My biggest challenge as a language teacher is to get the students to speak more freely and to not be afraid of making mistakes. 

As we add vocabulary, we often do little projects/activities that encourage speaking and it is often after the fact that I wish it was filmed, both to share on the blog, but more importantly so the students can watch themselves and learn from their mistakes… 

They are happy to act out skits… but usually want to read… they are happy to play games… but want the structured sentence and to just fill in the missing word…. I so want them to take more risks and make mistakes… and learn from them…

The few times I did film our activities we learned a lot from it… and respecting my students wishes I will not share everything here as they are not yet comfortable with others hearing them speak… but here are few examples worth sharing, although they do not have the feedback part of learning from their mistakes, I am proud of sharing their first steps…

1. Press the following link – על – תחת – על יד  – to see the students practicing the use of on, under, beside,etc… and names of colours. They were grouped in pairs, and received coloured cubes and an ipad. One was filming and giving instructions and the other had to build with cubes accordingly. It was quite challenging, but a fun way to encourage both talking and using active listening for comprehension.
2. Upon coming back from their winter holiday, the students received a project to tell us about it. Most of the students chose to use slides to present, others created a poster, made an album, or created an i-movie.  They had a lot to say, and only this past week we ended the presentations. Follow these links – 1. Album presentation 2. movie to hear two of the presentations….

Although there is no talking, here is also a link to the Google slides presentations

And some photos too: