My ideas on effective reinforcement and recycling

Different needs discussion

by Svitlana Orlova - Saturday, 3 November 2012, 09:29 AM

Dear friends,

I decided to share my problem with you. It concerns necessity of constant reinforcement and recycling. I consider it to be so important , that I spend too much time on it and then I do not have enough time to present new material. It always seems to me that my pupils need more time to practise and then I lack behind the calendar plan. Any ideas?

Dear Svitlana, 

Reinforcement and recycling are definitely important and I'm also trying to figure out how to make them work :) And my plan is .. to use technology.

You can create Power Point presentations with new words for each text / topic / unit etc. They are great for presenting and learning new vocabulary, as well as revision. It will take 1-2 minutes to go through the slides and revise target vocabulary as a class.

Here you can download and have a look at two recent presentations that I've created for my daughter.

Power Point presentations for grammar topics work well, too.

You can create all presentations in advance, save them on CDs and distribute among parents so that children can revise the words at home  throughout the school year and on holidays. 

Surely creating so many presentations will take you loads of time but think of engaging your colleagues. Together, you can create PP presentations to support every unit of your coursebook!

Another idea that I've tried is to keep a kind of 'class reference folders' with all grammar and/or conversational topics that they've learned. I created one folder for each desk, kept them on the shelf and distributed among students at the beginning of each lesson. With these folders, I didn't have to waste time explaining the rules again and again. I just asked my students to open their reference folders on a certain page and complete some revision exercise with the help of it.

Usually we ask our students to write down some rules at the back of their vocabularies or copybooks but students are sometimes absent so they don't have all the rules, some students aren't neat writers so their rules are a mess. They also tend to forget or lose their vocabularies. That's why I thought that classroom reference folders would be a good idea. A copy of such reference folders can be saved on CDs and distributed among parents as well. They can print them out for their children to use at home.

Finally, I sometimes hold myself back from trying to have my students remember everything we've learned. At the early stage, I think we should estimate the result not only by the number of words / topics / rules that our students have learned. What's really important is their motivation, their improving memory, their confidence, their skills that have been developing during the process of learning.