ZGUČAN commencement ceremony

ZGUČAN commencement ceremony, June 2015

Throwback Thursday #3

My students from Pionirski dom, May 2013

Pre-holiday classroom activities

Summer holidays are coming and aren't we all glad! The problem is, what to do with your students once the grades are more or less what they are, the weather is hot and everyone is already day-dreaming about those carefree summer days about to come. I've prepared a list of activities I use during these days, I hope any of this comes in handy. :)

• If you have a chance, go outside and play! Especially with young learners. Looking for ideas? Try here and here.

• Work on writing skills and write holiday postcards.

• Act out stories. You may let your students choose their story and their props. They could even prepare in advance and then act out their stories in front od their classmates. It's amazing what happens when you occasionally let them be their own bosses - their creativity seems to be endless!

The Magic Porridge Pot: overflowing porridge prop

The Three Little Pigs: house props

• Play games: board games (perhaps something like this), Truth or Dare, Room 101, Activity (prepare word cards with all-year-round vocabulary which students then either have to demonstrate with charades, describe or draw) ...
• Ask the students to make their own quizzes, crossword puzzles, word searches, comics on the topic of summer and then put their work together and make a nice summer magazine.

• Sing campfire songs! My (and my students') two absolute favourites:

THE CAMPFIRE SONG SONG

BOOM CHICKA BOOM

• Watch a movie. Not my favourite option, though. But when we do, we'll watch something like Window on Britain or something from the Mary Glasgow Magazines video section.

• Have a small goodbye party with music, games and chatting.

Do add your own ideas in the comment section! Let's make these few last days as fun and useful as possible and I promise, summer holidays will be here in no time. ;)

School farewell party coming up!

My dear ninth graders, each and every one of you has left an impression in my memory and in my heart. If I have taught you anything I am glad because you sure have taught me a lot. I wish you well and you will be missed!

We've done it!!!

"Po temeljiti proučitvi vseh pripomb se je ministrica za izobraževanje, znanost in šport, dr. Maja Makovec Brenčič odločila, da ustavi postopek sprejemanja zakona ZOsn.

Vsem sodelujočim v razpravi se zahvaljujem za podane konstruktivne pripombe in dopolnitve ter zgledno sodelovanje."

Primary school subjects, part 2

In this post I'll cover ZGUČAN Art and P. E. courses. You can read my reviews of other primary school subject courses in this post.

• ART (LUM)
  
  We discussed the syllabus and the methodology. The first you can find online and the second is pretty much the same as with any other subject (motivation, attitude, lesson planning, Piaget etc.) so I won't go into that much. There were some fairly important points I'd like to address, though.



• Firstly, when you use Art for your CLIL lessons, what you have to take into account is the age of the children you teach and, consequently, their stages of development in art. You cannot expect them to deliver something they are not yet capable of.
• When choosing a theme for their art work, show them the real thing if possible. Alternatively, show a photograph or a piece of acknowledged artwork with the same theme. By all means avoid showing colourful pictures of questionable artistic value. This also applies to other ways of teaching: use photographs instead of colourful flashcards whenever possible.
• Never draw to show a child how to draw something because it kills creativity. Instead, help him observe the theme he's drawing: What has a cat got? A head? What shape? A circle? OK, draw a circle. What's on its head? Ears? OK, how many? Two? Small or big? Good, let's add two ears etc.


• Physical education (ŠPO)
  Again, syllabus and methodology. Some practical work but I can't really say I remember much of it, unfortunately. We did cover some games that could fit into frames of P. E., so here are some interesting games you can use in your CLIL P. E. lessons (you probably know most of them already, though):
• Simon Says
• What's the Time, Mr Wolf
• Monkey See, Monkey Do
• Mother May I
• Hopscotch (you can use flashcards for different vocabulary items instead of numbers)
• Playing ball while counting, naming words from different vocabulary groups etc.
• Charades
• Hot/Cold
• ... and others ;)

I hope this comes in handy. Now I only have a few more ZGUČAN courses to cover and I'm done. :)