Games & More Games (Almost)
A Workshop with Children, Kagoshima, July 23rd 2005
Doing a demonstration workshop with children you never know what to expect. The number, ages and experience of the children are generally unknowable. Even the room can be an unknown. How big is it, how much furniture does it have, is there a whiteboard or blackboard, is the board magnetic?
The last point is crucial. Furniture and chairs can usually be moved, as part of a game if necessary, activities can be altered to take into account a slippery floor but if one is expecting a magnetic board and does get one – it can throw a wobbly difficult to recover from. It’s so easy to forget to check but so crucial to do so.
The space was fine, a large central area surrounded by a perimeter of tables. An audience could sit and rest and take notes. The blackboard was large and as magnetic as a skunk’s behind. A small magnetic whiteboard had been placed on an easel and was certainly usable in a crisis though not with the games that I had in mind. No room for football. No place for Super Snail to try his paces. Fortunately I had remembered to ask about the board and had blue-tack to hand (at least I did once I had recovered it from the bottom of the bag it somehow fell into).
There were seventeen children altogether. I made a point of counting them, several times. Counting is familiar and easy to grasp. While counting one can begin to grasp the nature, mood and capabilities of the children. Counting gives one time to think and by including oneself in the count it is possible to start making connections.
I am a solid believer in focus, especially from the middle (actually my middle is soft and fatty but I digress). Where children given focus is where they will learn actively from. A focused child can learn more in five minutes than an unfocused one can in an hour. Of course, getting a group of children to focus on the same thing is no easy task. Even if the children all end up participating in a game one cannot be certain that they are all focusing on what you would like them to focusing on or even focusing on the same thing. Many books on teaching language advise teachers to change activities quickly. This is a kind of food fight effect. Splatter them with lots of different comestibles and hopefully some may stick, they might even eat something and get some nourishment. However I think the alternative of offering genuine choice is much better in the long term. The lesson can become a buffet of learning. The difficulty is that this requires trust and it also requires both children and teacher to take on different roles from the norm. How to achieve this in one demonstration class? Please let me know!
Now I’ve laid some background I better get on with the show. Sometimes that is all a demonstration class is, a show. However, I think this time there was a little more.
When the lesson was due to start I found a group of children sitting nonchalantly around a table at the back of a room. I had no idea whether they were supposed to be joining me or not or whether they wanted to. I just knew I had about 80 minutes. So I busied myself setting a timer. There was no clock in the room but I would have done it anyway. The timer gave me a hook to catch onto the children’ curiosity. It had a big numbers and required a lot of button pushes to set completely. By having difficulty counting I began to engage the children so when I finally invited them out into the middle of the room they were willing to come. I put the timer on the whiteboard.
I began as I usually begin by leaving the room. The first phrase I get children to use after saying hello is, “Come here!” Usually it is straightforward to get children to say this in context, but this group were different. There were some young ones who either couldn’t work out what I was saying or were too shy to speak out. A group of older boys surely did understand the phrase but for a long time decided not to use it. I tried various ways using a parrot flag, exiting and re-entering the room again and again, everything short of talking to a puppet or soft toy which I have done successfully with three year olds. One or two of the boys said “Goodbye!” and I tried to get them to say “Go away!” instead but that didn’t really get across. It probably took over ten minutes and if it hadn’t been for the attitude of the boys I would have switched to something else, but I felt there was an unspoken game going on, not so much a clash of wills as an unspoken negotiation over terms of participation. At the time I thought the process was important and as I write this now I do so still.
I did eventually get one or two ‘come here’s’ enough to move into a variation of King For A bit. Using a second timer (it pays to have two) I set it for twenty seconds and gave a string of imperative commands which the children obeyed. I then gave them 20 seconds to give me commands. They were quick to catch on. Sometimes I’ve had groups who take two or three rounds before working out they can order the teacher around. This group soon had been working hard. They were especially keen on getting me to do spin jumps.
After this I told them all to leave the room which after the come here performance they had no trouble with. I donned a policeman’s helmet and went into Find the Penny I had brought a real British one pound coin with me. Using genuine realia where possible makes games much more interesting. The game is very simple but deeper than it looks. The policeman searches for the penny by ordering the other players to show their hands, which they must do immediately upon command. The players try to prevent the policeman finding the penny by passing it from hand to hand.
I began the game with the children sitting down in a line. One of the boys put the coin in his sandal which provided an excellent opportunity to go over the rules. I told them that shoes and pockets were out. The coin has to stay in a hand at all times. They got this quickly and were willing to accept the rule without cheating which I feel the process of unspoken negotiation I mentioned contributed to. I then got the children to stand up and told them they could move around. Unsurprisingly this happened slowly. Children can be very cautious. I decided to make the oldest-looking boy a policeman. He agreed to have a go but refused to wear the helmet and this set a trend that the rest followed (with the first ever group I did the game with wearing the helmet was a key attraction). With the boy as policeman this left me free to encourage the children to move around but they still had the mobility of treeless sloths. I began to think the game wasn’t interesting (especially since the helmet was a dud) but when I asked them if they wanted to keep playing the game or do something else they were keen to keep playing. I had misread the group. We ended playing the game for over twenty minutes. They became better and better at playing. At one point I even had to ask the teachers watching for help because the coin had become so elusive. The only way I could get them to agree to stop playing the game was eventually by setting a timer.
After Find the Penny I decided to do a co-operative quiz using football (soccer) as a theme. I used the blackboard for this. We settled on Japan vs England and played five minutes each half. The children divided into three groups and one at time I asked each group a series of yes no questions. I used Britain as the theme. A correct answer moved the ball towards the English goal by the throw of one dice. An incorrect answer and the ball moved towards the Japanese goal. When the ball reached the goal I used a goal-keeper question. This was giving the American equivalent of a British English word, for example, candy and sweets. If the children listened carefully they could hear me give the answer. This was done “accidentally on purpose”. The final score was 1-0 to Japan. Some of the sentence forms were tough for many of the children, for example, “It rains more in Britain than Japan,” and “The English queen is 162.5 cm’s tall.” However, learning to accept that one cannot understand everything when dealing with a foreign language is something I think it is important for children to get used to. One reason to use non-competitive games is that it becomes easier to do this. Competition can be more inhibitive.
After the quiz I decided a change of pace was required so I fished out the crocodile. If you don’t have an itai wani then get one! Available at all (well most) Japanese toy shops. It is a variant of pop-up-pirate. Players take turns pushing a tooth. Push the wrong one and the jaws slam shut. It is a natural for pronouns. I start with “You or me?” and go on from there. The group were very quick to work out that if they kept saying you they could force me to push the tooth that would get me bitten. Typically, though, some children interfered with this plan because they wanted a turn themselves.
The group got the concept of you and me so quickly that I decided to introduce he and she. This is somewhat unnatural compared with “You me, him, her?” but having tried using him and her I think it is easier for children to grasp he and she than him and her and he and she are more useful.. I used single words rather than complete sentences. I think this is important. I’ve seen children learn sentence chunks and be unable to break them down into component parts. I favour a jigsaw approach. I aim to give children components that they can manipulate to create their own meanings. I think of language as an act of creation.
I used the timer to move from the crocodile onto something else. That something was Snake, and this was the one moment I found I needed to be careful. Snake is a flashcard game and I like to use a box or tray for cards that are identified correctly. But the box I pulled out had things in it, this was unplanned and naturally the things were much more interesting than flashcards. I also noticed that some children had moved behind me so that they were under the blackboard. and unable to see the snake I had drawn for the game.
To have pushed to do the game at that point would have been a mistake. Flexibility is key. I stopped the game and gave full attention to emptying the box and showing the contents which weren’t actually that exciting. Once the box was empty I shooed the children under the blackboard back into a position where they could see the snake and we proceeded without incident. They were familiar with the vocabulary (feelings) and the game was a bit too easy.
The reason I had used feelings was that I wanted to play One Step Forward. Given the space I decided it was best to split them into girls and boys and take turns. We had a riot, and suddenly time was up and the lesson was over.
As the teachers who had been observing filed out of the room one of them commented that I must be knackered, but I wasn’t . I think the amount of energy one has left at the end of a class is reasonable indication of how it went (assuming one has been spending any). I’m not thinking of physical energy but mental. It’s very possible to get energy from a class when it goes well.
I felt the demonstration had gone well, though I wondered what the observers made of it. There is always a trade off between giving genuine choice and getting through material. Counting up the activities done I noticed I had done no more than I would do in a class half the length. But I feel giving genuine choice is important. as a teacher my goal is to encourage children to learn for themselves. As a human being I think children have a bellyful of being told what to do and lack of choice is damaging.
One problem I have with demonstration classes is that inevitably the teacher must take the lead and introduce games and activities. There is little room for the children to take initiative. This is something that can only take place over time, but I felt there were flashes of this potential in the class. I think I made connections beyond the teacher student level, though I have no way of knowing for sure.
Anyway, I guess this is a bit long for a blog entry. Being a novice blogger I don’t know, but I suspect it is so. Yo!
Oh! I forgot to mention that I did the entire workshop in English and that I finished by pointing this out to the children. 80 odd minutes without Japanese! I think it is important to point out and appreciate such achievements though I wonder if I should have used Japanese to do so. All of the children would then have got the point. As it was some of them were pleasantly and genuinely surprised.
OK! I’ll stop now.