[chokosaki]

Within the last few months I have made great strides as a teacher. I am more competent and am not afraid of trying new things. My classrooms are under control and I am much more confident. My students like me and the school tells me I'm doing a great job. I've learned a lot by reading things here on the forums and coming here for help. I've adopted ideas and modified them to fit my classes.

I now have 6 classes a week and enjoy them all.....for the most part. I have one class that still gives me trouble. It's a preschool class with 7 students. This class is unresponsive and they lose interest quickly. None of my techniques work in this class. I still consider myself a new teacher (not even a year yet). We often play games but these games die down quickly. We sing songs, but they fizzle. When introducing new words I can barely get them to repeat anything. I have a method of getting the students to say the word loudly and softly, fast and slow...my other classes love this but they just....are like...meh. I don't know what it is. I'm not a child psychologist or anything. My major was journalism. Heh. Even my Castle Crashers class game is met with little enthusiasm. It's not just me either....their local teacher has a lot of trouble too. Has anyone met a situation like this before? What did you do?


Oh, and here's the classroom technique I use now for classroom management.

In my classes, I divide the students into teams (boys or girls or whatever). On the board each team has a laminated castle hanging. The castle's have 4 turrets with four drawn on flags (this is done on a white board). In the middle of the two castles, there are 3 steps per team. At the top of the steps, there is a bomb. Each team starts out at the bottom of the steps and must move up to the top by doing well in class (could be answering correctly, drilling well enough, playing a game well). When a team moves up to the bomb, that team uses the bomb on the other team's castle (getting rid of one of the flags). Then, all the members in that team get two stars (or whatever symbol you like to give to the students). Then the team returns to the bottom of the steps. Also, during games, I give the winners a dragon card. The dragon card is used the next time a team gets up to the bomb. The team uses the dragon card for more power and gets rid of two flags (so they get 4 stars). This game starts the moment the class starts and ends when the class does. My students love this game. Even some of the local teachers adopted this. For the castle I found a castle coloring page online...printed them out, colored them, laminated them...and made a hook for them to hang on the board (I bought 2 small suction hangers that stick to the board). The same went with the dragon. I printed out a charizard (pokemon character) and colored it and laminated it. Oh, and with the younger classes I always let them make the bomb sound BOOOOOM! when they get the bomb. Always good for a little distraction heh.

[Dave-B]

Wow, you are really bringing out some creativity.

Have you thought about using a similar technique to get the students to speak English only?