A good chunk of the class was missing from this lesson for a rugby match, which had slightly caught me out. My own fault as I’d got it in my head my Year 7 lesson was earlier in the day. The class is still at the early stage where catching up on the work afterwards isn’t all that easy, especially as so much of it is the interaction and skills-building rather than content language. I realised that if 8 pupils missed this lesson, the next lesson would be difficult, as it is intended to be spread over two lessons and not all done in one go. So, quick change of plan!

I have a couple of lessons that I can pick up and use with no preparation for those days we all have when we’re shattered or feeling under par or the photocopier breaks down on the day I didn’t get things done early… You know the ones. Or the morning after the parents’ evening the night before or the Monday when life happened at the weekend and things just didn’t get planned in the way I’d like. These lessons have been life-savers on far more than one occasion. Part of this lesson came from part of one of those. The pupils are busier than me, they have to think, they get the chance to consolidate what they have been learning, they will learn some new things too but not so many and not so much that it puts the lesson out of sync with what else I need to do or, in this case, when everyone else is back.

In my Scheme of Work, I have put a Lesson-by-Lesson Guide, which is just that, a guide. It’s a table for the half-term or term where I’ve plotted out what I plan to teach when in very general terms. It’s intended to help me and my team to have an idea of where we are in the term, so that we know we can complete everything we plan to teach within a half-term/whole-term time-frame. We can see if we’re likely to have a bit of spare time towards the end of the term which we might choose to use up earlier on something else, or whether we are getting a bit behind and need to speed up a bit or chop something or indeed that we’re on track. We all have the freedom to move things around in the term however we think best, but it’s there as a guide. Nothing worse than getting to a week before an assessment and realising we’ve still got far too much material to teach for the time left. These things only work though if there is some slack built in. We plan content language to take up around 40 minutes of a 60-minute lesson so that there is enough time to develop classroom interaction properly. I also blank out a couple of lessons per half-term to cut us some slack for days like today when a lesson is affected by some sort of event – fixtures, school photos, jabs, day off sick, etc. It takes off quite a bit of pressure because I know I can still teach everything I need to without worrying too much about a lesson being affected. So much staff room stress can be caused by planning too tightly to the time we are supposed to have when no allowance is made for unexpected things that happen in every school every year and are part of ordinary school life.

So here are the key things from today’s lesson:

Register routine

Not a great deal has happened around this yet beyond Presente and Hoy no está. We still haven’t had the chance to use Ahora viene nor ¿Por qué llegas tarde?  but that day will come in its own time.

However, in the last couple of lessons, I have projected the question ¿Cuánto tiempo vamos a tardar en pasar lista? (How long will it take for us to do the register?), looked quizzically at the class, looked at my watch, done the register and looked back at my watch and said veinticinco segundos, or whatever it was, before moving on without further comment. That has just set the context for today.

Today, I displayed the same question under the visualiser and dealt out 5 points for all to see. These would be for the group that estimated most closely how long it would take to do the register without going over. Y si un grupo lo clava, hay otros dos puntos – so another two points are available for if one of the groups is lucky enough to predict exactly the right number of seconds. So we all ask Grupo Uno ¿Cuánto tiempo vamos a tardar en pasar lista?, complete with  mimes (see here for more info on this stage) and then Grupo Dos. Both estimates get written up on the board and we’re off. What they don’t see is that as I picked up my device at the very beginning of the lesson apparently to start doing the register, but then put it down as we got going on how long it would take, I did actually do the register. Very easy to do as those who were off on the fixture were already marked as Out of School. It just means that I don’t cause a problem elsewhere by registering too late in the lesson. This is all the more impressive as the government believes that electronic registers are a thing of the future that they still need to bring in. (I am 100% certain that my then school was using electronic registers in 2009, possibly also the year before that, but hey, if it takes our minds off everything else…).

Calendar

With the register done and winners rewarded, we started on using the wall calendar. I have the numbers 1-31 listed vertically – no words, just numbers – and three triangle arrows, each with a word on: Hoy / Mañana / Ayer. Quite simply, a volunteer comes up to stick Hoy against the correct date on the calendar. Another one comes up for Mañana and another for Ayer. I ask the class if they think each one is correct or not and if they have a different view they tell me más arriba or más abajo, which is a callback to when we were learning the alphabet with La Bolsa Vanesa. Everyone who comes up and gets their date right gets a point for their team. Once all three arrows are correctly placed, we repeat several times with mimes, pointing ahead for Mañana, behind us for Ayer and at the floor for Hoy. Very straightforward and it only takes a couple of minutes. This is something we will do for several lessons in a row before adding another couple of arrows with Pasado mañana and Anteayer. Getting these time-markers in now makes talking about other lessons in the week and homework deadlines much easier.

There was one very funny moment which sort of started a couple of lessons ago. (Ben, ¡ven!). Today, whenever someone came up to put an arrow on the calendar (it had to happen a few times as they kept getting them all wrong!), I would call them, ¡ven! and every time, Ben thought this was enormous fun and got up too. So now whenever someone was called up to the calendar with ¡ven!, we also had to say, Ben, ¡no vengas! (He loved it). This range of negative imperatives (subjunctive forms) is growing nicely! So far, we’ve been using ¡No mires! / ¡No toques! / ¡No hables (en inglés)! / ¡No digas nada! / ¡No hagas (trampas)! and now, ¡No vengas! I’ve got ideas for an overly dramatic, tearful chorus from the whole class of ¡No te vayas! when someone goes out to a music lesson, but we haven’t got that far yet.

Snake dialogue

We revisited the school subjects that were presented yesterday. I showed them just the tops of the symbols for the first three subjects and they had to tell their partner what they were. We did the same with the next line of symbols and so on. I covered up all but the first three subjects and they had to tell their partner their opinion on all three. I moved them on a couple of places in the same way as I did yesterday and they did the same with the first six. They moved on again and did another two, then another two. All just to refresh memories and to make sure the average mouth in the room is producing plenty of language.

Spelling game

A very simple game, with all the subjects and the vocabulary displayed, I ask the question, ¿Qué asignatura es? and I spell one for them to tell me what it is. It’s so easy for the alphabet to drop out of use very soon after it has been taught that these quick, no prep activities are a really worthwhile use of time. If you’ve been following all this, you might remember that I taught the alphabet out of order. It makes activities like this one much more straightforward for pupils to do. Of course, what I have done with them as a whole class, they can now do with a partner to increase the output of the average mouth and increase involvement. They need the contextualising question and phrases such as, otra vez, por favor to have their partner repeat and está bien / está mal. If they find it too easy, they can play it where they spell the subject, but they deliberately miss off the first letter.

I added in a couple of extra phrases for them to use in setting up the pair-work: You might remember the whole ¡Me toca a mí! / ¡Te toca a ti! from one of their very first lessons. Here, we will extend that sentence and use it a lot from now on with several variables: The pupil who wants to start spelling says: Me toca a mí hablar, te toca a ti escuchar (I’ll do the speaking, you’ll do the listening). There are more precise verbs for what they are actually doing, but these serve the purpose well and make a little go a long way. This is also a very handy construction because it keeps the whole organising of an activity in the target language where it could easily go back into English. The infinitives used here hablar and escuchar are two of about a dozen that are stuck on my wall that I can grab easily and put more centrally for use in an activity. They are all infinitives for lesson-type activities (e.g., dibujar, aprender, ordenar, pensar, escribir, etc) that I will eventually use in a Lesson Menu Routine. More on that another time.

Before they started on this as a pair-work game, there was another funny moment which has started something for the first time which I’m intending to pursue. As I took the answer to each spelling question, throwing the beach ball to one team or the other to tell me, pupil B (apparently) said something in English that I didn’t hear. The other team (amazingly) did. ¡No hables en inglés! came the response. I never did manage to get out of them what B had actually said, but someone on the other team thought that this merited a point for them that an opponent had spoken in English. ¿Nos da un punto? ¿Por qué? I asked. ¡Inglés, inglés! So I helped them out with this bit: Porque B ha hablado en inglés, which they then said back to me. I went back to the offending team: ¿Es verdad? ¿Es correcto?, to which they naturally replied that it wasn’t. I hadn’t done this before but I found myself saying to them, Levanta la mano si crees que Grupo 2 [the offended group] merece un punto. They hadn’t met the word merece before, but they clearly got what was at stake here. All of Grupo 2 put their hands up. Hmmm… ¡qué casualidad! ¿no? [Oooh, what a coincidence!]. Levanta la mano si crees que Grupo 2 NO merece un punto. All of Grupo 1 put their hands up. Hmmm… ¡qué casualidad! ¿no? So ¡qué casualidad! ¿no? has now entered my classroom for the first time. I think we’ll be seeing a fair bit more of this phrase over the coming lessons – I wonder how long it will be before I hear them saying it before I do…

Letters game

A good chunk of the rest of the lesson was spent on a wonderful activity I first picked up from Wendy Ward donkeys’ years ago where pupils in pairs have an envelope of letters printed on card and cut up (the alphabet repeated three times in the envelope, complete with some accented vowels). I say a word and pupils have to spell it on their desks. They work collaboratively in pairs against the rest of the class. It’s an activity I particularly like to use in Spanish for teaching the accent rules, although that wasn’t the specific purpose today. (Members of the Association for Language Learning can see a session I gave on this several months ago on their website as part of their STALL series). While they race to find the letters, I play a short burst of Yakkity Sax (Benny Hill) and after 20-30 seconds, call them to silence, they put their hands on their heads so I can see if they move to alter the letters after I have called time, and I go round dropping points cards on their desks if they have spelt the word perfectly. You can do about 10 words in a lesson before the game has run its course. You can also read more details about it here.

Hopefully everyone will be back in for the next lesson and we’ll be back on track!