Minecraft in my lessons before the course

My Minecraft adventure started years ago when some of my students spoke so much and passionately about this game. Honestly I thought it was a strategic game of some sort of a not-for-middle-aged-female-teacher sort of game like WoT of WoW or ... you know, that kind. I had no idea about a game, the only thing  I remember is their obsession with it.

Then I had this student one summer (one-to-one), whom I asked if she had ever played Minecraft. She showed me marvellous glass castles and a hotel she had built with her friends. I was amazed at her creativity and the amount of work she had invested in it.

It was Filip and Marijana’s #RSCON5 webinar that convinced me to buy a MC Pocket Edition.

I immediately saw some potential in it, I thought it could be used in reading and listening comprehension tasks (I dictate or write down what kind of house or farm learners have to make) and well, that was all I could think of back then.

As it turned out, there was far more in it.

Speaking of engagement, you don’t even need the game to be present in the lesson. Just say “creeper”, “enderman” of “Minecraft”, and tadamm, like a magic spell! Ice is broken, doors open, walls fall down. You gain credentials instantly in the eyes of your students, you get immediate respect and just everything smoothens. It was clear when I taught those two boys (12 and 13) who had English lessons with me in their summer holiday (a month with their granny in my small town), and they didn’t mind the 8 am (!!!!!!!) lessons, their little brothers also claimed their own English lessons, they booked me for next summer and I had lessons with them in the autumn holiday and right after Christmas.

I’m lucky with my clientele of mostly one-to-one learners, I can just hand them over the device for, let’s say five minutes (one ninth of a 45-min lesson, mind you), and see what happens.

Some types of activities I have been using:

Minecraft dictation

This is the simplest ever picture dictation kind of activity.

I make a short video I start like this: “I have a mission for you.” Then I explain the mission to build a particular object.

Why do I use a video and not tell them what to build just face to face? One reason is that they take it more seriously. (Sad but true.) They concentrate better, it’s something of more importance :)  Also when giving instructions in real life, they tend to clarify meaning by asking back in Hungarian right at the moment they don’t understand something, without trying to make the effort. I’m really bad at handling this. As for the video, they can start and stop it, they do make the effort and I see better what are the things I do have to explain (word meanings, etc.) and what are others that they can figure out by themselves.

Originally I wanted it to be a reading task but that girl was just too little to read :)

The same can be done with written instructions.

The whole thing may be homework if the parents are minecraft-friendly.

The mission:

The product:

10min rounds

There was this boy (13) who needed help with his school English. All we had to do was to do the exercises in the workbook again. To tell you the truth .... these exercises make me sick. I know they are necessary, but in this form ......... today’s kids have difficulty doing them, they can’t concentrate (no wonder, the exercises are boring as hell), they have no idea of the meaning of the sentences, they just write something really sluggishly... and that’s all. I see no point in it.

But still, we had to go through them.

So this was the deal:

We divided the lesson into 10 min. periods. Each period started with doing one or two of those exercises (paper, pencil). Once they were completed perfectly, he was allowed to play Minecraft for the rest of the 10-minute period.

During his play (in the remaining some minutes) I was narrating what he was doing in Minecraft (so that he might acquire some language), I was also taking notes.

We did it in rounds in his lessons.

I prepared a very simple written text from my notes about what he did, what he built, what mobs and animals he met, then we used it in the next lesson for a slight language work. (I hid info that was not true, I made gapped texts, I jumbled the word order or the words of some lessons, etc.)
Our subject did the exercises surprisingly quickly and accurately so that he could get back to the game. The follow-up exercise worked well too.

Just play for 15 minutes

This is the least structured and well-planned, high on DOGME one.

We agree on a time (15 minutes maximum), set the downtimer and let the student just play Minecraft.

I take notes and create a text as they play. Then this text is available for a range of things again: gapped text, banked cloze, read and draw, guess the meaning of words, with beginner readers (1st graders) follow the text and draw a tally when I beep (they find it hilarious), jigsaw reading, etc.

In a 1-2-1 lesson it is really easy to do, the (emergent) language-based exercises can as well be prepared for the following lesson.

Minecraft culture

The internet is packed with Minecraft anything. Minecraft is a subculture, so you can  search Google for the most unusual sounding search words like Minecraft sandwich, Minecraft grandmother, Minecraft unicorn, there’s an endless list of the most mind-blowing things. Some things are not appropriate for all age groups though.

Minecraft has legends that fascinate kids a lot. Do you know the story of Herobrine, for example? There are several videos about it.

Here’s one, it can be narrated for example:








There are Minecraft songs. How about a love song parody?





There are all sorts of parodies. Once I used the first part of this one with a beginner, he had to order flashcards with words and short phrases from the video.

3D to 2D

Once i had this idea to build something in 3D and then to translate it into Minecraft. We built a pine tree with sugar cubes first.

I used it with a 7-year-old girl once and then with a 8-year old, it didn’t really work the task was too difficult and they were rather focused on trying to eat some of the 3 D blocks.

Creating videos

Once one of my MC tutors (a 5th grader) showed me a screen video recorder and we started to create screen videos. He surprised me a lot. I swear I never explicitly taught him “was” or the Past Tense, I always used a lot of input thought, but I had no idea he was able to produce so much English as he did in those videos.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4morczbyyme0xwz/bandicam%202014-11-27%2018-59-42-356.avi?dl=0

Directions

When I was shown multiplayer, i immediately showed it to my next MC minded student. Guess what, we lost each other this gave me the idea to use Minecraft to use directions. I simply built roads. This project hasn't been exploited yet ;)

And the course #evomc15 has just started!

Looking forward to what is coming!

I cannot be a Nobel laureate

I (Barbi) will be a Nobel laureate

I (Barbi) will get married

What are the odds?

If you’re asking me, the same. The very same probability, yes.

In the morning, after very short hours of sleep (due to some prolonged stay in the company of friends, absorbing beers and emitting laughter)  I woke up grumpy, fed up with Facebook messages from males, saying basically nothing but paying too much attention to my eyes and smile. Plus the ads on the right too often offer me online dating sites, which is a nuisance if people in your immediate surroundings keep bugging you with the "do you date anyone?" and the "when are you planning babies?" questions.  The "I'm fine, thanks" reply doesn't seem appropriate, women my age without a family are just unusual. (Irregular, the wording borrowed from my dear Sasha :)))

Okay, so I hit my FB profile page and thought I'd change my relationship status now and it would be fiiiiiiiine. What I wasn't sufficiently cautious about was the appearance of that reeeeaaaally huge timeline banner, the giant letters saying I had a life event: got married!

I went to give my granny her pills, returned to find 'like' notifications. Oooops, I tried to explain, but the growth of the long thread of comments had slipped out of control by then. And honestly, I didn't want to delete the update any more. You know that cllective-collaborative humour of Facebook comments:)

I went for a run, arrived home to find the amazing evolution of the thing. Went to the beach to read a book, checked my notifications, laughed, had a bike ride in the sun, worked, checked my notifications, laughed and felt guilty at the same time, so many people congratulated on my 'big day', gave my granny her second portion of the medication, went to the shop, checked FB, laughed, did some work, made food, checked grandma, checked FB, laughed, felt guilty, etc. I had a great day!

Also, I had a touch of bitterness over how little engagement I can stir with articles I (used to) share every day, and what a buzz my fake marriage had created. And my earlier heartache is the fact/my perception that I'm more FB famous for my cheese addiction, anti-cat spirits and further miscellaneous nonsense than serious stuff I share or write.
(You might say what I share is not so intriguing. Is my alleged wedding?? :D)

When giving my grandma her dinner time pills I knew I was lost... (She would be thrilled I'd marry ANYONE.)

What's wrong here? Me? Social media rotten to the core? People?

Are the following conclusions true?

• People pay more attention to large print.
• People are very nice and overrate weddings. (Personally, my divorce was one of my greatest achievements, only two people praised my courage...)
• Béla is much more of a joker than I've ever thought.
• People hit the ‘like’ button more eagerly if it seems something socially acceptable personal
• I underrate engagement with serious stuff
• People love getting married
• I overrate comment threads
• People don’t read entire comment threads
• Certain updates can filter your friends

Anyone any experience or thoughts to enlighten me?

Santa... or who's supernatural?

Once upon a time there was a little girl aged 5, who went to see Santa in her dad's office to sing songs to him with the other kids, to collect the sweets, and to learn if she'd been naughty or nice.

These workplace Santa parties usually mean Santa interviewing the children and evaluating their niceness or naughtiness. Our little girl is not one of those shy children who may even cry when interrogated by the old, sweaty fellow in his rather clumsy red coat in a heated room. So she was brief:

"And guess what Santa, once in the summer when my mum and I were making langos (Hungarian dish), I told mum I wanted to have English lessons and I have been a nice child since my English lessons started."

Yep, and I've been a much better teacher since then, being the lucky one chosen from all the teachers in town to teach her.

I like that 

girl a lot.

If we were the same age, I would surely be her keen follower in the kindergarten group and we would get nothing from Santa, we'd be terribly naughty!

Ocean in the living room

Now that I'm 34 years older, this is quite a different story of hardcore unplugged lessons, which are more like a soap opera than a course.

We do whatever comes up, from creating stories to composing music in GarageBand, we turn the sofa cover into an ocean simulator, we search the internet for stuff. Most recently we are in the longish process of making a paper haunted house.

She has a blog where I store the products we create and all kinds of videos and links that have anything to do with our lessons, her mum is very conscious about using it regularly, so I'm proud to say she DOES make remarkable progress.

The abandoned house next door

She is 6 now and she looooves spooky things! It was around Halloween last year that I showed her a game on the British Council Kids website. God knows how, she remembered the word 'haunted house'.

Part of the story is the house next to ours, which has been abandoned for over ten years now. It was built about a century ago, so it makes a great Halloween decoration, most of my students are pretty excited about it, it has triggered many many projects and conversations.

Last Halloween we were looking at the usual scary Halloween stuff when I pointed to the house and said "it's a haunted house!"

Then it began, soon we found ourselves making a haunted house of paper and whatever we have, dead spiders and Christmas candy wrap included.

Motörhead, hell....

However, this is not what I want to write about, it's the Internet.

When we do some craft and spend some minutes in silence, I feel a bit guilty of not constantly pouring comprehensible input on her, so I usually try to find a kids' song that matches our activity on YouTube (from scratch), this little girl doesn't always like kids'  songs (neither do I) and considers them babyish (so do I) and then she asks me "Barbi, do you have... on your tablet?" The "... " is always very surprising, my student's dad likes rock and heavy metal music, he listens to it on his phone and in the car. Well,  this is why we ended up with listening to a Motörhead album on YouTube while covering the roof of the house with old leaves the other day...

Also, when she has a suggestion of what to put in the house, I often google it, trying to find the origami version of anything (we always have paper at home) or other craft solution, and we solve a lot of problems in this way. Now she has the habit of telling me what to type in my tablet or laptop, to find this or that. She doesn't really know how the internet works and she can't write, but she knows that it is something that helps us a lot.

Spiral stairs

Last week I wanted to make egg carton bird masks, but our rocker girl opted for using the egg carton to add a tower to the house. Cool! Initiatives are always welcome! So we made the tower and then she said we'd need a flight of spiral stairs and she imagined what it would have been like to walk on the stairs in the darkness and spiders everywhere and.... And then she stopped.... , as she tried to plan how we will solve this..., then looked at me and then the tablet, and I knew what she wanted. I said yes, I'd type 'origami spiral stairs' in my tablet. Of course we didn't get a specific origami staircase, but after looking through some pages I knew how we would do it, prepared the paper and handed it over to her to finish. She was thrilled! Then she paused and looked at me again, that slow moment... 

And then she asked me: "Can you do anything? Anything you want?"

...

You know, I said yes. That moment I felt I could do anything.

If there is a want, if we can work together, if we are connected to the internet (= the whole world), we can find the origami version of anything, not only that, we just imagine the things that can go in that little house and we can make it real.

How does she imagine these things? My tablet and my computer may seem to be magic machines, I can type things in them and I can conjure her daddy's favorite songs, I can find the solution to our construction problems, I can find songs and games about any animal.

Can you feel what I felt there?

...

Come at me Santa! We are naughty and nice!

Tagged for Christmas

I was down with some flu-like disease, sleeping and blowing my nose for a couple of days, to (partly) get better to a wonderful Christmas Eve: I’d been tagged. Four times :)))

Thanks Ratnavathy, Ika, Alexandra and Debbie :)

Now I’m doing as seen on Rose Bard’s blog, now I’m posting just the facts, the questions and answers later. (And obviously I won’t be able to tag anyone who hasn’t been tagged, so I guess I will be a dead end of the tag, sorry :( Still have no voice and feeling terribly weak, by the time I’m fine it will all have gone, the game I mean...)

11 Random facts about me

1 I’m an only child and lost most of my family.

2 Adversities taught me to be an optimist, there seems to be no other way.

3 As a child I was sure I wouldn't ever become a teacher.  I wanted to be a guitarist. (I was a really bad one and female = low self esteem.)

4 I don’t eat meat but fish. (And cheese.)

5 When I have a fever, I laugh at everything.

6 I’m a time-management disaster.

7 I made my own wedding dress (this is NOT why I divorced).

8 When I was a little kid, sometimes my dad told me nonsense bedtime stories. I laughed myself to sleep.

9 I’m still petrified in a school building: teacher’s desks, boards, classrooms give me the fright, I’m scared of fellow teachers too if they are not my ex-classmates. I feel really uncomfy when I’m a school teacher every now and then.

10 I learned to ride a bike no hands when I was 32.

11 I don’t have a TV or a Christmas tree.

My answers to

Ratnavathy Ragunathan-Chandrasegaran Alexandra Chistyakova Ika Chieka Wibowo Débora Tebovich

To the adult beginner thing

My previous post had been written before a first lesson with an adult beginner (who finally decided to have lessons alone, supposing he was not good/fast enough to couple up with someone who might be more proficient and a better learner (?).

What I had expected turned out to be true. The phase when I try to find out of the learners aims, language learning history, somewhat of learning styles or attitudes and the length of time they can devote to learning English a day was 45 minutes!

Why?
Do you know why? It was all self-criticism, he told me repeatedly how slow he was, how old his brain was at his age (born in the same year as me, dammit!), how much worse men are at learning languages and what an anti-talent he was. Should I re-think my ambiguity tolerance mania and pushing learners out of their comfort zone project?

Good start:/

 Ban schools! Or someone please tell all the teachers that making sweeping judgements about their students abilities may turn into to self-fulfilling prophecies, hence this is NOT a valid tool!! Grrrr!!!

I believe in life on Mars but nay the existence of the zero beginner EFL adult learner

If I were told to play the part of a first lesson adult learner on the stage of an improvisation theatre, I would be sitting in the limelight, saying very bravely:

“I am a total beginner, I have never learned English ... OK, I’ve been taught hahaha ... but my knowledge of the English language is zero ... and I want to start the whole thing from the start line, teach me as if I were a kindergartener ... especially focus on grammar ... I want to start with a clean sheet ... and what book should I buy?”

I rather believe in life on Mars. And I believe there are false beliefs about language learning. It took me long years to recognize that I have two options as an English teacher:

• play the role of the big white magician who knows the secret, does the mambo jumbo, takes revenge on the homework-non-doers
• train learners how to learn and share responsibility

I’m not a good actress, opt for the second one and make sure I take the following precautions :

I usually explain the difference between skill and knowledge. 

I draw the attention to the fact that the (here) so popular grammar-translation method (which they were most probably exposed to as kids) is the one that has proven to be inefficient forthem. I try to convince them that in spite of their memories of the 5th grade Russian teacher this is not necessarily the way to learn English this time.

Typically they agree with me, very happy, enjoy the lesson without the book, but soon the regression comes along: they want a book, they want a text, they want to read and translate it sentence by sentence. Bummer!!

Ok, this is not typical, this is the extreme, but it’s still in the air.

If a student who has just decided to start learning English (again) insists on the clean sheet idea (stupid stage image above), I (pretend to) accept that. But also tell them that they are about to unlearn things that they already know, which requires more effort than making use of them.

Another thing to mention is my view that it is not the lesson where the majority of learning takes place. Somehow I’d like to show them that the ownership over their own learning is a great thing, it is simply a good feeling, rather than a weighty responsibility.

Years have shown that merely sharing my experience about language learning with students is not enough. I’m trying hard to find or device activities to make them feel how it works the more fun and efficient way.

Some rough plans for a first lesson, primarily aiming to bust the clean sheet myth:

Signs

As I  live in a tourist place, many of the signs are written in English.

I spent 15 minutes walking around and taking photos and I made some clippings (http://pic-collage.com/). The game is to guess where the photos were taken. Apart from proving that my learners do know some English, it is a chance for them to pick up names of places, learn or revise prepositions. (I bet they are false beginners :))

The second photo will reveal the places and you never know what else emerges.

Songs

Nearly everyone is exposed to pop music in English and nearly everyone has been a teenager with even more extensive exposure to pop music in English.  

Song lyrics are somewhere in our brains, so let’s get them out. The magic words are “doodle music videos”:

The task here is to collect language from the videos. Watch the videos twice and take notes of language that you understand. Then swap notes, discuss.

TV

This is not to show how much they already know, rather a link to the English speaking world. 

Soap operas and sitcoms are language acquisition boosters, that’s pretty well known. However many learners don’t watch them in English, they find them too fast, too difficult, they feel uneasy when they don’t understand every single word. Or they just don’t like them :))) But those who do usually attribute a huge part of their development to TV shows.

Extra English is a great bait, a sitcom designed for language learners, someone uploaded countless episodes on YouTube :O. I hope my new students will somehow get hooked on the genre by this.

First lesson first homework: watch the first episode and see if you want to watch the others.

If it should turn out to be unpopular, Peppa Pig is still at hand!

Cognates

Any language is a window to another language, L1 as well as a known foreign language. Many people use German here, a knowledge of it may be of some help.http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Transwiki:List_of_German_cognates_with_English

Another piece of homework: choose minimum 7 words worth remembering, check their pronunciation on translate.google.com and see how cool you are with so much you already know in English.

Student Appreciation Week? Hmmm? Hö?

Student Appreciation Week