LAST TERM. LAST WEEKS.

After more than six months of getting up early, classes from twenty five past eight a.m. to a quarter to three p.m., of short afternoons in which there is nearly no time to do anything but homework, every one in the High School takes conscience of one thing: 'I feel tired.'

In addition to this, depending on the area where you live, here in the south the sun begins to warm the classrooms early in the morning and one finds half-asleep students during the two first hours. Later on it's worse, the heat can be really uncomfortable, and paying attention, practising, or simply avoiding distraction could be very hard tasks indeed, becoming impossible during the last hour; sweat, the teacher's monotonous tone that hardly changes from time to time, open mouths trying to catch any fresh breeze coming in through the open door and windows, and everybody's mind floating outside to a café terrace or the beach, thinking about the long luminous afternoon; 'homework?, studying?'; the delicious evening that invites us to walk or meet friends, to go to bed late; 'exams?, final assessment?, the course is lost, this subject is no problem, maybe later, I can get an hour tomorrow,…' 

Another problem that gets worse with spring is (love, ahem!) absenteeism. Every morning you come into the classroom expecting twenty five or thirty students to be in class. You find ten or fifteen, if you are lucky. What to do? Carry on with the official program? Try to develop other themes and activities easier to undergo in these conditions? I personally prefer to deal with topics related to the season we are in, from the trite 'summer holidays', (water sport, travels, what would you do if…?, ….), to questions of closer interest, what to do with leisure time.




· Timetables and classes.

During the whole course it's important to take into account what time our classes are at, in order to plan how we are going to work them; obviously there is quite a big difference between having class in the first hour or in the last, but in this term the conditions, as I have said before, get harder and the changes in the attitude of students at the different hours may suppose an additional handicap. So more important than what to do, is how to do it.

During the first hours in the morning, it can be interesting to do active practice, activities which imply productive tasks; for example we can propose a project based on investigation to students: 

  1. Prepare material in English about concerts, festivals, meetings of different types, sports tournaments, plays, cinema,… We can get this information from Internet, the town council's programmes, newspapers, magazines, and so on.

  2. Photocopy and hand out the jumbled information to the students, and ask them to look for events that are going to take place in the area where they spend their summer holidays.

  3. Once the information has been selected, in groups according to the areas they spend their holidays in, student word it as a letter, brochure, newspaper article, etc. depending on our interest.

  4. Students read the compositions and write down on the blackboard the events that interest them most.

  5. Finally each student writes a scheme to attend to one of these events. It can be a true plan or one she/he would like to go to.

During the last hours of the day, the most difficult thing is to do is catch students' attention and get them concentrating. Beginning class with a dictation can give incredible results. It is important to choose a theme that allows us to do other types of activities. Correcting a dictation is a troublesome task. The best way of doing this is to write it on the blackboard, but dangerous. If we ask a student, we are correcting his/her dictation publicly, if we ask several the problem remains. One possible solution is asking the students to write the dictation on a separate sheet, then when we have finished the dictation we pick up all of them and copy fragments from different students on the blackboard; now we can ask the class to correct it. After this, we can use the dictation as a reading comprehension, to revise grammar points or as a topic for discussion.

· Outdoor activities.

Another interesting possibility that this season of the year brings is working outside the classroom. This can be better done with reduced groups, but if the activity is previously organised, number becomes a minor problem.

The first thing to do is to clarify where we want to go; there is wide range of places to go to or visit, which is going to condition the activities we should programme. There is a big difference between going to a public park, a photographic exhibition, or just staying in the school yard. So we are going to focus on not official visits, they have their own planning and administrative procedure that can be dealt with on another occasion.

The matter then, is to talk about those 'going-outs' that we can programme and do under our responsibility whenever we consider them useful and helpful.
When we decide to take our students out ( to a park, a beach, the countryside, a square, the school yard,…..), we must bear in mind that students are going to be idle, one thing which we can take advantage of, conveying their attention to what their attitude and mind are attending to (that beautiful girl or boy, the seagulls, that old lady preaching to her husband,……), we are using the environment to our benefit.

We can use these situations to practise and do a great variety of activities:

Low levels

Advanced levels:



                                                   Tomás