Special interest column - Young Learners By Kylie Malinowska

In today’s super-fast world everyone is hungry for more ideas but has no time to read or share them. That’s why I love Carol Crombie’s (DOS at IH Viseu) great idea presented at the IHWO YL Conference. Carol collected and collated simple ideas that can be placed on slips of paper on your staffroom notice board or shared at a staff meeting. No long blog posts to read or books to madly scan. Simple ideas to be read quickly & put into practical use immediately. Fabulous! Carol’s collection can be found on the IHWO website in the affiliate’s area. In the spirit of her idea I’ve a new column in the IHWO journal which I hope will be useful & equally easy to access and implement. So here goes...

Five in a flash!

1. Fab website [this link is from the original 2012 article and may be outdated www.toondoo.com] is not only great for using in class for YL to make their own comics, it’s also great for creating YLE practice exercises.
2. Get your YLs to ‘act out’ any story from their coursebooks (or write their own). Call ‘cut’ and get them to re-do it ‘happier’, ‘sadder’, ‘angrier’ ‘funnier’ = loads of fun, language & intonation practice.
3. Five minutes to spare at the end of a lesson? Draw a picture on the w/b slowly, the team who guesses it first (by calling out guesses) wins a point and comes up to draw their own picture.
4. No computer? No problem. Teacher as a server. YLs write notes on paper and give them to you the ‘server’ who distributes them to class members who in turn reply (via the ‘server’). Discussion, feedback, sharing... No end of uses. (Thanks David Deere)
5. Are your YLs (or you!) too shy to sing? Get them to create finger puppets (or give them soft toys). The puppets then sing. In character of course :-)