The power of board games

Board games are designed to have fun and engage people to it. The original idea behind any game is developed in a very clever way to make it work.  Taking them as a basis, we can develop variations to fit into our lesson targets and schedule a  moment and a space in our week timetable to give games the value and the potential they have. 

Trivia games is one of my favourites as they have a variety of possibilities. We can prepare cards of a wide range of matters and use the same board for different purposes. 

It is, of course, a great choice to reuse materials we already have around, we don't need to keep on buying new things all the time. Finally, giving our creative touch to our classroom is always nice, as our students value and appreciate it. 

Word-cards for problem-solving

Problem-solving is one of the most difficult processes because it implies having a wide range of knowledge of the daily life and infering lots of hidden meanings. Nontheless, most problems work in the same way so one can approach problem-solving by mastering the key words that usually appear. By gaining vocabulary and matching meanings to operations, problem-solving can be a little bit easier.

I have compiled some of the most frequently used words and prepared word cards to help students practise this math vocabulary while practise math abilities. 

Share and download 👇

>>PISTAS PARA RESOLVER PROBLEMAS MATEMÁTICOS<<

ONLINE INTERACTIVE RESOURCES

 Before the pandemic kicked us out, I used to see online activities and apps as a great resource to help me in the multi-level classrooms and to help students that needed instant feedback or different types of activities to reach their goals. Keeping this in mind, a positive thing that the lockdown brought to me was that I found out other sites and activity generators that I didn't know, and that there was a lot of teacher sense of brotherhood that made us to help each other worldwide. 

I want to share here the ones that I think are the best ones: some of them have come to me during the lockdown and some others are the ones I already knew. 

  

 

>>ANY LANGUAGE AS A SECOND LANGUAGE<<

I almost forgot one of my favourites, I have been using it in my classroom since long ago and it has always been a success. It is >>FACE YOUR MANGA<< where you can create great mangatars, practise English and have a good fun. 

WORTHY STORIES

When tales are not just for the youngest ones.

BUTTERFLY EARS

Kalandraka is a company great at creating stories to raise awareness. Some of their books contain stories that allow us to make children think beyond the surface and develop important values such as empathy. This is the case of a very well-known title (and one on my favourite+essential ones): Butterfly ears.

It is the story of a girl who is being bullied and how she faces the situation in a positive way. As it is said nowadays, this reading is a 'must'.

>> Kalandraka - Butterfly Ears <<

WORTHY BOOKS

Following my idea of keeping things simple, I don't usually get complicated looking for long lists of books because, in the end, these resources that are intended to be helpful and uselful become overwhelming as it happens with new apps, worksheets and other activities recommended as "top".
I usually recycle resources from one year into the following one and list them to fit a concrete moment, project, objective or activity, so that I can improve each time I use them.

RECETAS DE LLUVIA Y AZÚCAR / RECIPES OF RAIN AND SUGAR

It is one of my favourites as I use it to work on types of texts, emotions and feelings, descriptions and much more. At the beginning of the school year I prepare some activities using this book, for example, last year I baked mini cupcakes that had messages related to values and emotions: friendship, respect, happiness, fear... that let us to start talking about how we felt and about situations where empathy, for example, is needed. These activities really worked and we had lots of fun talking, dressing up and eating.

Eva Manzano. Writer. -->site<--

THE ELEMENT

I had heard about how inspiring Ken Robinson was, but after reading his book I have come to the conclusion that he is more than that. I met this book in a strange moment in my life when I needed to understand why some boys and girls were angry at school and about everything we did, literally everything. 
It is essential to understand that children are not beings that come, learn and go: children have a life out of the school that influences their life at school more than we think and we don't usually consider it as an important part of their learning process. So whenever a child doesn't feel motivated or doesn't feel in his/her element, we tend to think s/he is lazy, doesn't want to, keeps on challenging authority or just has a learning problem and might need special support. 
This reading made me look at my students in a different way and at education as an important part of a child's life, not only as a formative part of life that provides with knowledge for the future, but also as a time for finding oneself and being happy, which is something that we don't usually consider. 
I have even recommended this reading to parents who needed to understand their children and which were their motivations to behave in certain ways. 

Sir Ken Robinson. Writer. -->site<--

INTERACTIVITY

I used to think that interactivity was related to software and apps that provided instant feedback to users who could interact with an AI. But then, I came across with the idea of interactive notebooks as a means of organising the students' stuff in an amazingly flexible and visual way.

I don't know if this resource is widely used in my country as we tend to be traditional and use traditional means to organise the school year. However, new winds of change are slipping through the cracks as innovation is being implemented. 

I consider myself as a lucky teacher as I have never been told to do things in one way or another, but I have had autonomy to make my decisions and to learn from my mistakes. One of the mistakes I have made through the years has been to present contents in a plain way and to see how that way was not enough to cope with some of the difficulties that some students had. Then I searched for ways and found out how interactivity helped, so I decided to implement it systematically through the dialogue, the projects, experiments and the use of ICT and interactive notebooks: this decision made me, eventually, abandon the text books.

I thought that interactivity required a change in the classroom arrangement but, unfortunately my classroom does not offer many possibilities as, for example, it has a sort of cupboards all along the wall and it is difficult to set displays or storage solutions. Finally, I found some inspiration on Pinterest wall displays and adapted it to the little space I have in my classroom, using the doors of the "cupboards" and making them interactive and visual. 

Plastic filing folders and pockets are so useful to save time, resources and space, as they can be filled and refilled depending on the topic you are working on. In the panel above, this display shows Roman numerals tips and other resources to deal with numeracy, such as extended and standard form or addition and substraction.

SPECIAL NEEDS IN THE CLASSROOM

ECO-FRIENDLY PROJECTS

I belong to a generation that used to play outside, sharing toys and games with other children of the neighbourhood, that used stuff from the street to create new games and that didn't need a lot to have fun. 

At home we were taught not to waste because resources were limited and, eventhough we had everything we needed, we treated things well so that they could last long. It was a kind of slow times, opposing to the times we are living now: everything is immediate, everything is feeble, everything moves really fast, things can be found in a minute and achieved in a second. 

I sometimes miss things from those times (not everything, of course!) like the fact that everything was worthy: a special wrapping paper, a card, a sticker... finding a stamp or a coin from another country was a treasure! I also miss the fact that everything had a second use and a second life. I think it is important to bring those values back to  the new generations : to teach them that things can have a second life and that it is not always important to buy things new because you can make things out of other things you can find at home. It is what nowadays is called "boost creativity" but I call it "avoid over-spending and over-wasting, specially in things that you might not need more than 5 minutes". 

It was long ago that I heard about the quote One man's trash is another man's treasure and it inspired me to bring its spirit into the classroom and to start developing eco-friendly projects that show how we can save resources and contribute to make our environment a little bit better. 

One day -not long ago- one of my students said to me that she thought all this was very good but unrealistic. Her argument was that she and her classmates were just 20 children that could not do a lot for the environment eventhough they were very-very eco-friendly, and it was because maybe the rest of the world did not think in the same way and they could do very little to change that. Just by hearing her speech I realised that I had achieved my goal which, in the end, had been to raise awareness of a group of pre-teens about environment and their present and future role to make things change. 

KEEPING THINGS SIMPLE

When I became a teacher I started to do the things using my student perspective, not being fully aware of the fact that time had gone by and thinking that I had to teach my students the way I had been taught.
It lasted for very short time as reality showed me that we were not living in the 90s anymore, that children today live in a different world and that the only things that remained the same at school were the walls and the stairs, nothing else. It is something nobody teaches you during traineeship, while you are supposed to be learning how to be a teacher. Most times it is all loads of theory and theory, which are so far away from what you are about to face in the classroom.
Then, when I started to realise that I had to do things in a different way I felt overwhelmed as there were lots of things to be done: preparing lots of lessons, memorising lots of names of students, keeping reports up to date, checking homework, photocopying, attending meetings, using technology, trying to do your best, teaching stuff, making children learn...and an endless list. What I did then, was to start reading on blogs and webpages, getting information from experienced 21st century teachers that wanted to share their knowledge with the world, which eventually became the most helpful resource I could get.
Now, that I am gaining experience, what this experience is teaching me is that we need to focus on what really works, to keep things simple, to go straight forwards to what we want to achieve and to speak clearly to our students.
This is, somehow, the aim of this blog, to show some of the ideas that are simple and work at teaching and to share my experience. (All the experience and resources I keep in my teaching trunk).