The most important tool in the classroom is the whiteboard. It serves as your bread and butter. As you learnt in the previous chapter, the whiteboard can serve as your centre point for movement, but arguably more importantly; it serves as your translator. If you are trying to describe something and you’re struggling and lost in translation then use the whiteboard – draw what you’re trying to describe. If you’re explaining a grammar point, use the whiteboard as a visual aid by writing out the grammar rule and sample sentences.
Let’s say you are teaching how the amount of syllables in an adjective determines its type of comparative and superlative. Such as if an adjective has one syllable i.e. fast, it’s comparative becomes faster and it’s superlative becomes the fastest. But if it has two or more syllables such as thoughtful or beautiful, the comparative become more thoughtful and more beautiful, and their superlative becomes the most thoughtful and the most beautiful. However, as there are always exceptions in English, adjectives with two syllables ending in y such as lovely, become lovelier and the loveliest. This is simple for you and me to understand, but not as easy for young students to grasp simply by telling them. This is when the whiteboard becomes your best friend. Here is how I would use the whiteboard in such a scenario:
On the top right of diagram A, I have word mapped different adjectives, on the top left I’ve listed the rules, and below them, I’ve created a table that clearly lays out the execution of the grammar. Once the grammar has been displayed, you need to give the students a chance to practice using the grammar.
Let’s say I wanted to do this by doing an activity. I could play a game I like to call ‘body parts’. Two students lay down on the ground, I then proceed to draw an outline of their bodies, similar to what you might see at a homicide crime scene. The students always laugh hysterically at this point. The students then get two slips of paper and write their names on the paper, I put these pieces of paper face down on both of the head sections of the two body outlines. I then give them another two pieces of paper in which on one, they write a one-syllable adjective and on the other, a two-syllable adjective. I mix them up within their syllable categories and evenly place these pieces of paper on the chest section of the first body outline and on the legs of the second body outline. And for the final time, the students get a fourth single piece of paper and must write an animal of their choosing on the slip of paper, which is then placed on the leg section of the first body outline. Under the slips of paper on the first body outline, I will write ‘is as’; under the second slips of paper on the first body outline I will write ‘as a’ (alternatively you can write ´is´ and ´than a´ in order to practice comparatives as oppose to similes) and for the second body outline I would write ‘is the’ on the chest section. Here is what the final outcome should look like:
Finally, a student will come up to the bodies and, in order, pick up the pieces of paper whilst reading the sentence. This is a great display of syntax, and if they struggle to choose the correct comparative or superlative, this is when the whiteboard becomes your best friend. You simply point to it, and they will immediately be able to figure out the correct word to say. The type of sentence a student will create should be something along the lines of:
John is as ugly as a monkey (or alternatively: John is uglier than a monkey) but, Henry is the most beautiful.
I would like to point out that some schools are low on budget and so often you are limited to only a black marker, which is why the above whiteboard is solely in black. But if on occasion you’re very lucky, you may have the option to use different coloured markers. In the diagrams below, I will demonstrate to you how you can use different coloured markers to their full advantage.
The true skill in using a whiteboard are the steps taken to create the final masterpiece. How do you start from a clean whiteboard to a fully written whiteboard and ensure as you do so, your students can understand what you’ve written?
Let’s break this down step by step to see how one can use the whiteboard to its full advantage. Let’s say your topic of the class is jobs. Your key vocab, of course, would be jobs – however, depending on the age and ability of your students, you don’t want to introduce every job known to man. If your students are 7, then the most common jobs would suffice i.e. policeman, chef, baker, pilot, dentist, doctor etc. What would your key sentence then be? At least for me, it would be to ensure my students are able to fluently describe what people do at their jobs. New teachers often make the mistake of going overboard. If we take the job doctor, for example, some teachers may think that their students must be able to say the equipment they use, the types of doctors there are, how one becomes a doctor etc. Remember for children, you want to keep it short, simple, snappy and to the point. It´s better for a student to know one sentence structure but be able to use it fluently than know a hundred and use them wrong. To quote my favourite martial artist (Bruce Lee): I fear not the man who has practised 10 thousand kicks once, but the man who has practised one kick 10 thousand times.
My key sentence structure would be, using doctor as an example: ‘Doctors help sick people’. Easy right? The first step is to pick out the key grammar point, which in this case would be ‘help’ – a verb. Some teachers would argue about how many grammar terms you should teach students. I don’t want to get into a big discussion about this, so to move on quickly, I always go for the three golden words – noun, adjective and verb (as students get older and their English improves, more complicated grammar terms, such as adverb and pronoun, can be taught).
First things first: word map with your students as many verbs as they know (keep in mind you will use these verbs to describe a job; so if a student says sleep, there’s no use in writing that down as only one job comes to mind that can use the word sleep to describe it. Let’s leave that for the adult classes).
A fun way to word map verbs is by placing students into teams and getting them to write as many verbs as they can – the team with the most verbs win.
After you have word mapped the verbs, the next step is to go through each verb and get the students to tell you what jobs correlate with these verbs. For example:
Teacher: who sings?
Students: I know, singers sing!
Once you have gone through each verb and written a job that correlates to that verb, you should have something like this on the whiteboard:
To complete the whiteboard we need the final part: Doctors help who? Soldiers fight who? English teachers teach whom/what?
Ask the students these questions and write their responses next to the verbs:
Now you’re finished! You’ve maximized the use of your whiteboard in a clear and concise manner and you’ve optimized the use of coloured markers. What more could a school ask from a teacher? Now all that’s left is to use the language in an activity, in which there are countless ways to follow through.
One such way is: Bingo, the classic game in which students have square tiled papers. A student comes to the front and picks a job from a bag with shuffled slips of paper with different jobs on them. Then without saying the job, they describe the job e.g. ‘they fight soldiers’. The other students listen and if they know the job and have it on one of their tiles, they cross it out. The first to get 4 or 5 tiles in a row shouts ‘bingo!’
Another great activity is ‘Who am I?’ This is the same game played in Quentin Tarantino’s ´Inglorious Basterds´. In this game you divide the class into two teams, a representative of those teams comes to the front. A sticky piece of paper with a job is stuck to their forehead. They must then ask questions to determine which job they have stuck to their heads, such as, ‘Do I write books?’, or ‘Do I fly in space?’ The first student to guess their job secures a point for their team.
Whiteboards are the catalysts for a smooth going, well-taught class.
There are a few notes to take into account: make sure you always use correct capitalization, which is at the beginning of a sentence and for proper nouns. Also make sure you are consistent with your whiteboard, in the above diagrams I have opted for using the plural of the jobs, so I cannot later say ‘a writer writes books’ unless I teach that to the class the next lesson; otherwise it can become awfully confusing and students may end up saying ´a teacher teach English´ or ´Teachers teaches English´ etc.
Whiteboards have a monumental use in the class if I were to describe each use; this book would be far longer than I intend it to be. So instead I shall mention one last use for a whiteboard – game boards. For example, another way to practice describing jobs is via a simple snakes and ladders style game board which can be drawn on the whiteboard in the following way:
The arrows going up represent the ladders and the arrows going down represent the snakes. You can divide the class into teams, each team has a coloured magnet, and they roll the dice and move along however many circles the dice dictate. In each box, you can write whatever key vocab point you are teaching. If we’re keeping with the topic of jobs, in each box you can write a particular job. If a student lands on that job, they must describe the job using the sample sentences presented earlier on the whiteboard – simple!
Another example of a whiteboard, drawn game board is battleships:
A double-sided whiteboard is needed for this game or two whiteboards back to back. First split the classroom into two teams, divide the whiteboards into boxes and fill each box with your key vocab, i.e. jobs. The teams, on each whiteboard, then draw three ships: one is 1 box long, the second is 2 boxes long and the third ship is 3 boxes long. The teams then play the classic battleships game, trying to guess the position of the other teams’ ships and trying to sink them before they sink theirs. If a team thinks a ship is on B2, they will describe the job written on the box of B2 and then shout: ‘B2 hit or miss?’ The first team to sink all the other teams’ ships win!
The first time I ever taught in a classroom was a complete mess. Afterwards, my boss kindly suggested that I could use the whiteboard more (I didn´t use it even once actually). I replied, ´why do I need to use the whiteboard?´ Looking back, I shudder with embarrassment, I didn´t last long at that job. Whiteboards are the bread and butter of any foreign language teacher, I might even ignorantly add, of any teacher!
