Welcome and Creative ways to group students

                   

Hello everybody! My name is Andrea Lluch and I am a university student at the University of Barcelona. This is my fourth and last year there and I have chosen the mention of English because my dream is to be an English teacher. This blog is an initiative created by my teacher of didactics of the English language with the aim that we can collect all the ideas that we learn in class week after week. I am passionate about the idea because writing is one of the things I like to do most, since I was a child.  In addition, I believe it can be an excellent plan because through this way, when we graduate and start working at school, we will have a lot of materials and resources available to be used. Finally, I think that being able to write  on the blog each week will help us improve our written skills and we will be able to learn new vocabulary. All in all, as you can see there are many advantages so I hope, dear readers, that you enjoy reading my blog, as much as I am going to enjoy writing on it!

Greetings,

Andrea Lluch             

Now, you will be able to see my first post about creative ways to group students.                                          

                             

Students love work collaboratively because it becomes funnier and  more meaningful. Teachers also agree that through this way kids can share habilities and knowledge as each member has opportunities to contribute in small groups. They can help each other and classroom climate can improve because they are more aware of the needs and feelings of their classmates.

However, sometimes teachers want to organize any activity by groups but we don’t want to waste much time and we are not sure about how we can do it. Personally speaking, it is good if sometimes we let students decide by themselves with whom they want to work, but not always because our objective is to get everyone working together. For this reason, today in class we have learnt one quick strategy to group pupils. Moreover, I have done a research to find other creative strategies and I would like to share two of them in this blog.

1. Remember your number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …

One of the quick strategies we can use consists on telling a number to each student and they have to remember it. When all pupils have their number, we can group together those who have the same.

For example, if we want teams of 5 students, we will begin to say: number one, two, three, four and five in order and then, all pupils with 1 will work together and the same with the other numbers. 

                               

2. Team maker:

My  favorite way to group students is with the web “Team maker”. Simply enter your student’s names, select the number of groups you would like and in a minute your teams will have been created. In addition, team maker has settings that allow you to choose a team named based on: animals, dinosaurs, cars, birds, among others. I’m sure that kids will love it!!

As an example, if you want to do 5 groups about animals, the web will select different names: Group 1- lions, group 2- elephants, 3- bears, 4-gorillas and 5-cheetahs. In my opinion, it is very easy to use and it can be very rewarding because students can choose the theme of groups and think different names. In this way , we can work on speaking and vocabulary in a fun way!

Team maker: http://chir.ag/projects/team-maker/

3. Book cover puzzle:

Other resource we can use in our English classes is the book cover puzzle. We need to scan and print different covers of books for children. Then, we can laminate them and cut into 4 or 5 puzzle pieces (depending if we want groups of 4, 5, 6…) and give one piece to each kid. 

Finally, students will have to find the classmates who have the pieces of their puzzles and teams will be done.