Another Competition Coming Soon: Meet the Judges

More than two decades ago Dinternal Education was formed from a connection between Great Britain and Ukraine.  Along with our sister language schools, we've since grown to become the biggest provider of English-language education in the country but we've never lost sight of the power of partnership.  That's why, together with our generous main prize sponsors Alekom Tour, we're all very excited by our final competition to celebrate Pearson's 20th anniversary in Ukraine. Next summer one lucky student from a Pearson Partner School will be spending two weeks in Great Britain, where they'll have the chance to study English with teenagers from many other countries and visit world famous destinations like London, Oxford, Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.  Working together, we really can do more.

The competition itself will be announced in early December and will close at the end of March.  Before then, here are the experts who'll be judging the entries:

Sam Cooke and Wendy Grace are the founders of Bright Schooling, a British educational charity which aims to make English language lessons accessible to as many people as possible. After teaching or lecturing in countries as diverse as Vietnam, Denmark, Taiwan, Kosovo and South Korea, both Sam and Wendy have spent a number of years working in English-language teaching here in Ukraine.  Earlier this year they partnered with Dinternal on a project to provide free classroom resources to schools in Mariupol.

Colin Gibson is a doctoral researcher in literature at the University of York. He has a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and an MA in English Literary Studies from the University of York. He worked as an English language teacher for six years between 2011 and 2017. He was born in Oxford but lived in a forest for the first six years of his life due to his father's job. His main interests are reading, writing, and playing football.



Aaron Fearnley comes from Rochdale, a town in the north-west of England.  He studied Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire and then did his CELTA at the Manchester Academy of English.  Since 2012, he has taught English in Britain, Hong Kong and Spain and travelled to four different continents.  "I know from my own experience that English is a vital global language nowadays and I'm passionate about passing on my knowledge to give students the best chance to succeed."



Monika Sherry was born in Wroclaw, Poland but now lives and works in Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland.  She worked for IBM in Bratislava and has taught English and Polish for a total of eight years, completing the CELTA while teaching in Paris.  Her students have included film stars and workers from Chanel, Hermes and BNP Paribas bank.  She loves reading, travelling and learning about new cultures.

Grace Thomas studied English Literature and Language with Creative Writing at St Mary's University in London.  Since doing her CELTA in 2012, she's taught English in Spain, France, the Czech Republic, Britain and Italy, where she worked as assistant director of studies at a school in Naples.  She now lives in Chester and works full-time for a company that organises study trips for teenagers in Britain.

Keep watching and good luck everyone!

Michael Hudson

Activity of the week - Paraphrase Pairs

ZNO Teachers!

Here is a simple way to make reading activities more fun, and a nice way to get students paraphrasing. Of course, that's a skill which is essential for tackling the writing, reading and listening parts of ZNO.

Many modern books aimed at helping students with ZNO, such as 'Focus' or 'Wider World' include reading tasks such as Matching, Multiple Choice and Gap Fills. These reflect the exam tasks the students will tackle in their exams.

Paraphrase Pairs

Instead of asking the students to do the multiple choice individually. We can put the students in pairs and give one student the questions and the other student the text.
The student with the questions must find out the answers without looking at the text themself. The students must work together to decide what the answers are, without showing each other the questions or text.

However...

Neither of the students are allowed to read directly from their paper!

They must summarise and paraphrase the questions and relavent parts of the text to each other. This will encourage them to think of synonyms and alternative ways of expressing ideas, skills which will come in handy when taking those all-important ZNO papers.

Have fun!

Activity of the week-- Banana!

Hi Guys,

A very quick and simple game to practice vocabulary!

Ask the students to choose a word that they learnt in that lesson, and to write a sentence using that word in context. For example, if the topic was 'reporting verbs', they might choose the word 'avoid' and the sentence might be as below.

"I always avoid watching films that are very romantic"

The student then erases the original word from the sentence.

"I always  ------  watching films that are very romantic"

The student then writes the word 'banana' instead of the original word.

"I always banana watching films that are very romantic".

Ask the students to read their sentences to one another, asking their partner to guess the original word. Students can then mingle around the room practising their sentences.

Excellent for ZNO exam skills!

Works particularly well with:

Gerund and infinitive

Phrasal verbs

Collocations

Have fun!

Another Competition Coming Soon....

After our recent Focus and Wider World competitions, a lot of you have been asking when our next contest will take place.  Here's Michael Hudson with a special preview....

The Christmas lights are going up, the leaves are coming down and we're almost at the end of Pearson's 20th anniversary year in Ukraine.  It's been a landmark 12 months for us all.  In April, over 1,000 people saw Vaughan Jones, Ania Kolbuszewska and Marek Jedryka speak in three different cities, while more than 500 teachers attended last month's two-day English Forum conference held at the Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics.  Personally, I've spent much of this year travelling the length and breadth of the country, doing seminars, workshops, demonstration lessons and PTE examining in - deep breath! - Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lviv, Lutsk, Shatsk, Cherkasy, Kropyvnytskiy, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Ivano Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Drohobych, Zaporizhia and Khmelnitskiy. 

We were almost as busy with our competitions.  Several lucky teachers got the chance to have coffee with Focus author Vaughan Jones when he visited Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv. From May to October, hundreds of students from all over Ukraine joined the wider world by writing to tell us about their hometowns.  I know Tom and I are both really looking forward to meeting the winning year 6 students from Vinnytsia's Gymnasium Number 1 in person sometime soon!

Our final competition of 2017 had to be something really special.  Thanks to our partners at Alekom Tour, it really, really is.  How special?  Well, if you're a student in a year 8, 9, 10 or 11 class at one of our Pearson Partner Schools, you'll soon have the chance to win a two-week study trip here:

Visas?  Free
Flights?  Free
English classes?  Free
Afternoon and evening activities?  Free
Food?  Free
Accommodation? Free
Excursions to places like London, Oxford and Buckingham Palace?  Free

Want to know more?  Keep watching this space....

Activity of the week - Grammar investigation!

A nice game to help students focus on common errors and improve accuracy. It's easy to set up and is also a lot of fun!

Materials
Just some paper!

Procedure
Tell the students about a crime that occurred the night before the lesson - a robbery at the school, for example. 

Explain that all the students are suspects, and they must investiagate to find the 3 culprits.
Give all the students a slip of paper.   You need to have written 'thief' or 'murderer' on three of them to signify the people who committed the specific crime. . Make sure the students don't  give the game away by revealing what is on their paper.  If it has nothing written on it, they are innocent.

The students then imagine what they were doing  last night and use the target language to explain it. The culprits must lie of course!

Target language which suits this activity includes:

Narrative tenses
Gerund and infinitive
Passives
3rd conditional

The culprits must intentionally include a small grammar mistake in their story. Something they think will be hard to recognise.

When the students have completed this task. They interview each other in pairs, listening for mistakes. The innocent students must identify the culprits by listening for the grammar errors. The culprits must avoid detection by trying to slip their errors in unnoticed.

At the end, the students work in pairs and try to identify all 3 culprits according to the particular mistake they used.


This game is great to encourage students to pay attention to common errors and accuracy.

Have fun!

Activity of the week - Brainstorm 3

This week's activity is a fun alternative or addition to 'Concept Checking Questions.'
Its very simple and requires no preparation!

• Divide the class into small groups of 3 or 4.
• The teacher calls out  CCQs using the target language; the groups have to brainstorm 3 examples. For instance, if the lesson is about adjectives of feeling, you could use '3 things that make people jealous'  or  '3 things that make people annoyed in the cinema'  or '3 things that might make you feel relieved'
• The groups then brainstorm and write down 3 things.The first group to do it holds up their paper and shouts out!
• The teacher then reads the examples and if all the class agree then that team scores a point.

A simple way to concept check and make sure the students have REALLY understood the meaning of words.

Have fun!

Visual scaffolding - helping our students climb to the top

It's difficult to climb without something to hold on to. When students are trying to increase their level of English by producing new language they need something too. This is why Jerome Bruner decided to call his teaching theory 'Scaffolding'.

Scaffolding is a word Bruner used to describe all the assistance teachers give to students in order to help them reach their goal. If you have ever tried to cook a curry with lots of ingredients, you will know that constant reference to the recipe is required. Simply reading once and trying to remember everything isn't enough. This is the same for students trying to put together large chunks of language.

Visual scaffolding

We can help students by providing visual aids to remind them of structures and words as a reference whilst trying to produce longer utterances. Clear, organised whiteboard work can help us do this. Boardwork should be planned carefully to produce a frame the students can use whilst trying to produce the target language.

My terrible doctor's handwriting aside ("like a spider wrote it" was one of my teacher'S comments), here is an example of scaffolding from a recent lesson on family vocabulary and 'have got'. In the production stage of the lesson the students have to ask each other  questions about their families using 'have got'. All the language the students need is there for them to put together and refer to when forming it for the first time.

Learning to fly

After giving the students plenty of time to practice with 'Scaffolding' a nice technique is to remove it once the students feel more comfortable and let them repeat the activity. This time using only memory and experience. Being able to do this will give the students a real sense of achievement.

Focus on Scaffolding

"Focus" has taken the idea of Scaffolding a step further by adding the 'Word store'.  The word store is a booklet attatched at the back (one page for each unit) with exercises for students to complete and store the relevent vocabulary for that unit. The Word Store can be opened at the same time as the lesson page to create a three page spread. So for every lesson in that unit, the Word Store will be right there providing the perfect scaffolding to help students recycle that all-important vocabulary.

No more excuses for forgetting words or not using them!

Providing students with Scaffolding increases confidence and therefore motivation. Let's help our learners climb as high as they possibly can!

Tom

Activity of the week - Silent Auction

Hello Guys!

This week's activity is a controlled practice in the form of a silent auction.
It needs very little preparation time and is lots of fun.

Materials  -  Pieces of paper with sentences on.  Blu-tac or Sellotape to stick to walls. 

Preparation 
-  Write 10 sentences using the target language. 3 or 4 of these will have mistakes, while the
   rest should be correct. 
 -Make the sentences big and easy to read, and number them 1-10.
- Stick the sentences up around the room.

Procedure
- After teaching the target language, put the class into small groups or pairs.
- Give each group a piece of paper.
- Ask them to write '1000' at the top and 1-10 down the side.
- Explain to the class that they all have $1000 to spend, and the winning team is the one who can buy the most CORRECT sentences.
- The students move around the room deciding if the sentences are right or wrong.
if they think the sentence is wrong, they put 0 next to the corresponding number. If they think it is right they can try to buy it by writing an amount they want to spend next to that number (making sure not to let other groups see what they have written).
- It is important that the cumulative amount they write down does not exceed 1000.
- After 10 minutes ask the students to sit down and give them an extra minute to decide where to place their money.
- Hold up each sentence in turn and ask how much each group placed on it. it it's wrong, they lose their money. If it's right, the team that wrote the highest amount down for that number wins the sentence.
- The team with the most at the end is the winner!

Ideal for
Perfect tenses
Used to/would
conditionals
reported speech

Variation
Have the teams write the sentences.

Have fun!

Hello from my Hometown: Join the Wider World

All of us at Dinternal Book and Pearson are really excited about our brand new course for lower-secondary students, Wider World.  To celebrate its launch here in Ukraine, we're also beginning a new competition which will run until October 13th 2017

As part of the competition, we've made a video that you can use with your students in class.  Robert Hartigan, Michael Hudson and I talk about our hometowns in Britain and Ireland and mention the best and worst things about living there.  For example, I talk about the famous Hull City football club.  We've  made a worksheet that you can give to your students, which you can download here along with the competition rules.  To help your students with language for sharing opinions about their hometown, we've also produced a great classroom poster full of useful expressions from Wider World which we'll be giving out to schools.

 

I hope you and your students enjoy using the materials and learning about the places we're from.  Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions using the comment box below.  I'm sure the competition would also make a great project for those of you who have summer camps with your students and will help introduce your part of this beautiful country to the wider world.  What are the best and worst things about your hometown?  Tell us before the competition closes in October and we could soon be visiting you in person to find out more!

Click here for the competition rules and entry form 

Remember that you need to send us the answers to three things: the video, the listening activity from Wider World and the writing your students do about their hometown.

The poster we've made includes lots of the useful, high-frequency phrases from Wider World, which are great for helping your students sound more natural and fluent when they speak. The book also has video and reading texts based on authentic BBC programmes that answer questions like 'What do the British really eat?', 'Do smartphones make you smarter?' and 'Can school be fun?' If you don't have video facilities in your classroom, you can use them to practise listening work in class and then your students can watch them at home using the extra online homework that comes with both the workbook and MyEnglishLab.

You can see more about the book here.  

Good luck, guys.

Activity of the week -Phrasal verb Bingo!

Before new vocabulary is introduced, it's a good idea for the students to brainstorm which vocabulary connected to that topic they can remember.This is called activating prior knowledge, or schema.

A simple way to do this is by playing bingo.

Materials: A small empty bingo card (a grid of 3 columns and 2 rows)

Procedure:

1. Put the students in small groups
2. Give each group a bingo card (they can easily make their own)
3. Tell the students you are going to talk about how you got to school that day, and they must try to predict which phrasal verbs you are going to use.
4. The students brainstorm and choose 6 phrasal verbs, one for each box on the bingo card
5. Talk about your journey to work using a variety of phrasal verbs.
6. The students listen and tick off the phrasal verbs as they hear them.
7. The first one to tick all 6 or a line shouts BINGO!

A great way to activate schema and also introduce new target language.

Apart from phrasal verbs, other ideas include:

verbs - talk about your daily routine

adjectives - describe your home town

verb tenses  - tell a story

Have fun!

Hello From My Hometown Competition: Closing Soon!

Michael Hudson

With only ONE WEEK left before the closing date in our Wider World competition, here's another guest post from Dinternal's Michael Hudson.  Michael's from the north-east of England but he's now based in our Kyiv office, where he's been reading all your work and judging the monthly prizes since the competition started in May.   The deadline for entries is midnight on October 13th - our marketing team will wait until then before closing the entry form because so many of you have been sending us your work late at night recently.  If you can stay awake, so can we.  The wider world is waiting...  

Hello from my Hometown began on May 1st and ends on another memorable date,  Friday October 13th! Does the mention of Friday and 13th make you feel nervous about suffering from bad luck? Then you might have a problem with

Paraskevidekatriaphobia!!!

Paraskevidekatriaphobia isn't just an incredibly hard word to spell.  It also describes the fear of Friday the 13th.  It was first used in the early 1990s by an American psychotherapist who combined the Greek words paraskevi (Friday) and dekatria (thirteen) with the suffix -phobia.  Apparently, he also claimed that anyone who could pronounce the word would immediately be cured.

But why do so many people consider Friday 13th to be unlucky?  The truth is that  nobody knows for sure. Some people say the superstition dates back to a biblical story or a Viking legend.  Others believe it started on October 13th 1307 when King Philip IV of France ordered the arrest and torture of hundreds of Knights Templars. Whatever the reason, a recent study in the USA estimated that over 17 million people in that country alone are affected by a fear of Friday 13th.  Travel south of the border to Mexico, however, and they'll tell you that it's Tuesday 13th you should really be afraid of....

Our international team at Dinternal Books all know that cultural awareness is a vital skill.   That's why we've decided to offer a very special prize for 13 lucky winners this Friday 13th!  All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is to send in your entry before noon next Friday.  In the afternoon,  I'll pick 13 winners at random from all the entries we've received since May.  So Friday 13th could finally be your lucky day!

The prize will be a copy of Pearson's Culture Close Up DVD for you to use with your students in class. Each DVD includes 10 videos on aspects of culture in Britain and the USA.  The videos come together with ready-made worksheets at A1 and A2+ level and teacher's notes to save you time while you're preparing for class. 

There are five videos using British English and five that use American English.  Each video comes with easier and more challenging voice-overs so you can decide on the level of difficulty for your students.  If you want, you can also play them with subtitles.  The topics include school life in the UK,  music, sport, cities in the USA and festivals, which means you can introduce your students to British and American culture using language they understand and through topics they'll find engaging, relevant and fun.

Even if you don't win, every entry we receive before midnight on Friday 13th will go into the grand prize draw to get some of our native speaker methodologists at your school for one whole day.  If any of your students still haven't conquered their fear of Friday 13th, we can start by helping them to pronounce that word....

Good luck! 
Michael

Activity of the week - Jigsaw Reading

Here is a really simple way to make reading lessons more active!

Active learning is one of the 3 pillars of Competency based language teaching and an essential tool in creating a class environment full of motivated students who are able to do more than just memorise.

Jigsaw reading is a co-operative task that involves dividing up a long text into smaller parts. Students are then divided into groups of 2-4 and are each given a part of the text to read.

The students then feedback to each other on the information in their own text, which encourages discussion and speaking and also helps the students understand the text properly as they have the responsibility to explain it to somebody else.

Comprehension questions can then be done in teams, making it essential for all the group to have the information and therefore motivating the students to read their text and then paraphrase it properly.  

There's an example in this guide for teachers.

Try a jigsaw reading for yourself and let me know how it goes!

Activity of the week

Here is a zero-prep fun game that really gets students reaching for that target language!

Materials- Some slips of old paper

Target language -  Use with vocabulary sets. Idioms and phrasal verbs work especially well

Procedure - In the final part of the lesson during the production phase, give each student two slips of paper.

Ask the students to write on each slip one of the phrases/words from the board.(making sure to keep it a secret)

Encourage the students to choose a word or phrase they didn't know at the start of the lesson.

The teacher gives a question which the students have to discuss with another student.

The idea is to try and 'win' the slips from their partner by using in context (not just saying) the slips their partner is holding.

Of course the students don't know which phrases and words their partner is holding, and so this activity will force the students try to use the more difficult phrases from the board.

The teacher must monitor and feed in new discussion questions at regular intervals.

the winner is the student who is holding the most slips at the end of the lesson.

This activity can be done sat down in pairs with rotation or as a mingle.

Enjoy!

Competency Based Language Teaching- the art of DOING

I know how to make the perfect fried egg. I know how to curl a ball and score from 25 yards just like David Beckham. I know how to drive. I know how to ski.  I know how to do all of these things flawlessly. Except, of course, I can't do any of them.

The bottom of my fried eggs always seem to burn before the top bit is cooked. Pressure always goes to my head when I shoot in football. My parking is awful. And anybody who has seen me ski - well, the less said, the better.

Yet I KNOW  the techniques for all these things. I have had 25 driving lessons and if anybody tells me to plough my skis again I'll.. well, I'll get to that later.

So what's going wrong?

Many skills require more than just a knowledge of how to complete them.
They also require a good knowledge of what it feels like to complete them without too much thinking, so that these skills be called upon when needed.  If we are not able to call upon the skill we need, then the knowledge of HOW to do it becomes useless.

I can repeat ad infinitum the rules of how to place my body weight and skis correctly, but this is a pointless piece of knowledge considering the fact I still can't ski.

Language learning is very similar. Rarely do I meet a student at B1+ in Odessa who doesn't know how to form the  2nd/3rd conditional. Rarer still is it to find a student at B1 who actually draws on this knowledge when in conversation to express themselves. 
The student can repeat rules but not actually apply them. Wasted knowledge.

It seems there is a gap between knowing and doing. If we want our learners to become successful English speakers then we must bridge this gap.

So what can we do?

Emphasising the need to 'be able to'  rather than just 'to know' is an essential step we must take in order to become competent teachers. I believe the onus is on us not only to give the students ample opportunity to practice- fail- repeat- improve - repeat, etc. but also to make the students aware of the gap they have to bridge. We shouldn't be satisfied with the fact that students can mechanically repeat the form of the present perfect continuous in the classroom.  Can they use it in real life?

It's also our job as teachers to understand that this process will take more than one lesson. We need to support and push our students to the point of 'being able to'  even if they may fight against us with cries of 'We know this'!

The Ukrainian Education Programme

The Ministry of Education in Ukraine has responded to this by reforming its lower-secondary programme and introducing something called CBLT (Competency Based Language Teaching) which (among other things) introduces a more practical 'can do' approach to English learning.

The Ministry has introduced 10 competencies consisting of smaller parts as a guideline  of what students should be able to do, with the emphasis being on DO rather than just know.
This is the first step in a movement away from the traditional parrot-fashion memorising of rules that accounted for a large part of education in the past.

The 10 competencies can be found on the Dinternal website.

Help is at hand!

Don't despair teachers! This shift in focus doesn't mean a total overhaul of everything we have done in the past. In fact, many of the top titles on the market such as Wider World, Next Move and Islands have been designed with all these competencies in mind. Teacher's books now list where each of the competencies are taught and practiced, to make sure your students become doers and not just knowers.

We at Dinternal are working on seminars to help teachers with this new approach and demonstrate how it can be easily applied in the classroom without too much upheaval or change.

Look out for our seminars, webinars and workshops!

CBLT will help our students become people who can use English in their day to day life in order to achieve their maximum potential. Who knows, one day I might get that skiing right!

Tom

Activity of the week!

Here is my first 'Activity of the week' of the new semester!

Designed to help enliven those long classroom hours with activities which students will find engaging and fun whilst practising the target language. I creatively refer to this game as 'sticky on the head mingle' and was inspired by a Christmas day game my family often play after a huge festive dinner.

I use it to practice personality adjectives.

Materials : Sticky labels

Get the students to write a personality adjective you have studied on a sticky label and apply it to the forehead of the person next to them. 
When all the students have done this, they mingle around the room.
When they encounter another student they make a sentence to describe the other person's word by telling them about their behaviour.

For example, ipon meeting a student with 'generous' on their head, they would say something like "Oh, thank you for the money you gave me"  or "You always give good presents." The students wander around commenting on each other's personalities.

At the end, the student guess which personality trait they had.  Simple!

It can also be adapted for many other vocabulary sets.

These secondary pre-intermediate students loved it!

Welcome to the new semester!

After a wonderful summer break, it's great to be back teaching at the London School of English!

This year I've chosen to use Speak Out for General English and CAE Gold for my CAE group. I'll be sharing experiences, activities and teaching tips from these courses during the year, so be sure to keep checking the blog for updates!

Upgrade your Qualifications with LSE Odessa

Graham Jones

Hi everyone! I hope you're all enjoying the start of summer.  With the end of another school year, we'll all be taking a break between now and August. Before we go, here's a post from Graham Jones, the director of the London School of English in Odessa.  Have a great holiday and I'll see you all again soon! 

As teachers are on holiday during the summer months, a lot of them use the time to upgrade their skills and qualifications.  One course we've just finished in the London School of English in Odessa is the TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) exam preparation course.  This was a 6 week course designed to prepare teachers for the TKT Module 2 (lesson preparation and resources) exam which will take place on July 1st.  As well as exam preparation, the course also included a lot of practical tips and advice for teachers, especially regarding lesson planning and use of resources.  The course was really enjoyable to teach and the participants (mainly from Odessa's schools and universities) were really enthusiastic.  Good luck in the exam!

A more intense course will start in LSE on Monday June 26th.  This is a course for teachers to gain the internationally recognised CELTA certificate, which allows teachers to teach English as a Second Language anywhere in the world, including Ukraine.  It's bound to be an exhausting but rewarding 4 weeks for all involved, including the tutors (myself and Kate Leigh).

If you are interested in either TKT (we are going to run a Module 3 preparation course in October) or CELTA, give LSE a call!

Our CELTA class of summer 2016

Working with Graded Readers

Michael Hudson

This is the first guest post on the blog from Michael Hudson, who works in Dinternal Books' Kyiv office and is one of the judges of our fantastic Wider World competition.  Every month between now and September, Michael will choose one of the competition entries to win a special prize of a Culture Close-Up DVD and a set of graded readers for students to use in class.   If you've never used readers before, they're a great resource for students to practise their language skills.  Here's Michael with some practical ideas.

I love using graded readers with students.  Not only do they introduce them to reading in English for pleasure but they also allow you to change the dynamic of your classroom work, help with motivation and provide lots of recycling of vocabulary and grammar.  You get engaging stories that are specially adapted for the language level of your students, which means they're ideal of out-of-class reading work. Like any other resource, readers work best when you give students work to do before, during and after they read the book. I usually do pre-reading activities in the lesson, then give students a chapter or part of the book to read at home (fast finishers in classroom activities can do part of this homework during lesson time).  We then review their while-reading tasks at the start of the next lesson and follow-up with post-reading discussion and extension activities.  You don't have to do it this way, of course.  A great thing about readers is how flexible they are, so you could give students silent reading time in class, too.  I don't usually recommend getting students to read aloud directly from the book.  However, if you want to use the reader for speaking and pronunciation work, you could get them to act out or even improve certain scenes as a post-reading activity.

Pre-reading activities

1.  Show your students the cover of the book and elicit as much vocabulary as possible.  Then ask the students to guess what happens in the story and to write short summaries of the plot.  Keep these until they've finished reading the book and you can look at them again to see which summary was closest to what really happened.

2. Give the students the chapter titles (jumbled up) and ask them to work in small groups to put the titles in what they think is the correct order.  Like the first activity, you can extend this by asking the students to then write a short outline of their story which they can compare to the real one later.  You can also use this as a link to grammar work.  Which chapter do the students think will be the most interesting?  Which will be the funniest?  Which will be the most exciting?

3.  Lots of readers have pictures to go with the text.  Photocopy the pictures, jumble them up and ask the students to put them in order.  Like the chapter titles, they can use the pictures to predict their own version of the story.  Once again, you can easily integrate grammar work into this activity by asking the students to describe what they can see in the picture and what the characters are doing.

4. Often readers will have a list of characters at the front of the book along with some biographical details such as their jobs or where they live.  You could make role play cards for your students.   Give each student a different character (include the name and 2-3 other pieces of information about them). The class can then do a roleplay where the characters meet at a party.   You can make the task harder by giving the students extra questions to ask, which means they have to invent extra information about their characters before they read the book (they can check their ideas later when they're reading).

5.  You can then use the information the students already know about the characters to make a relationship map.  Give your students a template to complete in groups like the one you can see on the left.  They can work in groups to complete it with their ideas before they read the book.  Display the maps in your classroom and the students can check their ideas while they're reading and possibly also add extra biographical information about each character.  At the end, you can go back and find out whose ideas were closest to what really happened.

6.  Find out about the author.  Give the students the author's name and ask them to write down some questions they would like to ask him/her.  The students can then try to find the answers to the questions either online or using the biography of the author at the front of the book.

7. Make a K-W-L chart.  This has three columns:  K (what I already know),  W (what I want to know) and L (what I learnt).  Students can work in groups to complete the first column with any information they know about the book before they start reading.  Then ask them to think of questions they'd like to find the answers to while they read and put these in the W column.  The final column, L, will be blank for now but students will complete this either while they're reading or when they finish the book.

While-reading 

1.  Students write a newspaper-style article on events in the chapter they're reading.  They could also interview the characters involved to get extra information, which works really well if you've already allocated characters to students before they read the book (see ideas for this in pre-reading activities 4 and 5).

2.  Horoscopes.  After the students have been introduced to the characters and have read part of the story, you could ask them to write horoscopes predicting the future.  What will happen to each character next?  What's going to happen before the end of the book?

3. Ask the students to make a comic strip summarising the main events in the chapter as they read. You could either ask the students to draw the pictures (and write text in speech bubbles) themselves or they could use one of these free apps to do it online.

4.  You can do lots of prediction activities before students read each new chapter.  For example, you can write out some sentences about things that might happen in the next part of the story and get students to discuss whether they are true or false (pre-teach or elicit the phrase 'No spoilers!' for enthusiastic students who are reading ahead).   You can also ask students to write down information about specific characters from the chapter they've just read (quotes by or about them, where they are and what they are doing) on bits of paper.  Swap the paper with another student/group and ask them to write some predictions based on the information they've been given.

5. The students can also fill in a table about the characters while they read. You could have each character on the left of the table.  Along the top there will be categories like age, appearance, likes and dislikes, possessions, etc.  You can compare the tables in class. Eventually, you could get the students to create a Facebook page or Wikipedia entry for the characters (on a poster if you don't want to do it online).

6.  Students can retell parts of the story from the point of view of one of the characters.  What happened to you?  How did you feel?  "I......"

7.  What should the character do?  Stop reading at a crucial point of the story.  Ask your students to write down or brainstorm some advice they would give the characters involved.  "I think you should....'

8.  Putting events in order.  At the end of each chapter, give the students a list of events that have happened in the book so far.  Can they remember the order they happened in?

9,  Give the students a list of questions to answer while they're reading.  They then compare their answers in the next class.  Pearson readers have lots of while-reading activities like these already prepared to save you time and effort.  You can see an example here.

10.  Encourage students to keep a list of new words.  Which words would they like to remember? What was their favourite word in the chapter?  You could then get the students to make vocabulary cards of these words to help you review and practise them.  The simplest way of doing this would be to make cards with English on one side and Ukrainian on the other.  However, you could do an online version of this too. Your students could even create their own quiz.

Post-reading 

1.  Ask the students to review the book for future readers.  You can give them criteria such as the theme/topic of the book, how difficult it was to understand, how interesting it is (for boys / girls / people interested in (history), etc,  Ask the students to write their reviews down and you can stick them to the inside back cover of the book or place them in an envelope you attach to the back cover. If your students have smartphones, you can use this great free app and ask them to review the book more interactively.  This way, students can see video reviews of the book just by scanning the cover with their phones!

2. The students can make a quiz about the book. You can either do this in groups with students making questions for other groups to answer or you could switch the normal classroom role and ask the students to make questions for you to answer.  If necessary, you can let the students check for answers they can't remember in the book (but they don't get as many points for a correct answer).

3.  Give the students a list of quotes from the book.  Can they remember which character said each one and why?  Can they put the quotes in the correct order?

4.  Put important words and phrases from the book on the board in the same order they appear in the story.  Can the students retell the story using the prompts you've given them?

5.  Alternative endings.  Ask the students to come up with a different ending to the book.  They could then write an email to the publisher (or to us at Dinternal Books) explaining their suggested changes.

6.  The students could write and perform a play or a short film based on the book. They could even record this on their phones!

7.  The students make a promotional poster for the book to advertise it to other students in your school.

8.   Spin-off stories are very popular nowadays, especially in TV.  The students could take a minor character and invent a whole new story about him/her.

9.  Make your own audio book.  Now the students know the content of the story, you could use an app like audacity to enable them to record themselves reading parts of it aloud.  This reduces the stress of reading live in front of the class as students can delete and re-record if they make any mistakes.  In fact, mistakes could be a good learning opportunity - you could tell the students to make 3 deliberate factual errors while they're speaking.  Can the rest of the class listen to the recording and spot the mistakes?

Pearson also have lots of ideas for using readers as well as certificates you can print out and give your students to celebrate their achievements in learning through extensive reading.

Happy reading and congratulations to our May winners from Novoukrainka in Kirovohrad Oblast, I'm sure your students will enjoy using their new Pearson graded readers!

Cheers,
Michael