Great ways to say goodbye to children!

Teaching English to children with puppets!

Today I am talking about one of my passions: puppeteering. 


I have noticed that many language teachers do not use puppets frequently in their classes. I believe this    
 might be because they are afraid of using puppets, don't know what exactly they can do with them, or might think their students would not engage in the proposed activities. I believe everybody can use puppets with some practice. Here I share some hints on how you can bring life to your puppets! 


Remember that puppeteering is an art and there isn't a right way to do it. 
I'm just sharing some hints  that have worked for me in my classes with both children and adults. 


But before that, a little Wikipedia moment: 

Puppetry is a form of theatre or performance which involves the manipulation of puppets. It is very ancient, and is believed to have originated 30,000 years BC. Puppetry takes many forms but they all share the process of animating inanimate performing objects. Puppetry is used in almost all human societies both as an entertainment – in performance – and ceremonially in rituals and celebrations such as carnivals. Most puppetry involves storytelling. 

Puppets can go from a simple string to giant craned operated dolls. Check here 32 different types of puppets that I have shared in a previous post. 

·      Puppets can be held in a way that they directly face the students. Hiding your hand can be done by using your arm, knee, a piece of cloth, or using a table. Sometimes I hide myself behind the puppet in order to hide my mouth. In this way they become more real. 

·      Bringing your puppet to life can be done by the sequence of breathing, guttural sounds, moving, talking, and dancing. A rehearsed choreography is also a good idea, as you won't need to think about the next movement when you are performing. Puppets can also wink, snore, jump, burp, be shy, tell you a secret, have hiccups, etc. These unexpected actions surprise the audience and add even more personality to the puppet. A catch phrase to be frequently repeated is a delicious treat!

The presentation of the puppet is an important moment as it sets the tone for the interaction. I believe that coming with a problem to be solved is a good way to engage students. I personally avoid the "I’m Billy, I’m 5 years old" approach as it doesn’t bring a complex character and children might feel they are being patronized.

·         Props are a fantastic way to bring a plot to scene. Even a simple thing as a ball can be great fun when paired with a fork! The student’s objects can be brought to action as props that need to be used to solve problems.

· Puppets are a great resource to align creativity, inspiration, flexibility and humour in language teaching. Here I share some ways in which  teachers and students can share their class with puppets: 

·      Language can be very rich in the making process as instructions involve sequences of actions and materials. In the case of scripted plays, stories can be  read, adapted, and rehearsed.

·      Puppets do not need to necessarily speak as they can only be taken care of. Here teachers and the students give commands and exchange advice about what should be done to guarantee the well being of the puppet.

·      Puppets can read aloud, retell stories, tell their versions, and give their   opinion of recent events. Puppets can also play games, tell jokes, try tonguetwisters, lipsynch to a song, and present the news. They sometimes also refilm ads or great movie classics.

Creating sketches with the raffling of characters, places, and situations is an effective way to mix creativity with language. Students are usually very proud of their memorable creations and watching their presentation is definitely a pleasure.

The triangle is a theatrical technique in which the puppet says something strange, the manipulator looks at the puppet, the audience, and finally at the puppet again. It can also be reversed.

·      Puppets can also be used to practice grammar rules in a more lighthearted way, to review content with humor and to go back to challenging grammatical points that are explained by the puppet or to the puppet. 

·      Puppets can help students to give feedback and disclose their feelings more openly about how the see their development and their relationship with the language. Teachers can use puppets to give advice on how to learn or to express concerns about discipline. 

·      Last but not least, puppets can be used to show students different realities, as things students like doing, their environments, or even be taken in adventures as when Buddy went ballooning: 

      Hope you have enjoyed it! 

       Happy Puppeteering!

       Buddy and I send you a big frog-hug, 

        

        Juan 

Discovering different play types

I have the pleasure to share here the functions that play might have for children. Well, not only children. I myself sometimes engage in some of these. 

Enjoy! 

Big frog-hug, 

Juan

The Play Types               

Devised by Bob Hughes, in ‘A playworker’s Taxonomy of Play Types’

—• Symbolic Play – play which allows control, gradual exploration and increased understanding without the risk of being out of one’s depth.

—• Rough and Tumble Play – close encounter play which is less to do with fighting and more to do with touching, tickling, gauging relative strength. Discovering physical flexibility and the exhilaration of display.

—• Socio-dramatic Play – the enactment of real and potential experiences of an intense personal, social, domestic or interpersonal nature.

—• Social Play – play during which the rules and criteria for social engagement and interaction can be revealed, explored and amended.

—• Creative Play – play which allows a new response, the transformation of information, awareness of new connections, with an element of surprise.

—• Communication Play – play using words, nuances or gestures for example, mime, jokes, play acting, mickey taking, singing, debate, poetry.

—• Dramatic Play – play which dramatizes events in which the child is not a direct participator.

—• Deep Play – play which allows the child to encounter risky or even potentially life threatening experiences, to develop survival skills and conquer fear.

—• Exploratory Play – play to access factual information consisting of manipulative behaviours such as handling, throwing, banging or mouthing objects.

—• Fantasy Play – play which rearranges the world in the child’s way, a way which is unlikely to occur.

—• Imaginative Play – play where the conventional rules, which govern the physical world, do not apply.

—• Locomotor Play – movement in any or every direction for its own sake.

—• Mastery Play – control of the physical and affective ingredients of the environments.

—• Object Play – play which uses infinite and interesting sequences of hand-eyen manipulations and movements.

—• Role Play – play exploring ways of being, although not normally of an intense personal, social, domestic or interpersonal nature.

—• Recapitulative Play – play that allows the child to explore ancestry, history, rituals, stories, rhymes, fire and darkness. Enables children to access play of earlier human evolutionary stages.

What exactly happens during play?

What exactly happens during play?

                                                                                                   Play is not a break from learning.

                                                                                                   It’s the way young children learn.

If you observe children playing and take lots of notes on what exactly they are doing you might come up with the competences below that children develop organically while playing:

Describe    Communicate    Identify   Listen   Order   Match   Classify    Combine

       Compare    Criticize    Evaluate      Explain     Define      Collect      Choose     Change    Design     Question     Organize     Integrate     Simplify    Understand       Penalize

Play is not as lose as some might think. It has clear rules that participants follow. Breaking this code might cause conflict during play. 

Definition of a situation: Let´s play house.

Assignment of roles: I´ll be the daddy and you will be the son.

Defining location: This is the kitchen.

Specifying the action plan: I´ll fix supper and you wait.

Assigning props: This is my pan.

Correcting operating procedures and fixing the script: Daddy doesn´t cook like this.

Directing other´s performance: This is the way to do it.

Invoking rules related to real X pretend context: You don´t really have to do it.

Termination/ transition: Okay, supper finished.

Commenting interpersonal climate: We are playing, so we are friends, right?

 I had the chance to observe these very clear moments while playing with my lovely 3-year old nephew Leo. He showed me the jungle, the river, crocodiles, and taught me how to do things. Out of the blue I asked him the last question  "We are playing, so we are friends, right? " really curious to see what he would say. I was totally overwhelmed when he said "Give me a hug." I'll remember this forever!

 In the next post I will share the different types of play!  

A big frog-hug,

Juan

Understanding and nurturing play

I will be writing the next posts about a subject that fascinates me: play.

                                                                                      

                                                                                          " We don’t stop playing because we grow old;

                                                                                                  we grow old because we stop playing.”                                                                                                                             George Bernard Shaw

Play is the kind of thing we might take for granted, thinking we know what it is, until we have to define and explain it. Much harder it is to understand what exactly happens in the heads of children during this fascinating linguistic, cognitive, social, and affective activity that unfortunately has been losing space in children’s agendas. Here I share some of my findings:

Playing is essential for children as it fulfills many of their developmental needs: to learn, to socialize, to create, to feel challenged, to calm themselves and focus, to compete and cooperate, to enjoy themselves and others, and finally to have fun. When at play children actively use their hands, head and heart.

Play allows children to learn about themselves, others and their environment. Play relates to and relies upon past and future experiences , as children actively make models of the world, when they repeat situations over and over to investigate and test their ideas.

Play only occurs when children do not feel anxious or threatened, and after they have become familiar and have explored the object they will play with. During play, children focus not on what objects can do, but on what they can do with them. Children can’t be forced to play and neither do they need to be taught to do so.

Play also nurtures the development of children's language skills, as they experiment with words, sentences, and structures during play to express their thoughts and ideas, to solve problems and to communicate their desires.  As children become more sophisticated in their play skills, their language also becomes equally sophisticated. Last, play provides opportunity for adults to share the children´s inner worlds on the children’s terms and pace.

Here are some tips that I have adapted from the Action Alliance for Children (www. 4children.org) for nurturing play with your students and children:

Let children master toys by making materials available for frequent and longer periods of time.

Provide playthings that kids can use in a variety of ways: blocks, paper and crayons, dolls and toy animals, balls, playdough, etc. The simpler the toy, the more complex the play.

Encourage kids to play with ordinary household objects like pots and pans and outdoor materials like sticks and grass.

Provide simple playthings that encourage children to be active and use their imaginations, not to watch while the toy does tricks.

Create an environment where children feel safe to try new things and where they feel they have the support of adults. Model playing and let them come with their ways.

Respond to play: A teacher sees a child playing and builds vocabulary by providing new words, naming things, narrating what they are doing.

Extend play: a teacher observes a child pretending a chair is a car and “driving.” She encourages imagination by asking “Where are you going? What do you see along the way?”

Guide play: One week a teacher turns the dress-up area into a costume library. Children practice language and social skills by acting out different roles.

Observe the child’s activities: Seeing a child line up toy dinosaurs by size shows her understanding of size comparisons and putting things in order. The child might also be replicating school’s entrance or any situation in which he/she has experienced being in line.

Take photos and keep some of their toys: A series of photos of a child’s block structures over time shows that she is learning more about spatial relations. It’s also nice to build memory and share it with children later in life. I cherish the pictures that were taken with me and my toys and I wish I had some of them to share with my children.

In the next post I will investigate types of play, what happens during play and how children know that someone is playing with them. See you soon!

A big frog-hug,

Juan

Proactive discipline management

                                                                             Children today are tyrants. 

They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. 

Socrates (469 BC-399 BC)

As Socrates noticed in the quote above, our ways of involving children have not been effective for some time. Student indiscipline has been a major challenge as a great number of schools still struggle in their attempt to convince children to comply with their educational systems. I assume here that the indiscipline problem might stem in part from our focus on making students adapt to our teaching, instead of teachers adapting in ways that promote student learning.

Fortunately, new behavioral approaches have focused on using indiscipline prevention rather reaction to solve student misbehavior. These new approaches advocate for a substitution of the old ways of strict rules, authority and coercion by the new ways of awareness, sensitivity, and rapport.

Proactive discipline approaches manipulate the physical, social, and emotional aspects of the learning environment to avoid indiscipline from happening. Below I present the proactive discipline management approaches of antecedent strategies, ecologic factors, and behavioral rapport.

The antecedent strategies approach (Kern & Clemens, 2007) assumes that problems result from a mismatch between the individual’s strengths, skills or preferences and the environment. Misbehavior can be reduced or eliminated by redesigning the individual’s learning environment. This proactive redesign includes:

• setting clear rules and expectations,
• building predictability in the environment,
• creating activities that include students’ interests,
• having a brisk pace of instruction,
• allowing opportunities for students to respond,
•  increasing specific praise for appropriate behavior,
• scheduling attention and support for some students,
• anticipating or scaffolding difficult situations,
•  intercalating easy and difficult tasks,
• noticing and eliminating triggers that precede problematic behavior,
• proactively investing in modifications guided to promote student engagement, 
• allowing students to make choices on how they would like to learn.

The ecologic factors approach (Carter & Driscoll, 2007) assumes that internal physical and psychological states of students may be possible roots of misbehavior. Indiscipline can be seen here as a means of communicating unsatisfied and pressing needs. The proactive prevention includes addressing the ecological variables we can change and showing sensitivity to the ones we have no control. Below I list ecological factors that can be causes of misbehavior:

•  nutrition: thirst, hunger, heavy meals, nutritional diet, irregular meals,
• sleep hygiene: fatigue, sleep duration, sleep schedule, sleep disturbances,
• physical comfort: pain (headache, toothache, earache, nausea), allergies, excessive noise, temperature, light,
• emotional comfort: absence of friendship or support networks, conflict with peers (e.g., bullying), little access to choice or control, few success experiences,
• familial concerns (family conflict, neglect, excessive or inconsistent discipline, unresponsive parenting, parental isolation or depression),
• activity level - over- and under-stimulation, lack of meaningful or enjoyable school and after-school activities.

The behavioral rapport approach (Ducharme, 2005) assumes that indiscipline is caused by the quality of the relationship between students and teacher. The behavioral rapport approach supports developing an alliance with the students by building empathy, respect and trust, which are expected to decrease misbehavior. Behavioral rapport interventions include:

• using physical proximity and touch,
•  interacting with warmth, sensitivity and empathy,
• validating them with kind looks,
• talking about the child’s interests,
• demonstrating interest in students’ comments and lives,
• sharing facts about our lives,
• praising good behavior,
•  using humor and having  playful conversations,
• acting as a partner rather than as an authority figure,
• taking a few minutes, particularly with those experiencing difficulties.

Interestingly, the best moment to invest in the prevention of indiscipline through proactive strategies is when things are fine in the classroom. In a paradigm shift, discipline management ceases being an arm wrestle and becomes more of a chess game, in which teachers see students holistically and focus on the cognitive, social and emotional aspects of learning.

Share these proactive strategies with other teachers!

Together we can change the overall experience of teaching and learning!

A frog-hug,

Juan

Here are the references:

Carter, M. & Driscoll, C. (2007). A conceptual examination of setting events.   Education Psychology,   

       27 (5), 655-673.

Ducharme, J. M., & Harris, K. (2005). Errorless embedding for children with conduct difficulties:

       Rapport-based success-focused intervention in the classroom. Behavior Therapy, 36, 213-

       222.

Kern, L., & Clemens, N.H. (2007). Antecedents strategies to promote appropriate classroom behavior.   

      Psychology in the Schools, 44(1), 65-75.

The funtastic world of puppets!

 Here I share a video with 32 different types of puppets, ranging from instant puppets to crane operated ones!

Soon I will be writing more about ways to use puppets in class to foster the alignment of creativity, spontaneity and language. 

Big frog-hug, 

Juan