to hear how other students interpreted various statements. Then we voted on which correction we liked. At the end, we all read the corrected one together. We got through two of the three.
Day 2
We did a running dictation of the third summary - Hocus Pocus. In pairs, student select a runner and a writer. I post the text down the hallway (I always post two copies in opposite directions so it doesn't get overly crowded in the hallway). The runner runs down the hall, memorizes everything they can in the first sentence, and brings that information back to the writer. The writer writes all of this. The runner's job is finished when s/he has conveyed all the information in the first sentence. The two then sit and illustrate that sentence.
Then, they switch jobs. The writer does the runner's job and the runner the writer's.
Any time the group had questions, they sent a runner to me. I sat in a centralized location so that
(a) the kids always knew where to find me and
(b) it never appeared that I was too busy to talk to them, because I was surrounded by a group.
When they finished, I checked their work for spelling, missing words, etc. The first group to get their work to have no errors at all got either a Jolly Rancher or two extra points. (you'd be shocked at how many wanted the jolly ranchers.)
Day 3
We read through the dictation together, and anyone who still had errors corrected them. We made sure everyone understood the whole thing. Then I gave them a quiz. They had two choices:
1. Find four false statements and write down the false information.
2. Find four false statements, and rewrite the sentence so that it's true (but not by just putting non).
If they chose the second, they got 1.5 points instead of just 1.
Day 4
I told them about Apuleius and Quintilian (Latine). We talked about where they were from - which meant discussing Carthage, directions, etc. briefly - and interesting stories. I explained to them what the story The Golden Ass is, because we're going to read selections from it later, and we talked about how Apuleius was accused of bewitching an old woman. We discussed the Apologia, what an apologia is, and how, precisely, he got into trouble. We acted out what Apuleius was accused of doing (bewitching an elderly wealthy woman so she'd marry him).
Then, I asked them to, with a partner, read the brief text from Apuleius' apology, out loud. Then we re-read it together and asked any questions. Then together in their partners, they - in their own words - made a list of the things that Apuleius felt the Romans felt defined a magician. I asked them whether what Apuelius had written in that sentence represented his opinion or peoples' opinions, and they felt, due to existimant, that he was representing others' opinions.
Then I asked them what was on their lists, and we made a collective class list of Apuleius' definitions of a magician. We then reread it and we asked the following questions:
1. Quis est?
2. Quid magus agit?
3. Quid ille pollet?
4. Quomodo?
5. Cur?
They said it helped them separate out the sentence and tell specifically what was going on.
Monday, we'll read Quintilian's version, and we'll make a Venn Diagram suggesting what Apuleius thinks, what Quintilian thinks, and where those overlap. Then, we will look at statements in partners or small groups and determine whether:
(a) fieri potest
(b) veri simile est
and
(c) patetne sententia?
Thursday, August 27, 2015
A unit in my classroom, part 2
All the stuff that we more or less pulled off in five days - and it did actually take a little longer than that, because on Friday, they'd earned lots of PAT, so we only had eight minutes of class - is easily stretchable into two weeks. In some of my upper level classes, it did take longer, and we just took our time with it and enjoyed ourselves.
Friday, the eight minutes of class essentially amounted to the weather and days of the week. After that we played Versipellis. I need to post on Versipellis, because it is the best game I know, and the kids are obsessed with it (credit to Keegan Potter for it). Friday, therefore, is not included in my plans, so day 5 is really day six...and actually is going to be day seven, and you'll see why below:
Friday, the eight minutes of class essentially amounted to the weather and days of the week. After that we played Versipellis. I need to post on Versipellis, because it is the best game I know, and the kids are obsessed with it (credit to Keegan Potter for it). Friday, therefore, is not included in my plans, so day 5 is really day six...and actually is going to be day seven, and you'll see why below:
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
What a unit looks like in my classroom, part 1
I've been asked to post some information about a Latin III/IV unit I'm doing right now, so here's what it looks like:
Last May, I asked my Latin II and III students to throw out some ideas of topics that interested them. They gave me a list of twenty-seven ranging from Roman-occupied Britain to fairy tales. Then they voted, we tallied the votes, and we ended up with:
magic
military
sports and games
mythology
fairy tales
Last May, I asked my Latin II and III students to throw out some ideas of topics that interested them. They gave me a list of twenty-seven ranging from Roman-occupied Britain to fairy tales. Then they voted, we tallied the votes, and we ended up with:
magic
military
sports and games
mythology
fairy tales
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Musical Chairs
No one is too old for musical chairs.
My Latin I students have recently acquired what feels to them (and probably is) like a huge amount of vocab, so what's been called for recently is (a) making sure they have it and (b) reviewing some more subtle stuff. I don't even teach numbers, for a couple reasons:
1. They come up all the time, so it sticks much better if we just use them whenever they're necessary.
2. They're just not all that interesting, so much better if we just use them whenever they're necessary. For example, when we learned pen, we also learned that there are a LOT of people in my fifth period who carry around an absurd number of pens. So we counted them all. One kid on a regular basis has 25 pens. Why? Don't know. But now the whole class knows something about her, and we can count to twenty-five.
Anyway, musical chairs.
I have a small collection of music in Latin, which I always play when we play musical chairs. We set up enough chairs in the classroom in a giant circle that everyone can have a chair and - here's the catch - never remove any of them. Each kid gets a little whiteboard, and I have them write the word on them rather than doing it myself. It gives them the exercise in writing in a safe way.
The students sit in a circle with their labeled whiteboards (today: volcano, stand up, chair, black, sit down, ceiling, bring, white, red, etc.). I begin the music. They walk in a circle. No one leaves the circle. However, when I turn off the music, they can sit in any chair they want - even if it's nowhere near them.
Then I go around the circle and ask each of them a question as they show their board. Today the questions were:
1. what does it mean?
2. show me (either literally or with hand signs)
3. how do you pronounce?
4. how do you spell?
5. how many letters are in?
Thus we practiced the vocab, the visual/kinesthetic association with it, asking questions, pronouncing while looking at a word, the alphabet, and numbers.
For upper levels, I also like use in a sentence, give a synonym/antonym, whom does this describe (in a text), etc.
If the kids get something wrong, we don't pull out a chair. That kid goes and sits either outside the circle or in the middle - depends on your class, because you really don't want to shame your kids - with a sheet of paper. On that paper, they keep track of all the words anyone misses, with the definition or answer to the question...until they can answer a question someone missed. I.e. if Thackeray misses quid significat vulcanus and Lucient (who is out) raises his hand and says, "Volcano!", Lucient will give his list to Thackeray, who will sit out/in the middle and continue the list, and Lucient will sit in Thackeray's seat.
My Latin I students have recently acquired what feels to them (and probably is) like a huge amount of vocab, so what's been called for recently is (a) making sure they have it and (b) reviewing some more subtle stuff. I don't even teach numbers, for a couple reasons:
1. They come up all the time, so it sticks much better if we just use them whenever they're necessary.
2. They're just not all that interesting, so much better if we just use them whenever they're necessary. For example, when we learned pen, we also learned that there are a LOT of people in my fifth period who carry around an absurd number of pens. So we counted them all. One kid on a regular basis has 25 pens. Why? Don't know. But now the whole class knows something about her, and we can count to twenty-five.
Anyway, musical chairs.
I have a small collection of music in Latin, which I always play when we play musical chairs. We set up enough chairs in the classroom in a giant circle that everyone can have a chair and - here's the catch - never remove any of them. Each kid gets a little whiteboard, and I have them write the word on them rather than doing it myself. It gives them the exercise in writing in a safe way.
The students sit in a circle with their labeled whiteboards (today: volcano, stand up, chair, black, sit down, ceiling, bring, white, red, etc.). I begin the music. They walk in a circle. No one leaves the circle. However, when I turn off the music, they can sit in any chair they want - even if it's nowhere near them.
Then I go around the circle and ask each of them a question as they show their board. Today the questions were:
1. what does it mean?
2. show me (either literally or with hand signs)
3. how do you pronounce?
4. how do you spell?
5. how many letters are in?
Thus we practiced the vocab, the visual/kinesthetic association with it, asking questions, pronouncing while looking at a word, the alphabet, and numbers.
For upper levels, I also like use in a sentence, give a synonym/antonym, whom does this describe (in a text), etc.
If the kids get something wrong, we don't pull out a chair. That kid goes and sits either outside the circle or in the middle - depends on your class, because you really don't want to shame your kids - with a sheet of paper. On that paper, they keep track of all the words anyone misses, with the definition or answer to the question...until they can answer a question someone missed. I.e. if Thackeray misses quid significat vulcanus and Lucient (who is out) raises his hand and says, "Volcano!", Lucient will give his list to Thackeray, who will sit out/in the middle and continue the list, and Lucient will sit in Thackeray's seat.
Saturday, August 22, 2015
'Data' tracker
This year, I gave my Latin I students a template that looked like this:
I've never been much of a numbers-minded kind of lady, but I do like to know where my students feel they are - which, to my mind, is frequently more important than where they actually are. My mother always used to say, "Arianne, it's not what you say, it's how you say it." For students, it often doesn't matter nearly as much what they know as how they feel. This template lets me see a few things:
1. how long it generally takes a class to get a certain piece of information comfortably. Some things take longer than others.
2. which things I'm teaching more and less effectively.
3. how my students feel about a topic, and what they want reinforced.
It also lets my students note, over time, their own progress. They forget, when they get really good at something or when it becomes natural to them and other stuff becomes the struggle, where they came from. As we do this over time, they get to watch themselves make progress, actively, and remember that at some point they didn't feel that way.
I collect it on Fridays, look through it, make any notes I need to make (e.g. first period can greet people but is having trouble with the weather), and then give it back on Monday. I don't grade it. It's for them. The last box we will fill out after we've moved on to something else, because then they've had time to digest and they're no longer in stress mode trying to internalize the information. It lets them - and me - see what they feel like when they've had a break from direct focus on something.
1. how long it generally takes a class to get a certain piece of information comfortably. Some things take longer than others.
2. which things I'm teaching more and less effectively.
3. how my students feel about a topic, and what they want reinforced.
It also lets my students note, over time, their own progress. They forget, when they get really good at something or when it becomes natural to them and other stuff becomes the struggle, where they came from. As we do this over time, they get to watch themselves make progress, actively, and remember that at some point they didn't feel that way.
I collect it on Fridays, look through it, make any notes I need to make (e.g. first period can greet people but is having trouble with the weather), and then give it back on Monday. I don't grade it. It's for them. The last box we will fill out after we've moved on to something else, because then they've had time to digest and they're no longer in stress mode trying to internalize the information. It lets them - and me - see what they feel like when they've had a break from direct focus on something.
Preferred Activity Time
This is something Bryce Hedstrom has talked about in great detail, and it actually comes from Fred Jones' book Tools for Teaching, which I highly recommend.
Preferred activity time is spent, as it sounds, doing activities your students prefer - but the catch is that they have to be activities you're happy to spend the time doing. I.e. they still need to have curricular value.
We manage our classrooms in a lot of ways - teaching our kids the daily routines so that you don't have to clean up your disaster of a classroom every day, because kids know where things go. Walking around your classroom while they're working to keep disruptions to a minimum. Individually speaking with kids who do cause disruptions. But so often we resort to punishment for behaviors contrary to what's expected. Why don't we reward them for behaviors we do want them to exhibit? Well, that can be hard. First, how do you reward them? Second, how do you choose which behaviors those are? You can't look at at kid and say, "I'm so proud of you for not throwing that pencil at Jasper today!" Who does that? So you identify the most important and most time-saving things, and you work with those. Here's how my kids earn preferred activity time:
1. If they're all in their seats when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
2. If they're all silent when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
3. For every three minutes the upper levels spend in the target language, they earn one minute of PAT. For the first years, we begin with every minute gets them a minute.
4. When they hustle, they get time. For example, I gave them three minutes to set up the chairs in pairs the other day. They used 48 seconds of that. The remaining 2 minutes and 12 seconds were added to their PAT.
They lose time when they choose to waste time. If it had taken, for example, 3 minutes and 15 seconds (which would have been egregiously unnecessary) to set up the chairs, they would have lost 15 seconds. If they choose to use time exhibiting inappropriate behaviors - we're telling a story, and they choose to constantly hold side conversations - they lose the amount of time they spend doing that, until they've done it three times. When it's happened three times, we take a different tack called omission training, and for that I refer you to Mr Jones, whose book is spectacular.
Imagine my second period has earned 29 minutes and 18 seconds. 30 minutes before the end of class (this gives us about a minute of buffer to set the classroom back up if necessary and follow leaving procedures) on Friday, we stop and select a game. These are games I offer them, so all of them are to my liking. None of them will waste time, and I'm happy to relinquish those thirty minutes to playing those games. We then spend the remainder of the class playing that game, and whatever didn't get done on the other portion of Friday will get finished Monday.
When they earn an entire class period - this is cumulative. Two weeks ago, they earned 27 minutes. I put this in my spreadsheet, and then I added the 31 minutes from this week. They've now got more than a class period in saved up time - we will spend it celebrating Kindergarten Day on the closest Monday. On Kindergarten Day, they can bring snugglies, we sit on the floor, if they want to bring a mug, they can use my electric kettle for hot water and can make tea or hot chocolate, and I will spend the period reading them a story in the target language. They love this because they feel like they're doing no work when in fact they're doing the best kind of work - being totally relaxed, utterly safe, and getting nothing but input.
(we're doing this Monday. we're reading Doomsday in Pompeii because it is Volcano Day - August 24th. Doomsday in Pompeii is a book in English, so although I will be looking at English words, I will read aloud in Latin. I am spending part of this weekend translating about 2 more pages than I think I'm actually going to need and taping over the English so it's not quite as stressful for me Monday. normally I'd read a book in Latin, but I don't have any kids' books in Latin about volcanoes. yet.)
Preferred activity time is spent, as it sounds, doing activities your students prefer - but the catch is that they have to be activities you're happy to spend the time doing. I.e. they still need to have curricular value.
We manage our classrooms in a lot of ways - teaching our kids the daily routines so that you don't have to clean up your disaster of a classroom every day, because kids know where things go. Walking around your classroom while they're working to keep disruptions to a minimum. Individually speaking with kids who do cause disruptions. But so often we resort to punishment for behaviors contrary to what's expected. Why don't we reward them for behaviors we do want them to exhibit? Well, that can be hard. First, how do you reward them? Second, how do you choose which behaviors those are? You can't look at at kid and say, "I'm so proud of you for not throwing that pencil at Jasper today!" Who does that? So you identify the most important and most time-saving things, and you work with those. Here's how my kids earn preferred activity time:
1. If they're all in their seats when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
2. If they're all silent when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
3. For every three minutes the upper levels spend in the target language, they earn one minute of PAT. For the first years, we begin with every minute gets them a minute.
4. When they hustle, they get time. For example, I gave them three minutes to set up the chairs in pairs the other day. They used 48 seconds of that. The remaining 2 minutes and 12 seconds were added to their PAT.
They lose time when they choose to waste time. If it had taken, for example, 3 minutes and 15 seconds (which would have been egregiously unnecessary) to set up the chairs, they would have lost 15 seconds. If they choose to use time exhibiting inappropriate behaviors - we're telling a story, and they choose to constantly hold side conversations - they lose the amount of time they spend doing that, until they've done it three times. When it's happened three times, we take a different tack called omission training, and for that I refer you to Mr Jones, whose book is spectacular.
Imagine my second period has earned 29 minutes and 18 seconds. 30 minutes before the end of class (this gives us about a minute of buffer to set the classroom back up if necessary and follow leaving procedures) on Friday, we stop and select a game. These are games I offer them, so all of them are to my liking. None of them will waste time, and I'm happy to relinquish those thirty minutes to playing those games. We then spend the remainder of the class playing that game, and whatever didn't get done on the other portion of Friday will get finished Monday.
When they earn an entire class period - this is cumulative. Two weeks ago, they earned 27 minutes. I put this in my spreadsheet, and then I added the 31 minutes from this week. They've now got more than a class period in saved up time - we will spend it celebrating Kindergarten Day on the closest Monday. On Kindergarten Day, they can bring snugglies, we sit on the floor, if they want to bring a mug, they can use my electric kettle for hot water and can make tea or hot chocolate, and I will spend the period reading them a story in the target language. They love this because they feel like they're doing no work when in fact they're doing the best kind of work - being totally relaxed, utterly safe, and getting nothing but input.
(we're doing this Monday. we're reading Doomsday in Pompeii because it is Volcano Day - August 24th. Doomsday in Pompeii is a book in English, so although I will be looking at English words, I will read aloud in Latin. I am spending part of this weekend translating about 2 more pages than I think I'm actually going to need and taping over the English so it's not quite as stressful for me Monday. normally I'd read a book in Latin, but I don't have any kids' books in Latin about volcanoes. yet.)
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Summaries and lies
My upper levels have been learning about magic recently. I love teaching with video clips, since (I'm referencing the delightful and amazing Evan Smith here) visual vocabularies are indispensable. The more we can provide kids with a visual representation of information, the better a handle on it they'll have. So I've shown them three video clips:
-Mickey Mouse from Fantasia, stealing the magician's hat and making the broom do all the work
-David Blaine doing card tricks for Harrison Ford and getting summarily ejected from his house (I highly recommend you google Real or Magic Harrison Ford David Blaine, and then, if you're going to show it to your students, stop it before Indy drops the F bomb)
-The great scene from Hocus Pocus when the witches turn Thackeray Binks into a cat so he can live forever with his guilt (wonderful opportunity to teach the kids pedicis aeternis - in eternal chains - if you've been looking for one of those :D)
-Mickey Mouse from Fantasia, stealing the magician's hat and making the broom do all the work
-David Blaine doing card tricks for Harrison Ford and getting summarily ejected from his house (I highly recommend you google Real or Magic Harrison Ford David Blaine, and then, if you're going to show it to your students, stop it before Indy drops the F bomb)
-The great scene from Hocus Pocus when the witches turn Thackeray Binks into a cat so he can live forever with his guilt (wonderful opportunity to teach the kids pedicis aeternis - in eternal chains - if you've been looking for one of those :D)
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
fREADom
I gave a presentation this morning on reading and reading skills. Below please see links to the dropbox location of both the PowerPoint and some notes to hopefully help it make sense. :)
Powerpoint
Notes
Powerpoint
Notes
Putting together my classroom
This is one of my bookshelves. I'm working on installing rain gutter on my cork board as well. Both of these things allow me to display my books cover-out. Studies indicate that kids are more likely to want to read if they can see the covers of the books, so I have displayed my books that (a) are light enough to put in this and (b) have interesting covers. Those that don't have interesting covers or are too heavy (or don't have pictures in them) are displayed on this bookshelf:
This bookshelf is painted so that it's graded by level. Blue is beginner, red is intermediate (which is a HUGE range), and yellow is advanced. The top shelf is for dictionaries and songbooks.
This is my board. The center is for use, the left is for club info, and the right is for weather. Posted along the board are my question words. Each poster has the word, colored, in huge font (at least 90 pt), the word in English smaller in a less interesting color, and pictures that you could associate with the word. I add words as my kids ask me to, but right now, they are to where, from where, where, when, what time, to whom, who, what, whom, whose, where, what kind, how many, why, how. I may have forgotten a couple.
This is my costume corner. I have a massive collection of stuffed animals hung on chains, which are attached to the wall using massive command hooks. (all these are findable on amazon) All my fruit and small plastic toys are in the hanging blue and maroon boxes, which I got at Home Depot. I sewed a piece of fabric to the back and slid them through a dowel rod, which I put on the wall using massive command hooks. There is a smaller hook with fly swatters on. On the table, there is a football helmet that doesn't fit in a box, and a box of cool and intriguing props (ranging from cat toys to I don't even know what). Underneath the table there are milk crates that are zip-tied together. Each is labeled, in Latin and English, with the type of clothing in it. To the left there is a hat box (hats are very important to my students. this also includes wigs and beards). Behind the arch (which represents all buildings all the time), there is a giant urn I got for twelve dollars that contains my foam swords. Above all of that, there's a green do you understand? poster, and it shows them how many fingers to hold up depending on how much they understand.
These are my file cabinets. The left hand one is my teaching materials - glitter, ribbons, extra paper, printer paper, classroom decorations, paint, etc. The chest of drawers is paper plates, miscellaneous paper, club files, cleaning supplies, etc. The right hand is the art buckets. You can see art buckets on top of it. I got the buckets, as well as the jackets around/in them, also at Home Depot (pretty cheaply). There are nine (enough for each group of four to have a bucket), and each has markers, scissors, colorful paper, sharpies, glue sticks, colored pencils, etc. The green drawers on the right hold my socks (so we can erase white boards), mini white boards, markers, games (like story cubes and Jenga). The tall tubes of colored paper are in a cheap folding laundry bin I got from Target for five dollars years ago. This way, I always have butcher paper, and they have a place to turn butcher paper projects in.
This is my idiom wall. I have found, especially in reading, that having knowledge and comfortable use of idiom is unbelievably helpful. Each week, each class chooses one, and I put it on the board. Every time someone uses it correctly, they get a piece of candy. I add idioms throughout the year, so the wall never gets stale.
This is my weather board. I include the day of the week, the time of year, and the weather itself. We do the weather daily at the beginning of class. It allows us to practice all three tenses (yesterday was, today is, tomorrow will be...), and we get used to questioning, and we get some basic idiomatic vocabulary in. I made all of these in Word and laminated them at the school, and then I stuck magnet tape on the back. You may note that I have two the moon is shining. There is no good reason for that.
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