This is Tips for teaching the tiny teens, Claire Potter’s talk about tiny teens or the “tweenies” as some of us refer to them (younger teens). Like her handout the talk was clear, well structured with a bit of theory and some ideas. For me Claire’s main point of the talk was personalisation for motivation. Tiny teens are motivated by what they’re interested in or relevant for them (she also said they are actually interested in the teacher although we don’t think so at times). Knowing or being interested in hearing about the latest pop groups or TV programmes for this age group is important, as is getting to know your students’ personal likes and dislikes and interests. A good way of motivating these tiny teens are student-made quizzes and stories. The way she did the story was good, she modelled it by having sentences about an event (the first time she met a celebrity). The students had to guess what the event was. Then she read the story and showed them a picture of her aged 13 meeting a celebrity.
She also showed us other activities she got from teachers at her school. Tok’s future game was a grid of will questions and answers e.g ´Will I have any children?´ ´you will have 10 children´ ´you won´t have any´ etc, and it was based on a dice or spinner random luck format. She also highlighted the ´yes or no´ game used by Tez. This was one of my personal favourites. It was based on the old and popular yes or no game where students are asked questions, but they can’t say yes or no. Tez’s idea had a twist. To motivate a group of football loving tweens he asked them if they thought a Liverpool football player would be good at the game and then he showed a clip of the Liverpool football player playing it. Very funny. This motivated the students to want to play it.
Anyway check out the handout… any questions just ask Nat 🙂
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