A Word in Your Shell-Like…

A word about #eltpics’ Creative Commons licence

#eltpics are created and curated by people involved in some way in teaching and training, especially in ELT. From the very beginning the idea has been for these to be a useful and used resource in the classroom, on blogs etc.. The success of #eltpics and the associated blogs http://takeaphotoand.wordpress.com and http://burningquestionnaire.wordpress.com has been phenomenal. The culture of co-operation and shared ideas is alive and well and hugely evident in these initiatives.

It’s great to see that the images are being put to such splendid use in classrooms and on blogs all over the world. As we become more digitally literate, we should share a sense of responsibility with our students. By using a Creative Commons (CC) resource such as #eltpics (and making clear that we are using a CC resource by using proper attribution) we are highlighting an important area of present and future digital literacy.

The licence associated with #eltpics is Attribution Non-Commercial Use. [link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ ] In practical terms, this is quite straightforward in most areas. One area which has caused some concern has been the use of #eltpics in blogs/ webpages which use advertising. If the revenue from the advertising goes to the blogger/ author then that blog page and its content are commercial and, as such, the use of an #eltpics image is not allowed under the CC licence. However, one thing to remember is that you can always get in touch with the photographer and they can waive any of the conditions.

Attribution
Under the attribution aspect of the Creative Commons licence, any use of an image from #eltpics has to be annotated with a suitable attribution. This can be put after the image, at the end of a page, blog, slideshow etc.. As people have asked about how to attribute #eltpics in blogs on worksheets etc., we thought it might be useful to set out an attribution guideline following the Creative Commons license recommendations. So…

From 01/07/2012 the following guidelines apply to attributing #eltpics.

If you’re using an unmodified, original #eltpic, the attribution should read like this:

“Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @ij64, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/”

If you’re using derivative work:

Reflecting in Red

“Image made using a photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @ij64, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/”

If you’re using more than one #eltpics image the twitter names can be listed:

                                                           The Colour of Summer

“Image made using photos taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @ij64, @goldsteinben, @elt_pics used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/”

If you use #eltpics a lot, then it may be worth keeping a copy of these attributions to hand so they can be copied and pasted (with relevant twitter username )
As we move towards #eltpic 10,000 (ha! Unbelievable!) I hope more and more people get involved with contributing and using this fabulous resource. As always, huge thanks go out to all those who’ve been involved in the contribution, uploading and promoting of these images that say so much.

Victoria Boobyer
@elt_pics

Double snippets

Things are frantic at the moment – it’s that time of year – so while I get my act together and find enough time to upload, and do justice to, some of the wonderful guest posts that are coming in, I thought I’d post a ‘double-whammy’: a link to an article about eltpics, and the shortest of the guest posts – short does mean sweet, though.

The post has been written for us by Clive Elsmore, who is based in England, is originally from Scotland and has spent happy times in climes that make for wonderful photos.

Some of the images by Clive Elsmore (@CliveSir) at eltpics

Clive took the 8,000th eltpics image, so we invited him to send a few words on how he would use eltpics in class. Over to Clive:

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Thinking back to my time in India, without exception all my students struggled to invent stories. They couldn’t do it in their own language let alone in English. Even personalising it would result in requests for a model which, if given, would then restrict ideas and language. This difficulty was really a reflection of their own life experiences – these particular kids had had a patchy education and often received little encouragement for verbal creativity outside school. Owning a book was uncommon.

So, a way to help develop creative writing or more fluent speech might be to group the children in fours or fives and to give them a larger number of selected photos. These could be cut from magazines or, given the facilities, printed from the ELTpics collection http://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/sets/. Choosing from ELTpics would make it easier to establish a theme if one was needed. The kids would select a picture, be encouraged to talk about it, collaboratively invent a story using all of the visual cues, and then each would tell another group, the class, or write down, his or her part of the story. Extra stimulation might come from mixing in realia such as an old key, a hairbrush, a used envelope containing a scrap of newspaper, a broken pot and so on, all drawn from a bag.

ELTpics number 8,000 by @CliveSir (Clive Elsmore).

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The second item for this post is a link to a summary written by Shaun Wilden. Every Wednesday at 12.00 and 21.00 GMT or BST as appropriate, Twitter hosts a chat for educators called ELTchat. People from around the world ‘meet’ on twitter to discuss the day’s topics, using the #eltchat hashtag, and the chat has become so popular it was

Bathroom sink. An eltpic by Shaun Wilden, in the Household Objects set.

nominated for an ELTon award this year. On 30th May this year, the midday eltchat was about using ELTpics, and Shaun, one of ELTchat’s founders, wrote the summary, which you can read here.

 

 

Buddha and Oral Exams

Anne Robinson, from the North East of England but based in Santander in Northern Spain for, well, a few years now, is a teacher, teacher trainer, author and the Senior Presenter for Cambridge ESOL in Spain. This of course makes her an expert in exam preparation classes! She uses photos and eltpics in her classes, so I invited her to share some of her ideas here. As Anne sent me various smaller pictures, I’ve dotted them through the post to keep you guessing – it’s not a case of either of us going slightly mad, honest.

(Check out Anne’s Burning Questionnaire here – nice reading.)

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Pictures and photos play a prominent part in the University of Cambridge ESOL Speaking Tests. They are there to stimulate candidates’ imagination and language production.

What we examiners often notice is that certain details in a picture are missed. Not a problem, because it’s not a question of being stuck for words – just that certain things about pictures leap out straight away and others can pass by unnoticed.

In the Cambridge English: Preliminary Speaking Test, each candidate is given a photo on a particular theme and is asked to describe it.

‘Please tell us what you can see in your photograph’.

Image by @sandymillin for eltpics

Candidates should speak for about one minute, without help or intervention from the interlocutor or the other candidate. This can prove to be a difficult task. They often get off to a spurt with a few sentences, then dry up and start repeating things they have already mentioned.

So, picking up on details in the photograph can help tremendously to give them enough to say.

One way of training students to think about and notice where things are is to give them parts of a scene.

Each student/group of students is given (or shown) one part of the photo only.

They are asked to think about and discuss:

1. Where they think their piece of the photo fits: at the top/bottom/in the middle of the photo? On the right/left/in the centre?
2. What else they think is in the photo?

They then get together and try and reconstruct the whole photograph.

Finally, show them the whole picture and see how it compares with the ones they built together from their imagination.

Three legged Buddha Image by Anne Robinson for eltpics

Then, give them the Preliminary Speaking Test instructions:

‘I’m going to give you a photograph of an art display. Please tell us what you can see in your photograph.’

Then they could be given another photograph such as this one and asked to talk about it:

Living (?) statue Image by @fionamau for eltpics

To complete the activity in the way they would in the Cambridge English: Preliminary exam, you can then ask them to discuss:

‘Your photographs showed examples of street art. Now, I’d like you to talk together about the art you like and the kind of art you don’t like to go and see.’ (Allow about 3 minutes for this.)

I love the java jive….

Love the Jave Jive? Busting for a cuppa? When Canadian teacher Vicky Loras, one of the lovely founders of eltpics, based in Zug, Switzerland, tweeted us her morning coffee and, in doing so, took eltpics to the 7,000 mark, I knew I just had to have her as guest blogger on Take a photo and… Vicky inspires many teachers around the world via her beautiful blog, so here she is to inspire you too. Also check her out on our Burning Questionnaire blog, where she shares a bit about her life with us.

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That cup of coffee. Picture 7,000 at eltpics by Vicky Loras.

Things I Do Every Day –

An Activity for Beginner English Learners

I am very happy the picture of my favourite coffee cup came up number 7,000 in #eltpics, in the Daily Routines set! This is how I would use it in class, along with the other photos in the same set – I think it would be great to use with my true beginners to practice the Present Simple (my German speakers would benefit a lot, as there is only one present tense in German and only time adverbs distinguish between doing something as a regular activity and doing something at the moment of speaking).

I would start by showing them the photo(s) and saying:

- I drink coffee every day. What do you do (stressing this part to him) every day, Werner?

- I wake up early.

- Werner wakes up early, I would then say, writing it on the board to stress the change of person and ending. Then I would ask another student to model it one more time and then have others ask each other What do you do every day? And then repeat the other person’s answer in the third person, until they have all had a turn or two and understand the change in person. The sentences can become progressively more complex: I drink four or five cups of coffee every day.

Perhaps then we would move to other question form, such as How many cups of coffee do you drink every day? How often do you wake up early? Anything to help them practise the question form (do you) and asking about the regularity of an activity in the Present Simple and answering for all persons.

This would also help them a lot in understanding the use of the Present Simple, as it can be quite a tricky tense. If you have any other ideas of how to use the same photo, I would love to hear them!

What…… like…?

This week’s post is by Sandy Millin, co-curator of #eltpics.

Last week I was looking for ideas to help me revise personality adjectives with an intermediate class. In my bookmarks I rediscovered Ceri Jones’ Back to the Drawing Board lesson plan, in which she started with an egg shape on the board, and the students ended up with profiles of people they had drawn themselves. It worked really well, and led to us focussing on four questions which are often confused by students at many levels:

• What does he like?
• What does he look like?
• What was he like?
• What would he like to do?

By the end of the lesson, we had revised the personality adjectives a lot, but the students were still struggling with these questions, and especially how to answer them – they tried to start every answer with ‘He likes…’ regardless of which question it was.

For the next class I turned to the eltpics ‘Every Picture Tells a Story‘ set and created the following handouts:

Images by: @ij64, @klizbarker, @aClilToClimb (x2), @mkofab, @jinotaj

[To download, click ‘view on slideshare’. You may have to log in (not sure), but it’s completely free. You should then be able to click on ‘download’ above the document.]

Each pair was given one picture with the associated questions and instructed not to show it to anyone else. They had to work together to answer the questions in as much detail as possible. I helped them with vocabulary where necessary.

They then folded the paper in half so that they could only see the answers and not the picture.

Pairs then got together in groups of four. They looked at the other pair’s answers and tried to imagine what was on their original picture. If they wanted to, the readers could sketch what they imagined. After a few minutes, they were then allowed to look at the original image and describe how it differed from what they expected. I tried to choose images which would promote discussion for my students – other images may be better for your class.

Other ideas

• ‘Every Picture Tells a Story‘ is a great set for modals of speculation. What must have happened? What could happen next? What could they be thinking? What might you do in the same situation?
• In a similar way to Ceri’s lesson, students could use the questions as the basis for profiles of the people in the pictures.
• They could also use ‘What would they like to do?’ as the start of a story describing what happened after the photo was taken.
• The picture could accompany a newspaper article describing where the person was seen or a ‘wanted’ poster.
• Any of the images from the same set could even be the centrepiece of a whole storytelling lesson. Laura Patsko explains how.

Next week, a special guest……..

 

20 x 20

Shortly after his ‘star turn’ as Pecha Kucha compere at IATEFL this year (held in Glasgow), Jeremy Harmer sent me a short description of his experience and asked if it might be of use or interest for this blog. ‘It certainly would be!’ was my immediate reaction. However, rather than just upload Jeremy’s description as is, I’ve been a bit cheeky. I decided to send him a few questions – a gentle interrogation, if you like – to expand a bit on how it felt to be The Main Man at such a big, annual event. The following post is, therefore, the initial description, followed by my interview with….. Jeremy Harmer.

20 x 20

This year, for the second time, I was asked to host the Pecha Kucha evening at the 2012 IATEFL conference in Glasgow. I agreed to do so with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Excitement, because I knew (if we got the choice of speakers right – and we did [see below]) that it could/would be a great evening; trepidation because it is difficult and demanding (boo hoo, I hear you say) to do something amusing which, at the same time, sets the scene, explains what Pecha Kucha is (see the link below), introduces the speakers and gets some audience involvement.

...keep counting..... Image by @vickyloras

I found myself searching for a theme. And then I had this great idea! Because people worry about using pictures and whether pictures are in copyright etc, why not use ‘creative commons’ pictures – i.e. pictures where the photographers/publishers say that anyone can use them! And the best resource (for us ELT practitioners)? Eltpics, of course.

And so I set about searching the various collections on the eltpics site. I consulted @fionamau and she made some great suggestions. But I found other funny pictures too which had nothing to do with my main theme which was ‘how to encourage terrified Pecha Kucha speakers’. That meant finding pictures of people from the collection and I found some great ones. I was spoilt for choice.

Did it work?

One of the stars.......... Image by elt_pics

Well that’s for you to judge. You can watch my Pecha Kucha introduction here. Much more importantly, you can see the 8 2012 ‘stars’, and very good they were.

I hope you enjoy it.  

What I discovered (as I was preparing my PK introduction) is how versatile any picture can be. Ss readers of this blogsite know, you can do anything with a great picture, and that’s why eltpics (I can say this because I was not an instigator and I am not a curator) is so damn good!

INTERVIEW: ON PECHA KUCHAS

Jeremy, when was the first time you hosted or ‘compered’ a Pecha Kucha?

I first hosted a Pecha Kucha in 2011 – but I had been a Pecha Kucha speaker three times before that. My first ever PK ‘appearance’ was at IATEFL Exeter in 2008 (the first time IATEFL did one). I think I may have been more frightened and on edge than at any time I have ever performed before or since. But a kind of delicious edginess!

How did you feel the first time you were asked to compere? Was it not a bit daunting?

It’s both more and less daunting to host than to be a speaker. Less because you are not expected to ‘star’, as speakers are. More because I guess it’s up to you to ‘set the tone’, and most importantly to make the speakers feel good and comfortable.

What did you speak about then?

Time! (Because of the 20-seconds-per-slide thing!)

A little extra time.... Image by @SueAnnan

How would you describe the ideal Pecha Kucha?

I think the ideal Pecha Kucha event has (a) a big, friendly audience, a range of speaker personalities, and (c) a range of PK ‘moods’. Not all PKs have to be funny – though it’s great if SOME are!

What advice would you give to someone considering trying it?

Try it, try it try it!

Try it, try it, try it! Image by Victoria Boobyer

Why do you think this has become a popular form of conference entertainment?

I think it’s a combination of awe at the courage of the speakers – and it does take some ‘nerve’ – together with a wonderful mixture of the audience wishing them well but enjoying the spectacle of seeing them suffer a little bit! And (this is the important bit) the format actually ‘concentrates the mind’. In all the PKs I have seen, everyone finds their own unique way of rising to the challenge – and that’s great to observe.

ON USING ELTPICS

How did you go about using eltpics when you were preparing? Did you look for pictures to match your ideas, or did you look for pictures that would give you those ideas?

I can’t remember where the idea first came from – but I was desperately searching for some kind of a theme to make what is essentially an introduction mildly amusing/interesting. The job (as I see it) of the ‘compere’ is to warm the audience up and introduce the speakers. I had no idea how to do that. Then perhaps someone mentioned ELTpics on twitter or somewhere (I really can’t remember). Or perhaps it was one of the speakers asking me about pernission to use images or something. Anyway, I just decideD to go and have a look.

I started by just looking around, browsing through categories. Then I got in touch with one of the curators, who suggested some eltpics with expressions/faces and that got me going. After that I just kept browsing – finding, for example, a picture of Rome’s Colisseum (which gave me a humorous line), a bowl of cherries and the boy facing backwards on the donkey! The more you look the more you find! I ‘collected’ about 35 pictures, and then had to discard them as the pecha kucha took shape. Once I had decided to get the audience to yell things out that kind of narrowed things down a bit.

Do it your own way.... Image by @klizbarker

Do you think you’ll use eltpics again?

Well I’m in the niddle of preparing a ‘big’ talk about using, abusing, and not using technology (whatever that is!) in language teaching. I will certainly go back to ELTpics (a) to tell my audience about them, and (b) to demonstrate some ideas. But I will also be using them for some time to come.

When are you sending us your next photo?

I sent one recently of an extraordinary parking sign I saw. There will be more – especially if they have something ‘interesting’ to say.

* Have you read Jeremy’s answers to eltpics’ The Burning Questionnaire? Click here.

Image by @Harmerj

Could be, must be, might be me….

by Fiona Mauchline

Take One.

Some years ago – and I mean something like 12 – I went to a day of workshops with Herbert Puchta. At that time, multiple intelligences were the In Thing, much as CLIL and technology are now, and Herbert’s sessions offered a fascinating smörgasbord of classroom activities that worked via each of the original 7 intelligences as described by Howard Gardner at that time. One of the activities we tried was an interesting titbit involving the intrapersonal, then interpersonal intelligences. We were invited to observe our neighbour in silence, then write I don’t recall how many sentences about him or her – pure conjecture, and adaptable to many grammatical structures such as the dreaded present perfect or modals of deduction/hypothesis. When we had finished, we showed our sentences to our neighbour, who told us how many were correct but not which. We then had a conversation along the lines of ‘I think the first one, ‘he must have bought his shoes recently’ is correct, as you’ve left the price label on the sole‘… To this day I not only use this activity frequently, in both classes and teacher development sessions, but it’s a great ice-breaker and of course requires no materials other than pen and paper. Learner-centred, learner-generated. How does this link to eltpics? Well how about this. There are two ways, and then a third variation on the theme.

Could be you

#eltpics (Credits at end of section)

Prepare some mosaics of a fairly large number of eltpics. Allocate each student a partner and tell each student to look through the photos. Choose five that make them think of their partner. Students then think about why the pictures make them think of their partner and write their reasons down. This can be simple sentences at lower levels – I think Xavi has a red motorbike – or paragraphs at higher levels or with groups you are encouraging to develop self-expression – I think Frank likes surfing, and these flowers remind me of surfing too, as I think they’re the kind of flowers you often see on board shorts or beach skirts. They remind me of exotic places and beaches – the kind of places I think Frank might like to live. Etc.

Students then exchange their written pieces and read. Ask them to add a written comment saying how many sentences/paragraphs they agree with or are correct, but not which ones – you may ask them to guess which pictures have been chosen, too. When students return the written pieces with the comments, students then discuss why they wrote what they wrote, which ones they think they got right, and so on. Finally, students may like to write a complete written response to each sentence or paragraph. ‘You’re right, I love the beach and surfing but I really don’t like the colour orange. I might like the flowers if they were yellow, but these flowers remind me more of my grandmother than of exotic places‘….

(Mosaic images by @sandymillin, @yearinthelifeof, @cgoodey, @mkofab, @ij64, @ricsili, @jinotaj, @pterolaur, @CliveSir, @elt_pics, @cerirhiannon and @fionamau.)

Could be me

Ask students to look through eltpics and choose three or four pictures that say something about themselves. Ask them to write an explanation on a separate piece of paper (I’ll spare you my example, unless I get fifteen comments requesting it). Students either exchange their images for a partner to write their ideas down ‘I think you might have had a pet duck when you were a child‘, or you can put students’ image collages on the wall for the group to look at as if they were exhibits in an art exhibition. As students look, they make notes – this can be done in L1 and you can then have a ‘vocab surgery’ (wonderful emergent language opportunity) between the looking and thinking, and the writing in English stages – then they write down their impressions on either one student’s images or on various. They could also guess which images were chosen by whom and write their explanations. Students can then discuss their ideas together, explain why they’ve written what they’ve written and eventually read the original pieces and compare. As an example, here’s a mosaic that tells you things about me… but what might those things be?

Something about Fiona.... Images by @aClilToClimb, self, @sandymillin and @harrisonmike

This is me

Finally, a ‘me’ idea that doesn’t actually use eltpics but students’ own photos, and is essentially the same as the idea Could be me above. Ask students to make a pair of photos of things that tell a story about themselves; ask them to take one photo, then remove one or two things and take a second. First of all, in pairs, students play Kim’s Game. They look at the first image for 30 seconds and try to memorise the things in the photo – have a look at my photo way up at the top of this post. They then put the photos away and try to remember the items in it. Can you remember what’s in my photo? After a minute or two, students show their partner the second photo to check what they’ve noted down. They should also try to spot what is missing from the second image.

Here’s my second photo.

Ah, but what's missing? Use your memory, though, not your scrollbar...

Students then conjecture about the items in the photos, as in the idea above. What do you think my photo could tell you about me? If you pop any guesses in comments below, I’ll let you know if you’re right…..eventually.

Have fun.

Food for thought

This week, we have another guest post. So far, most of our contributions have been from folks based in Europe (apart from Tara), so when I heard that Beth Konomoto was an avid #eltpics user, I asked her to join us here. Beth, who is Canadian (something else she has in common with Tara), is based in Japan and has been there since 2005. She works with EFL students of all ages, and is finishing up a masters in TEFL/TESL. She’s also not long started a blog, so if you’d like to welcome her to the blogosphere and give her some encouragement, you can find her at http://englishcoachbeth.blogspot.com/

Warning: don’t read this if you’re hungry

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Feeling hungry?    All images from the #eltpics food set.

I regularly use ELTpics as supplemental vocabulary and conversation practice for my junior high and high school conversation classes. The class sizes are usually small, 1-4 students, so I bring my laptop into the class. We have wifi in the rooms where I usually teach, so it makes it easy to work directly with the site. 

I usually choose a set of pictures that goes with what we are studying in the book, but sometimes for a warmup or quick activity I let the students choose what they think will be interesting based on the set titles. The pics naturally bring up language negotiation, asking questions, and asking for clarification when we brainstorm the topic, set title, or individual pic title. The pics also easily work for sorting activities.

Here are some of the ways I use the sets on ELTpics.

One really successful set has been the ‘food’ set. In the textbook we use there is a unit on food with linguistic goals for countable/uncountable nouns and “Do you have any ~?” “How much/many ~?” However, most of the food in the book is generic ‘American’ food which leaves a lot out.

I start off this lesson by using the top page of the ‘food’ set and leave the thumbnails small so that the students can see the pictures, but not very well in order to peak their curiosity. Then we brainstorm food on the board. We go back and look at the small thumbnails and try to fill out our brainstorm a bit more. 

We go through the pics in a slideshow on the flickr page and briefly talk about them. I also print out the thumbnails page and cut them up for a sorting activity. After spreading the thumbnails out all over the table, the pics get sorted into countable and uncountable and then we count what we can.

The other set that has generated a lot of discussion is the ‘-ing’ set.

Mostly, this set generates questions: who? what? when? where? why? what time? what country? 

With the pics in slideshow view, I stick a post-it on the screen over the title (I know it’s not very high tech, but it works!). Usually when we are asking questions and talking about the pics, we get the “wrong” idea about what the pic is “do-ing”. This leads perfectly into writing new titles for each pic and we try to make at least 2 different titles for each. 

Similar to the sorting activity with the ‘food’ set, we sort the pics into categories like: times of day (morning, afternoon, after school, after dinner, etc.), things we ‘have to do’ vs. things we ‘like to do’, and even more general pics we like and don’t like.  

ELTpics is a great resource for enhancing lessons that use a textbook. It makes class more personal and more connected to real people in real life!

Thanks ELTpics!

From the heart

Here's one about hearts... Image from eltpics by @AriannaBasaric

February 14th was approaching. Hm. What to do for a special Take a photo and… post? Where to find ‘the love’? Love is….  I love…..  I love eltpics? I love photos? And then the idea came. As the phrase I love images popped into my mind, so did the name of a well-known ELT person who has not only contributed photos to eltpics and supports it by mentioning it/us in sessions he gives around the world BUT has written books about using images in the ELT classroom, books such as Working with Images and The Big Picture. So I asked. And guess what? He said YES.

So, without further ado, I shall wish you all the love in the world today and every day, and hand you over to……(Valentine drumroll)… Ben Goldstein.

Heart as Symbol.     Various tasks

As we are celebrating Valentines this week I thought I’d look at symbols and icons, in particular the significance of the heart symbol. The original idea for these tasks came about when I was writing my Working with Images book. I came across the work of Iranian photographer Moza Hantoush who created a number of artistic images based around the heart. Also, a friend of mine in Barcelona Maria Molsosa was an inspiration – she has an impressive collection of heart images, some of which are included in this activity and also makes her own artistic hearts.

A     Brainstorming hearts

1  Brainstorm with learners different contexts where they might find the heart symbol, e.g. on a box of chocolates, one of the suits in a deck of cards, on most commonly on “I love…” posters, badges, flags or stickers.

You could also mention less likely contexts which feature hearts, (e.g. on the froth of a cappuccino), or those things which can be designed in a heart shape, e.g. cakes, chocolates, balloons. Hearts can be used in contexts in which there is no association with love, for example in campaigns to give blood. The heart is clearly not just a romantic symbol.

2  Brainstorm places where learners might write the symbol of a heart, perhaps as a romantic statement to somebody: e.g. scrawled on a beach (as in the image of this blog’s home page), cut onto a tree trunk, painted as a piece of graffiti on wall or a tattoo on their body or simply as a way to sign off when writing a letter or an email.

B       Hearts and words

3  Sometimes hearts have words written in them, particularly on Valentine’s Day cards or messages when hearts are used as symbols of love. Learners complete the gap fill task. Younger students might like to draw them.

hugs   love   mine   ever   me

A Be ______

B True _____

C Big _____

D For______

E Love _____ Tender

Do people send similar messages in hearts in their language? What do the class think of this custom? Sentimental? Fun? Romantic?

4  What words are associated with hearts apart from love and what mental images do these conjure up in the learners’ minds?

Ask learners what the significance of these words might be? Do they have the same associations in their first language?

(e.g beat, broken, arrow, key, gold, stone (as in “to have a heart of….”)

Show this photo from ELT Pics and ask learners to think of a suitable title:

Image by @sandymillin

(answer: an arrow through my heart)

5  Present some song titles which might include these words or others (e.g Heart of Glass, Unbreak my heart, Heartland, Heartbreak Hotel, etc.)

Ask students to picture or think of an image that could match these songs. They could design a CD cover for the song based on their image idea.

Artistic hearts

Maria Molsosa

6  Look at these different images of hearts uploaded on to Flickr/ELT PICS by Maria Molsosa. Maria goes around the world taking photographs of hearts which she finds in unlikely locations. Look at these two images of hearts that have a connection with trees.

Image A

Open heart

Open heart Image by María Molsosa

Image B

The girl who watered hearts

The girl who watered hearts Image by María Molsosa, by kind permission

Look at image A. How does the image make you feel? Why do you think the photographer called it ‘open heart’?

(Sample answer: The image is a sad, even brutal. Trees have long lives and this has been chopped leaving just a short trunk behind. The essence of the tree has suddenly been exposed like an open heart. The title ‘open heart’ could also refer to ‘open heart surgery’. In fact, ‘surgeon’ is used to refer to people who operate on human hearts and trees.)

Look at image B. In what way is this is a positive image? What do you think is its message?

(Sample answer: It could be positive because the girl is watering a tree that may bear many fruit or produce a lot of love in her life. However, the graffiti could also be asking: “Can love grow on trees?”

Moza Hantoush

7 Match these heart images with their titles. What do you think the different photos are saying about love? Which image do you think is the most striking or original? Why?

Seven Images by Moza Hantoush

Trapped

Served with Love

Even when the heart stopped beating

A very special penny

With love comes pain

True inner beauty

Love is a gift

You don’t die of a broken heart

Follow-up

Consider the symbolic nature of other images. What diverse cultural associations does this image have? What does it mean to you, literally and metaphorically (e.g. the apple is the forbidden fruit, the record label of the Beatles but also the logo of an important computer company).

A quickie

This morning I clicked on a link that was tweeted to me by a teacher from Cazorla, a beautiful part of Jaén in the south of Spain.

Someone else from Cazorla, Jaén.

The teacher, Carmen Martínez, who goes by the twitter name of @educandoando had read this blog and had taken Paco Gascon’s idea and developed it with her students. I’ve read her blog and it has really REALLY made my day – her take on the #eltpics idea alone is perfect for Easter, or for any time of year really. Apart from that, all the ideas in the blog are fresh and creative, not an adjective you can apply to much of the mainstream education syllabus nowadays, and I love the direction in which she has taken ‘our’ (Paco’s) #eltpics activity. If you teach children, and can understand Spanish (or can get a friend to help you) I can only recommend you take a look at Escritores Tiernos.

Fiona

Photo credit: Image of a deer in Cazorla by Jashir at flickr.