The focus of this week's lesson was the use of prepositions. Something that comes very naturally and is essential in the Minecraft world. Before we got in game we went through prepositions one by one and then we practised building simple objects with Lego. This prepared students for using prepositions in the game.
I built a world for students to work in pairs where the activity required them to explain to their partner how to construct increasingly complex shapes out of various wool blocks. The final task had students working pairs to build a house together. Students paired up, logged in, and went to their relevant station.
Students were also told today about their test that they will be having at the end of the semester. The test will be comprised of two parts. The first part they will have to tell a native speaker how to build an object, and the second part of the test, the native speaker will tell them how to build an object. Students will be graded on how well they build each object, or in other words: how well they were able to communicate their ideas in English.
Just a few pics of my fourth 'Mining English' class.
Today students completed an information gap exercise which had them explaining to a partner how to craft certain objects (with reference to the Minecraft wiki of course).
So, the time has come. Last week our brave heroes set out to kit themselves out in the best gear, sharpened their axes, restrung their bows and filled their inventories with maester's potions and foods. Today is the day they put their strategies to the test as they face off against the other groups in a one on one battle to the death!
Well, maybe not that dramatic, but still, there was a lot of tensions in the class today as groups were paired up for their tabletop style RPG battle against other groups. Below describes how I went about teaching this lesson.
1. Show them the battle video
This serves two purposes, one is to refresh their memories of the battle system, the other is for them to mine it for vocabulary and phrases to use themselves when they do their own battles. Students are thus told to take notes as they watch the video and then compare their notes with their group members afterwards. Once they have done this, I had students come up to the whiteboard to write down anything that they heard as me and my colleague played. The board then acts as a cheat sheet for when students do their own battles, allowing them to refer to it when they can't think of what to say.
The rules of the battle state that once a character has been reduced to zero armor, they must answer a question. If the group answers the question correctly, they do not lose a life and can continue. However, if they answer a question incorrectly, they lose a life. Once a group has lost three lives, they have lost. At this point then, I had students think of questions to put to their opponents. I created 10 sample questions for each group to show what kind of questions were considered suitable and as a model. Below are a few of my sample questions.
Question 1
What is the capital of Scotland?
London
Edinburgh
Florence
Dublin
Question 2
What is the largest continent in the world?
Asia
North America
Europe
Africa
Question 3
What is the highest mountain on earth?
Mt. Fuji
Mt. McKinley
Mt. Everest
Mt. Ararat
Question 4
If a woman gives birth to triplets, how many babies does she have?
1
2
3
4
Students thought up similar question based on their major, the presentation they had given a few weeks before, and other general knowledge subjects such as capital cities and animals etc.
3. Battle Time!
Following this, the groups were paired up and put to battle. They were instructed that they were to speak to the other group in English only. If they spoke Japanese to their opponents, their turn was over. I did however allow some Japanese during within-group strategic speech. Below are some pictures of the battles.
One thing that could be improved with this activity is moving the question making activity out of the classroom time and getting students to do this for homework. The reason is that some groups didn't make a lot of questions and actually ran out of questions to ask their opponents. This led to them trying to make up questions on the spot which made the battle drag on and become uninteresting.
So, for the final class which has not done this activity yet, I have told them that if they run out of questions during the battle stage, they will have to forfeit the game. This class has also been instructed to make five questions each (20~25 per group) at home before they come to class next week (the battle lesson for this class). I'm hoping this should keep the action high and as a result, games possibly finishing quicker. If this happens, I would like to run the battles in a tournament style where we can see which group is the strongest! Of course, they will be the strongest based on their character development, strategy and general knowledge!
I had to teach a shopping lesson this week, and, not having a great time with it was last year, I decided to make things a little bit more interesting. My idea was to play a kind of tabletop RPG with the students, where they would kit out a character with armour, weapons, food and potions and then pit them against each other the following week.
Discucssing the idea with my colleague, he seemed really interested too, so we started sketching out simple rules such as how much damage each weapon would do, how much defense each piece of item would give etc. After rehearsing it a few times ourselves, we finally came up with a system that seemed fair and would allow students to customise their characters so that groups wouldn't all buy exactly the same stuff.
1. Watch the presentation
Here is the presentation that I showed the students at the start of the "shopping class".
Not all of the rules are included on purpose: so that the students have to ask. Another point is that in the above presentation my colleague (and my) face appear. In the actual presentation, these are videos explaining how to use the different weapons.
Another thing which is not explained is: "How do we win?"
Well, once a characters armour has been reduced to 0, that group have to answer a question. If they get it correct, they don't lose a life, but if they get it wrong, they lose one of their three lives: ♡♥♥. This continues until they lose all three of their lives. As for the questions they have to answer... they will be decided by each group individually and should have something to do with their classes major.
2. Decide as a group which weapon you want to buy
After watching the presentation I handed out a "shop" worksheet to each group in the class and told them to keep their items a secret (so that students would have to ask what each shop is selling and how much items cost). I also handed each group their character worksheet that appears in the above presentation.
At this point, I was asked a number of questions. Some of the most common ones are:
Can I use a potion and attack in one go? (NO!)
Do I have to buy armour for all body parts? (YES!)
If I don't have an anti-freeze potion, what happens? (You have to roll a six on the dice to become unfrozen)
3. Do the shopping activity
Students complete the shopping activity which has been explained to them through the presentation.
4. Introduce your character
Groups take it in turn to introduce their characters name and the weapon (s)he will use. Nothing else. The rest is a secret for next weeks BATTLE activity.
って言う事で、I'll be back soon with a review of the battle lesson.
In reply to a number of requests, this post outlines our methodology behind getting our students to create and upload rage comics to reddit.
First Lesson
The first lesson is a general introduction to the vocabulary for emotions in English. At the end of the lesson, students are introduced to popular Internet memes known as rage faces and are asked to guess what emotion they are portraying.
Below are the slides we used as part of the lesson.
The emoticons on the board were drawn by students as they introduced their own favourites. We then looked at what emotion they represent. This was done as a segue into what the rage faces are used for - expressing emotion in a domain void of facial expressions (the Internet, text messages etc.).
Second Lesson
In this lesson we went over the phenomenon of "trolling" and helped the students register on reddit, create their comics with ragemaker.net and then upload their completed comics to reddit.
Below are the slides we used as part of the lesson:
Because students were all submitting their comics from the same room (hence the same IP address) I had an issue with submitting comics where reddit would say, "you are doing that too much, try again in 10 minutes." Which meant that students could only submit their comics once every 10 minutes. A massive delay! To remedy this problem, you should input all students usernames on your subreddit as approved submitters. The link is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/about/contributors/
Students should be advised that the content on reddit (especially rage comics) often contain inappropriate material or themes for school settings. We therefore recommend carrying out such lessons with mature students. In our particular context, all students were 18+.
Adding flair after students names helps the reddit community know who is or is not a student.
Because anyone can post anything on reddit, we recommend monitoring the comments that students receive on their comics, looking out for anything inappropriate or insulting. (We found that the community reported such comments in a lot of cases, too.)
As a follow up lesson, we recommend having students reply to any comments they received, comparing their upvote scores, commenting on new comics and participating in English with the community you have created (= interacting with other English speakers).
If you want to add your comics to EFLcomics, let me or Scott (sukosuti) know what the students reddit usernames are, and we will add them to the approved submitters list and also add flair. Alternatively, we can add you as a moderator and you can moderate your own students.
My students are really getting into making rage comics. Here are the best two for this week. The number one comic was made by a student in her free time. She said: "Because it was very interesting class, I enjoyed it in the house (sic)."
This term students were asked to do some 'quick writing' at home which are similar to Murphey's Action Logs.
Students basically have five minutes to write about (reflect on) what they did during the lesson. They are told to write any new words or grammar they encountered too.
The things that students write are also very helpful to me as it shows what worked/didn't work in the class.
