Hello!
Welcome back! A few days ago I had a great opportunity to take part in a Classroom Management Workshop with Mrs. Paulina Andruszkiewicz- Glińska.
Mrs. Paulina Andruszkiewicz- Glińska is a teacher and a blogger. She uses many creative ways to teach English. On her pages and blog she shares with people some useful tips and hacks on how to make learning English easy and involving for kids. She also posts interesting materials and invites to discussion on important issues connected to education. I would highly recommend her blog - From P with Love.
During this workshop, Mrs. Glińska has told us how important is to get to know our students. As teachers, we have to be aware that our pupils have quite short attention span and they are usually very active. These characteristics make it impossible to have a perfectly quiet classroom and that is OK! Despite this, we should be able to control the group which can be helped by concluding an appropriate contract. Such a paper is a set of norms and rules during lessons that everyone should follow.
The presenter also mentioned that classroom routines are the key to a good organization. I strongly agree with this statement. Thanks to proper routines we are able to avoid chaos and it is a great opportunity to add more second language as well. Here we can introduce some songs or rhymes like "Hello, how are you?" song for hellos and "See you later, alligator" for goodbyes.
Mrs. Glińska has shown us many useful online tools which I found really valuable. These are some of them:
1. www.classroomcharts.com - this page is great for making seating arrangements
2. www.online-stopwatch.com - this is an online stopwatch to help us with time management
To conclude, I have seen these strategies in use during my teaching practice and they work very well. I will use them myself for sure. What about you? Do you prepare contracts with your students? Do you have classroom routines?
I am looking forward to your comments.
Zuzanna
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