I am writing this in the
days of the coronavirus or Covid-19 so I would like to share some of my
teaching experience with anyone out there who would lend an attentive ear.
I have been teaching
mostly in a real classroom with only the odd online class with a few adults,
and I intend to continue this way when the crisis is over. But right now, I am
having all my classes online, (I am using Skype) and this is no easy task
especially with young children. However, as my ancestors would say “Ουδέν κακόν αμιγές καλού” or every cloud has a silver lining.
To begin with, as a
teacher I am obliged to find novel ways of adjusting to the medium, and though
I feel stretched, I am gradually rising to the challenge. How? It is in large
part improvising so that I can maintain the children’s interest and
make up for the real contact. In a real classroom, I used realia but to a
limited extent whereas online I am making the most of the fact that the
children are at home and I can ask them, for example, to play hide-and-seek,
where the children hide and ask the rest of us about their whereabouts in
the house using and practising Present
Continuous and prepositions of place as well as vocabulary related to
rooms and furniture.
Where am I hiding?
Are you hiding under the
bed/in the wardrobe/behind the door?
This not only provides
good practice but gets the kids to move about as this –lack of
exercise-- is one of the problems of a prolonged quarantine.
Thanks to the features of
different platforms, we can share sound and screens so we can still use our
course books and practise all four skills, but the exciting part of it is that
I am looking for material readily available to the students and me for that
matter. Let me be more specific: you may wish to overlook some of the
material in the course book, at least for the time being, and focus on word
groups such as cutlery, food, fixtures in the house or as the fancy takes you.
You could ask the students to look out of their window and describe their
garden or street or whatever the case might be. It can turn into a guessing
game when the surroundings of different students are unfamiliar to the
rest. in a nutshell, take advantage of all the new opportunities presenting
themselves.
I will now move to another
important issue facing parents and children these days: the trauma of
seeing parents and grandparents falling ill or even passing away or the trauma
of being confined in their homes with no contact with the outside world. There
is not enough we can do about the former but perhaps we can intervene so as to reduce
their boredom and bring hope to them in the guise of a poem or a story.
Let us not forget that art can be liberating and a great healer. Children
need reassurance that this nightmare will come to an end and, as a
friend, says we shall overcome.
So I wrote a story for my
young students called The Cloud that Saved Us from the Bug, in
which a young girl with the help of a cloud embarks on a long journey to a
faraway corner of the universe, the pool of wishes and dreams, to lodge
her wish written on a wax tablet with a stylus. (In ancient Greece it was a
medium of writing)
As my intention was not to
offer a ready-made story but to stimulate my students’ imagination and activate
them by casting them as the heroes who will rescue us all, I also prepared a slideshow where I provide
some cues on each slide meant to encourage them to think of a story of their
own before they can watch or read my story.
Here is the story:
And here is the slideshow:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XFJAIeL5Ud8ROOiXxc7GskKiojlpDl8w
Wishing you all the best.
Hope we come out of this unscathed or at least with a few minor injuries.
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