MariaVlachopoulou

We have used Voki with my 6th graders for our etwinning project last year, too!So you could say we had already been familiar with it and maybe-just maybe-we wouldn't find it as exciting anymore!  But, no,  this year, we have found a new way to use it, a way that made it the most exciting, entertaining and successful activity of the project. Students had a great time and Voki is still on the top of the list with their favourite web tools! Those of you who have used Voki would know that students love making up characters and they could spend hours choosing the right eyes, nose or mouth, the appropriate background for their characters and they could go on forever experimenting with voices and  accents when they give their characters a voice to speak! This happens everytime! They are never bored because they have a large number of alternatives! The title of the activity was "Famous people in disguise" . Specifically, what they had to do was the following: Students w...

I have been working as an EFL teacher in the public sector for about ten years. I never really taught exactly what I had to teach-that is, the books set by the Ministry-I always liked to supplement them with materials of my own. And still that was not enough. There was constantly this feeling of inadequacy in me. I thought that to have the privilege to be around children every day and just teach them the language was not enough. I had to change something.  I gave it a lot of thought till I decided that I wanted to teach my students the same things I teach my children. I didn't want to give them solely knowledge. I wanted to teach them values, I wanted to raise their environmental awareness, I wanted to teach them about Human Rights, about Citizenship and Digital Citizenship, about bullying and racism and stereotypes. And many more... So a couple of years ago, I started having these "special days". A day raising awareness against bullying, a day raising awareness ag...

This is the presentation of our project for Teachers for Europe 2016: HUMAN-RIGHTS-REFUGEE RIGHTS-SOLIDARITY.

During school year 2016, Grade 5 (E2) of the 1st Primary School of Amyntaio, Greece worked on the theme of Human Rights and Refugees Rights within the frame of our project for TEACHERS4EUROPE 2016. At the beginning of the activity students read a poem written by a student  from Canada who won the first prize in 2010 in the first Refugees and Human Rights Child and Youth Poetry Contest, organised by the UNHCR Toronto Office and COSTI Immigrant Services in commemoration of World Refugee Day, June 20. The title of the poem is "I am". The student describes how he thinks being a refugee may feel. In spite of being only 12 years old the student uses very strong images of torture, death,slavery, war, sorrow, despair, lonelinessin the poem. We tried to discuss the meaning of the poem and the feelings it evoked. I have to admit it touched them a lot. Then the students were asked to compose their own poems based on some phrases taken from the poem such as, I am..., I am looking ...

Martin E.P. Seligman, an internationally known psychologist, of the Positive Psychology movement, introduced the PERMA model of well-being (2011), in which psychological well-being is defined in terms of five elements: positive emotions (P), engagement (E), relationships (R), meaning (M), and accomplishment (A). According to Seligman having PERMA equals flourishing.   According to Peterson (2006) schools are ideal institutions to provide opportunities for these elements and they should start focusing not only on academic learning but also the promotion of character and well-being. Let’s see what the acronym PERMA stands for and how we can link each element to our teaching:   POSITIVE EMOTIONS (P) Positive emotions are directly linked to happiness. Positive emotions coming from positive thinking and optimism help us feel less depressed when bad events occur and focus on the good things, make us feel better about ourselves and thus stronger and more confi...

(This is part of my article published in the summer e-bulletin of TESOL Macedonia Thrace Northern Greece. You can read the rest there, if you are a TESOL MTh member) ...However, even if you follow all these tips, students may not always share your enthusiasm for writing. This is the time when you have to employ some other means to get them interested! I call these “My contemporary Muses”, because they inspire my students to write! Here are some web tools I am using for my writing activities: ·          Storybird.com : This must be the most popular web tool for story writing at the moment.  Students can choose a set of pictures and write their stories based on these. I can personally guarantee that even the most reluctant to participate get excited with this! The art is so wonderful and there is not one student who will not be interested in turning picture prompts into a story. Recently, I have discovered that there is also the op...

http://www.tesolmacedoniathrace.org/2016/05/teaching-beyond-classroom-teachers.html

ΤΡΙΤΗ 9 ΦΕΒΡΟΥΑΡΙΟΥ ΗΜΕΡΑ ΑΣΦΑΛΟΥΣ ΔΙΑΔΙΚΤΥΟΥ 1ο Δ/Σ ΑΜΥΝΤΑΙΟΥ-ΠΡΕΒΕΥΤΗΣ: ΜΑΡΙΑ ΒΛΑΧΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ Για δεύτερη συνεχή χρονιά το 1ο Δημοτικό Σχολείο Αμυνταίου πραγματοποίησε δράσεις για την Ημέρα Ασφαλούς Διαδικτύου. Το σχολείο είναι πρεσβευτής του www.saferinternet.gr από πέρυσι.  Οι  μαθητές των τάξεων Ε' και ΣΤ' συμπλήρωσαν αρχικά τα φύλλα εργασίας "Δικαιώματα και υποχρεώσεις online" , στα οποία έπρεπε να επιλέξουν τα 5 πιο σημαντικά, δικαιώματα και υποχρεώσεις όσον αφορά στη διαδικτυακή τους ασφάλεια. Οι απαντήσεις τους συγκεντρώθηκαν και καταγράφηκαν στο υπολογιστικό φύλλο που είχαμε στη διάθεση μας και με αυτόν τον τρόπο μπορέσαμε να δούμε και να σχολιάσουμε τις πιο δημοφιλείς απαντήσεις. Μεταξύ των σημαντικότερων δικαιωμάτων που επέλεξαν οι μαθητές ήταν το δικαίωμα να προστατεύουν την ιδιωτικότητα τους, να αισθάνονται ασφαλείς και να απολαμβάνουν Διαδίκτυο, το δικαίωμα να μπορούν εύκολα να αναφέρουν ύποπτες ή ενοχλητικές συμπεριφορές στους διαχειριστές...

It all started with a lesson plan based on an activity from Günter Gerngross, Herbert Puchta and Scott Thornbury's "Teaching Grammar Creatively". The activity aimed at teaching verbs of the senses-looks, sounds, smells, tastes, feels-a problematic area for students, at least the way it was presented in the school book of 6th grade.I needed something to make an impression, to stay with them after the lesson. So after the presentation and the consolidation I decided to try something I had never tried with this class before. Ask them to write poetry. When I started explaining the activity I was not at all sure if everybody would be able to cope with it. In fact, I thought that some students may even start nagging or refuse to do it.To my surprise, nothing of the above happened. On the contrary, the moment I explained what they had to do everybody-and I mean everybody-set to work. Some of them asked to work in pairs and I didn't mind this. So adapting the activity a ...

The most vivid memory of my school years is my dear English teacher, Naki, who used to make us circle prepositions spotted in texts, lesson after lesson. This is something I like to do with my students, too, from the beginning of my teaching career. It is a "ritual" we follow in every reading lesson and my students know it by now! Prepositions are an important part of the English language and they are everywhere! They are in prepositional phrases, phrasal verbs, idioms and expressions. They can go with verbs, adjectives or nouns and then we also have prepositions for time and place. Greek learners- and not only them,I am guessing- find it really hard to remember where to put it and if they remember that they need a preposition, they may still have problems in finding which one they should use. A problem with prepositions is that they usually cannot be translated especially if you try word-to-word translation - something Greek students try more often than needed- contra...