Back2Back
In the company of enthusiastic and fun-loving colleagues from the primary, secondary and ITT sectors, I had a fantastic Saturday morning a few weeks back at Greg Horton’s Active Learning workshop at Withington Girls School. Active Learning is just that – learning whilst on the move and Greg was brimming with ideas, most of which can be adapted for the primary classroom. The one I’m going to talk about, and the one I’ve used successfully in several lessons is Back2Back. Here’s how it goes.
2 children come out and stand back to back, with a bit of space between them. Another 2 stand at the sides of those 2, giving their backs to each other – so now you’ve got 4 children one facing the front, one the back and the others to the left and right. They can then link arms to make the moving bit easier.
On the IWB you need to show a list of the words/phrases/sentences you want the children to practise. These will be in English on one side and in French on the other. Give everyone some time to read over these and you could talk about any points of grammar/phonemes/silent letters etc too if you like.
We had been working on descriptions of monsters so my focus was on the difference between ‘he is/he has’, adding in numbers before the nouns (I found that because they had learnt a noun with un/une they kept forgetting to take out the ‘un/une’ when they put in a different number) and the position and agreement of adjectives.
Now for the Active Learning! The person facing the board reads the first English item and their Back2Back partner has to say the French. If they get it right, the 2ndEnglish phrase is read out and so on. If the person being ‘tested’ makes a mistake, or takes too long, the children do a ¼ turn so that you have a new ‘reader’ and a new ‘testee.’ Every time someone new comes to the front, they have to start reading from the top of the list again so the first phrases get read out lots of times. My list began with easier phrases and got more difficult/longer as we went down the list.
I did it with a trial group the first time to show the class how to play it and then substituted new children in as mistakes were made and people had had their go. We played it again today with 6 groups and it worked brilliantly, even with a tricky class. It even gave them the opportunity to think about the characteristics of the people they wanted in their groups. (I had picked 6 team leaders who then took it in turn to choose people for their groups. They talked about people they could get along with, people who would be sensible and people who were good at French and so would be good pronunciation role models.)
The beauty of the game is that assuming mistakes are made, and I assure you that they will be, the children are hearing the words/phrases over and over again and everyone except the ‘testee’ is silently reading those same words too. They can also ‘read on’ to see what’s coming up next/later.There was concentrated silence as they waited for the French to be said and as time progressed, they became more critical of pronunciation as they were eager for someone to be caught out so that they could have a turn.
Everyone was on task, everyone was eager to have a go, and they definitely made progress with the language focus.