Category: Games

Pin the Nose, Tail and Antlers on Rudolph

28/12/2014

The BEA kids had a blast at our first-ever Christmas Day party! We had an afternoon of contests, games, caroling, and of course, cake to celebrate the big day. One of the highlights was our twist on a game favorite, "Pin the Tail on the Donkey." Since we had over 80 students at the party, we divided them up into three teams to play in the library and classrooms. In the library, we had the classic "Pin the Tail on Rudolph" and in the classrooms we played "Pin the Nose" and "Pin the Antlers" on the famous reindeer. Our librarian and my assistant did a fantastic job designing all the posters for the game, and all the staff worked so well together to give the students such a special day!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Valentine's Day 2012

15/2/2012

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Hi everyone!

Happy Valentine's Day from the BEA kids and staff! It was another busy day at BEA today, especially since it was Valentine's Day and the start of student conferences.

Valentine's Day Activities:
This year, I spent a lot more time planning our holiday lessons, which took almost 6 hours this morning! The planning itself wasn't that challenging, it was all the color printing of flashcards that took forever. Regardless of the holiday, I always find these types of lesson to be the most challenging because of the culture content. Many of the activities I found online was mostly reading or worksheet-type activities that don't give students a lot of speaking time. I love working with flashcards, and the students like playing card-type games, so I decided to make a Valentine's vocabulary lesson.

In the first part of our lesson, the kids had to write their names down on paper hearts for a chocolate raffle at the end of the class. I told them that there were only two chocolate hearts for each class, so they had to enter a raffle for them, but of course, I got chocolate for all of them. We then moved onto some vocabulary drill with flashcards focusing on Valentine's Day related terms. The Basic and Pre-Intermediate courses learned noun-verb expressions, such as give a box of chocolates, write a Valentine, and get a red roses. The vocabulary for the Intermediate course was idiomatic, such as I'm in love, She's love struck and We're crazy in love. Students then got to practice their new vocabulary in a game of concentration. Rather than having the kids just turn the cards over, they had to say the word for the picture on the card and then a make a sentence for it. If students didn't use the word correctly (even if they had a pair), they had to turn the cards back over. For the Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate courses, we also had a Valentine's Rhyming Game. Students worked in groups and completed a worksheet. They had to read a series of clues and then find a Valentine's Day word that rhymed with the clue. This was quite an effective activity because it helped students with their pronunciation. Cambodian students have a tendency to drop the final consonants on words, so this really helped them to pay more attention to those final consonants.For the last part of class, all the BEA kids got their chocolate and wished my a Happy Valentine's Day! I even got a few hand-made paper roses from some of the students. If any of you are interested, the Valentine's Day Rhyming activity is in an embedded document at the end of today's blog entry.

Student Conferences:
Shally was also very busy today as well with student conferences. He managed to talk with almost half of the students in each of our courses. The purpose of these conferences is to give students their first semester grades, and to give them advice on how to improve their English language skills. This also gives the kids a chance to ask Shally questions about their studies, as well as other issues in their lives. In most cases, Shally is often the only person in their lives that they can confide in about personal issues.

Spring Break 2012:
Tomorrow is the last day of our first semester, so the BEA kids will be on their spring break for three weeks. However, we'll be back to classes on March 12. Although the kids will have break, Shally and I will be busy as usual. We'll be preparing for our CamTESOL presentation on Sunday, February 26 and revising the curriculum for the second semester.

Back to the books ...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Review Week / Lesson 5: End of Semester 1

19/2/2011

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Hi everyone,

Well, we made it! We had our last class of our very first semester at BEA. Shally finished up our student conferences. Once again, students had a lot of questions for Shally, especially about our program for next year. We haven't even started the second semester, and our students are already thinking about their second year. I'm glad to see that they're planning ahead! Many of the questions dealt with the number of additional students we'll be enrolling next year, as well as the courses we'll be offering. At the moment, Shally and I have a general outline for our expansion in September 2011. However, during our semester break, we'll be drawing up a more concrete plan once we've considered our school finances.

For our last lesson of the semester, I decided to let the students have a bit more fun than usual, which sometimes leads to complete chaos in a Cambodian classroom. For the first part of the lesson, I handed out out chopsticks to each group. The students then had to make a list of all the possible uses of chopsticks. They came up with some pretty interesting uses. Here are the "Top 10":

1. hair clip
2. conducting an orchestra
3. playing the xylophone
4. snooker
5. flag pole
6. wand
7. backscratcher
8. toothpick
9. ear cleaner
10. nose picker

After our brainstorming session, students played the game "I am King". Each of the chopsticks were labelled with the numbers 1, 2, 3, and a picture of a crown. Students had to draw lots and keep their number secret. The student who got the "king" chopstick, chose a number, and then gave that student an order to perform. Well, this is where all the chaos started. Students had each other singing, dancing, walking like a monkey, slapping boys, and kissing the teacher. Despite the chaos, it was a great lesson to review infinitive forms.

After Shally finished up the conferences, we had a small awards ceremony in each class. Shally announced the names of the top three students in each course and presented each student with $5.00 worth of school supplies, which consisted of an English-Khmer dictionary, a personal diary, and a plastic carrying case. I got plenty of photos, which I'll upload to our site next week.

BEA is now closed for our semester break until March 14. During this time, Shally and I will be quite busy. This week, we'll be finishing up our presentations for the CamTESOL conference in Phnom Penh on Febraury 26-27. This is an international conference for those involved in teaching English as a second/foreign language.

Shally's workshop will focus on how to effectively use western-published textbooks in the Cambodian classrooms so that Cambodian culture and values are reflected in the lesson. My workshop will center on how to teach business letter writing in the Cambodian classroom. I will use my research from the pre-intermediate course's second writing workshop on the process of teaching how to write a cover letter for a CV. All the materials from our workshop will be available on the website before we head to the conference.

After the conference, we'll be ordering new tables for our library, adding more lights in our classrooms, setting up our library program, and finalizing all the programs for our second semester.

We will still have regular postings while BEA is closed, so we hope that you'll still keep up with BEA news during the break.

Onwards to CamTESOL,
Nicole

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Review Week / Lesson 4: Spelling

18/2/2011

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Hi everyone,

I decided to make two postings for Thursday; one focusing on Shally's student conferences and another on my spelling review lesson.

While Shally was holding student conferences this afternoon, students reviewed the spelling of some of the more difficult words from their textbook. When I planned the lesson this morning, I thought there would be enough time to have a group "Spelling Bee" - something along the lines of the "Scripps National Spelling Bee" contest in the United States. However, we didn't even get past the first practice activity. My time allotment for each activity was completely way off base for today's lesson. For next semester, this lesson will definitely have to be spread out over two days.

For the first part of the lesson, I had the students scan through the units they had studied over the semester and note down 10 words that they considered difficult to spell. Prior to the lesson, I made up my own list with words that I considered difficult for Cambodian students. Once again, I was quite shocked when I monitored the students while they were noting down their words. I had anticipated about 30-40 percent of the words, but there were many words that I had never considered would be challenging for the students. One of the more surprising words from the basic class was "parents". A student asked me if it was possible to use only "parent". I understood why she asked this question because quite a few of our students live with just one family member, such as a mother, father, grandmother or grandfather. It is not uncommon for fathers to leave and remarry without getting a divorce, or for students to live with their grandmothers because their parents have passed away. Her question has not got me thinking about the term "parents", and how it's difficult to say that it only refers to just a mother or father in Cambodia. Anyways, once we're on our semester break, I'm going to compile the list of words that all the students wrote down so that we can give more emphasis to these words when teaching them in next year's courses.

For the second part of the lesson, students worked in groups where students took turns dictating their words and the others had to write them down in their notebooks. After, students had to check they they had spelled the words correctly. I noticed that this was quite a challenging activity most many of the students. When I first planned this activity, I thought it would be quite "boring" for the students. However, almost all of the students seemed to enjoy it, especially the role of dictating their word lists. I am now considering that we'll have to include spelling tests as a part of our evaluation for next semester.

Back to the books,
Nicole

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia

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Pin the Nose, Tail and Antlers on Rudolph

Valentine's Day 2012

Review Week / Lesson 5: End of Semester 1

Review Week / Lesson 4: Spelling

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