Egg Drop

Materials: one egg for each student/team (they can give you stotinki for this), one ziploc bag for each egg (Very important! Get these sent from home if you want to do this!) packing materials like old newspapers, towels, plastic grocery bags, scotch tape, etc.

Description: First of all, don’t panic. Letting students drop eggs out a window does not have to be as chaotic as it sounds. But it can be a lot of fun, and as long as you do the whole thing in English, they won’t even know they’re learning anything.

First, tell them about the egg drop months in advance. Use this as a motivation tool. Tell them things like “Oh, I hope we do good on this test so that we can drop eggs out the window.” Don’t elaborate on this statement until much closer to the actual event. It peaks their curiosity, and gets them excited for this mysterious “egg dropping thing.” They’ll also probably think you’re crazy, but that’s ok.

About two weeks before the egg drop, tell the class what you’ll be doing. The objective is to package your egg and protect it in such a way, that when you drop it out the window, it doesn’t break.  It’s your choice if they are going to work in teams or individually. As a class, brainstorm different things you can use to protect your egg, such as newspapers, pillows, or whatever. Encourage them to think creatively – I’ve had students use baba slippers! They can also think of other ways to help their egg land safely, such as parachutes. Help students with any words they don’t know the English for. Tell each student/group that they have one week to write a short plan to protect their egg, (in English!) and it must get approved by you if they are going to participate.

After you have checked their plans, remind them of the egg drop day that they will have to bring their materials in (in fact, remind them several times, and explain that their eggs are going out the window, protected or not). Collect money for the eggs if you like. On the day of the egg drop, bring the eggs, extra tape and scissors, and the ziploc bags. If your room is on the first floor, see if you can borrow a room on the 2nd or 3rd floor for the hour.

Here’s why you need the ziploc bags: before you give students the eggs to wrap up in whatever they’ve brought, put each egg in a ziploc baggie and tape it shut first. This way, when eggs break, they won’t make a mess all over the pillows/towels/whatevers, or make a mess on your school’s sidewalk. If you can’t get ziploc baggies, think of some other way to contain the egg mess, or I would not advise doing this activity!!!

Anyway, the rest is simple – students have a time limit to package their eggs, and then they go outside under the window and you drop them. (Then they’re no accusations of students “throwing” another team’s egg.) As soon as eggs land, they can start unwrapping them to see whose survived. Then students clean up the sidewalk (send a garbage bag down with them if you like) and come back upstairs to write their final report, which they turn in for a grade. They’ll ask you to grade them on whether their egg broke or not, but maybe just give out bonus points for eggs that survived instead of bad marks for eggs that broke.

-Abeth S.

Matching Cards

Materials: premade cards on slips of paper or index card halves (see below for ideas)

Description: This is an easy way to work on almost any concept, and the cards can be easily stored for future classes and years. All you need to do is make sets of cards that illustrate the concept you’re trying to teach, as long as there’s enough cards for your maximum number of students.

Say, for example, you’re working on telling time. Then you’ll make one group of cards that has the time words on it (1:30, 5:50, 11:15, etc.) and a matching group that had the corresponding words on it (half past one, ten to six, quarter past eleven, etc.). The cards don’t have to be very big. Then, in class, you mix up the cards and give one to every student. Then everyone has to stand, walk around the room, and find the person with the corresponding card. It works better if you have students and their partners stand in one area of the room once they’ve found each other, so that the other students have an easier time finding their match. Then they can show you their cards and you can check for errors.

Besides time, you can make grammar cards (I, am, You, are), pictures and words to drill vocabulary, pictures and letters of the alphabet for beginning students (A, alligator, B, ball), questions and answers, or even just straight up Bulgarian-English cards. I have a set of about 100 of these that I’ve made, and when I’m feely particulary ornery with my 8th graders, I take the whole set into class and dump it into a big pile on the floor and tell them they can’t leave until all the words are matched up correctly. They don’t like it, and yet, they’re so compulsive, they can’t resist matching them up!

-Abeth S.

Bean Jars

Materials: two jars or containers for each class participating, one filled with small beans or dried corn

Description: So, my counterpart and I were tired of the kids saying simple things in Bulgarian that they certainly knew the English for (like, “Can I go to the bathroom?”, which I think is the first phrase everybody learns!) and so we decided to create “English-Only Days.” The bean jars are a way to monitor the Bulgarian usage, and also as a way for classes to compete against each other.

It’s very simple. The jar full of beans is marked “English” and the empty jar is marked “Bulgarian.” On a day when the jars are in class (we don’t do it everyday, because some grammar discussions require a lot of Bulgarian explaining), if someone says something in Bulgarian, we remove one bean from the English jar and put it in the Bulgarian one. It doesn’t matter if the Bulgarian comment was to us or a friend in the class – if we hear Bulgarian, they lose a bean. It’s a lot quieter in the classroom on English-Only Days!

Sometimes, if a class is really struggling and losing a lot of beans, we give them a chance to earn some back (like, one bean for every “6” on a test). At the end of each semester, we count the beans for each class, and the lowest number of beans wins. The prize is a game day, where we play games or watch a short movie instead of doing work. Then we start from scratch again at the beginning of the next semester.

If you have a more advanced class, you can pull the bean jars out more often. For intermediate classes, we have one or two days a week with the jars. This is not only a good English tool, but it also helps with discipline, because if you hear talking you can take away a bean, and the other kids get really mad at the talker. The even chew them out in English, so as not to lose any more beans!

PS. You will get a lot of weird looks from your collegues as you carry bean jars to and from class. (Don’t leave them in the classrooms, or kids are tempted to cheat!)

-Abeth S.

Outdoor Basketball Counting

Materials: a basketball and hoop

Note: This is great for summer camps when you want to teach some basic English, and are outside playing with some kids. This could be adapted for the indoor classroom if you think creatively.

Description: During the summer I would meet with some kids in the park on different days and we would do simple games that involved basic English, (counting to 20 and backwards, days of the week, months, seasons, etc.) The first day I tried to do something with basketball, but none of the kids were very good at shooting hoops. So later that summer, I decided to bring the basketball back and try something else….

Basically, you just have a small number of kids, maybe try to keep it to 6 or 7, and make them stand in a circle in front of a basketball hoop. Then, you give the basketball to one kid and tell them to pass it, say 5 times to the right, and each kid has to say the subsequent number when he or she gets the ball (1!, 2!, 3!, 4!, 5!) until it reaches the fifth kid. Then that kid gets to take a shot with the ball at the basket. If the kid makes the basket, he or she gets one point, then returns to the circle and the ball is passed another five times, each kid saying the next subsequent number when he or she passes the ball (6!, 7!, 8!, 9!, 10!), until another kid gets the ball. Then that new kid gets a chance at a shot. You can make them count as high as you want, say 100, 150, 200, whatever, and once the count reaches that number, whoever has the most points wins.

Basically it just helps kids count in English while teaching them how to play a little basketball as well. Most of the kids I did it with seemed to enjoy it, and I got beat often times. I think I need to work on my jump shot. The only caveat is making sure whatever number they count to before someone gets to shoot, say to 5, or 4, or 6, you just have to take into consideration how many kids are in the game. If you have an even number of kids playing, say 6, then you have to make the fifth kid shoots, otherwise it would be the same kids shooting all the time, and some would get left out. Simply consider how many kids are playing beforehand and run a scenario through your head real quick as to what number the should count to before they shoot to see if everyone would have a chance.

-Brent F.