Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / August 2005

Not off the top of my head Credo, but I'd be interested to hear how
you get on.  My drawing skills are abysmal, but I can do smiley faces,
cats, and dogs and usually manage to get a laugh out of students with
them (preferable to them pointing out my onboard spelling mistakes to
me).  I used to have a colleague who left amazing full artworks on the
board after her classes...

Do you belong to the TESOL-L list?
(http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/~tesl-l/) - you'll definitely get ideas
for articles from the folks there.

DC

Is this what you're after? Maybe be too TEFL-ey/basic for your audience
(sorry if you've thought of these already)

- clean up our board: after a particularly messy lesson, work with
students to organise the board into a set of clear notes down the side,
progressively rub off the mess. Good for revision at the end of a
topic/lesson.
- memorising: as students repeat a boarded text over and over,
progressively rub off more and more words.
- remembering vocabulary from a boarded list: point to a word and
students repeat, jump around in the list (not top-to-bottom). Then
begin rubbing out one word at a time, but still point to the empty
space, until you are just pointing to empty bits of the board. (works
for short-term memory)
- are you one of those people that remembers where something was on a
page? Use left/right sides of the board (or different parts of it) to
help ss remember e.g. countable/uncountable nouns (countable one side,
uncountable the other) or phonetic minimal pairs.
- phoneme swatting, give ss fly swats and have them swat the phoneme or
word you say (or a student says). I had some sticky balls that were
great for this too.
- any kind of personalised ex for ss, especially at the beginning of
the lesson: copy up an exercise revising the past lesson and let ss get
on with it as a class (small classes only) (leave the room or move to a
corner and just watch what they do, do not intervene, it is fascinating
to see how they actually understand things).
- again, small classes: have them do a writing assignment together on
the board while you are out of the room, then give them feedback.
- for budding artists: progressively build up a picture, Ss guess what
it is.
- make *deliberate* spelling/grammar mistakes on the board, keeps
students on their toes.
- let students be the artists (small classes). Coursebooks sometimes
have nice cartoony pictures illustrating a list of, say, ten vocabulary
items. Before the lesson, photocopy the picture and divide it into a
grid, then give each student a square of the grid to copy to the board.
As they are drawing, discuss the content (great cathedral!, hey, leave
the hills for Mustafa!, etc.).
- of course there is always Pictionary, and board rushes.

Jan