Bulgaria – SKILLFUL THINKING

Nature Mind Map

Sports Mind Map

Reasoning and Searching for Causes. Activity 4

Task: Students are given three possible results

1.It is hard to study

2.School is boring

3.I haven’t got enough time

I explained that these are the final sentences which describe a situation. They have to ponder about the possible reasons and to try to figure out more than one. Then they write these down and think if the reasons are the first in a logical chain or there are others which have brought about their findings. The purpose is to discover the roots of a problem and to try to self-reflect the ideas.

The students worked in pairs or small groups( up to four people) so that the ideas should be accepted by the other/others and critically considered.

The time for work was 15 minutes. Teenagers have found it easier to start backwards causative chain if the final statement is written as a question that starts with “Why?”

On a Lonely Island. Brain Game Activity 2

Students are given a task to choose 5 objects that they think are the most important for surviving. The objects are : bottle, lighter, paper, bow, hammock, chocolate, rope, fishing net, knife, magazine, suncream, dog, spear, bitten apple, mp3 player, friend, plastic bag, arrows, book.

Critically Read News

On Friday, 11/02/22, I decided to have an activity, called critically read news. I downloaded a short article from The Daily Telegraph (online edition), concerning the pandemic situation in regard with teenagers, so that the students had to be more interested in the text.

The title “Spain relaxes Covid restrictions for UK teenagers” is suitable for 14-year-olds, the text is less than a page and it does not contain a lot of unknown words. The task was given as a pair work and the students had the opportunity to discuss their choices.

Procedure

The copies are distributed – one per pair

The instructions are simple – Decide what is a fact and what is an opinion in the following article. Underline with different colours and point out your decisions. Time for work – 15 minutes

Crime Scene. Prblem Solving. Activity

My teenagers are very keen on watching crime series and that’s why I decided on the following problem-solving activity

The class is divided in 6 groups and every group has to prepare a riddle/a crime scene for the others. On a particular day they swap the prepared materials and try to solve the mystery. All the students were excited about creating a task for their classmates. Unfortunately, we once again switched to online learning, so the actual task was done on the net. I separated the groups according to their given list of tasks. Each breakroom sent their task to the next and they were given an hour to sole the problem. The ideas of the different groups were various – there was a treasure hunt, a dead body, a theft. The problems were presented using a map, a ppt, maths problems to get to a certain phone number, ID cards. In the given time all the teams came up with a solution to their problem.

In a class discussion the answers were verified by the team that had given the particular task. Everyone felt satisfied with the results. I attended the work of all the groups in turns – room by room – they were working hard, speaking in English , searching for possible and plausible solutions.

Mysterious death

A girl named Alison has a birthday, so she decides to invite her friends to a bar. She calls Beatrice and Jon. They meet at the bar, where’s Nick, their friend and also a bartender.

They start chatting when they see a fight between a waiter and a client. Jon interferes and when they calm down he returns to Alison and Beatrice. They continue to have fun and in the meantime, the waiter goes to the cellar to take some ice because the client is injured-there is blood flowing out of his mouth. The owner calls his employee because of his bad behaviour. The waiter leaves the ice on the bar.

Betty and Alison order a cocktail, Jon orders red wine. Beatrice asks the bartender for more ice. Nick sees some ice nearby-he quickly grabs it and gives it to the girls. Betty is in a good mood, so she wants to dance. She invites her best friend to come with her, but Alison is shy and decides to stay at the table. Beatrice quickly drinks the cocktail and goes to have fun, while Alison is enjoying her drink.

Later, Alison starts feeling dizzy. Beatrice tries to help her, but Alison faints. Jon is nowhere to be found- Beatrice tries to reach him, but unsuccessful. The girl calls an ambulance and when it arrives, they announce, that Alison is dead.

After the interrogation, the police finds out that Beatrice and Alison had the same drinks, and they were both poisoned. Jon says, that he drank too much wine, so he had to go home.

Why was Alison the only one to die? Who is the culprit?

Aurora, Viktoria A., Margarita, Natali

Mysterious death answer:

It has poison in the ice and because Alison drink slowly, the ice in her drink melted and she drank the cocktail with poison.

Nick is the killer but not on purpose. 

Camp Crime

From a school there was an organized camp in a campsite. A lot of students went to this camp without their parents, just with 5 teachers. Everything was going normal until one night something happened. One of the boys was found with cut throat on the porch of one of the bungalows. The kid who found the body told their teachers and they called the police. On the porch there was a glass with blood on it. Probably the thing that killed him. But there were no broken window or something else.

The boy’s name was Peter and he had a girlfriend Emma. His best friend was Jonathan. The three were always together since 5th grade. Now they are 10th grade. But there is something that Peter doesn’t know and that is Jonathan’s biggest secret. He is secretly in love with Emma for one year and she knows it, but never told Peter.

Other children were not very close to him, so they couldn’t help that much.
They searched everyone’s houses, bags and other things they posses. The police officers found in one of the houses a broken makeup pallet and there was something written on like ,,E/\/..’’ but the other part of the word was missing.
Emma- typical popular girl, cheerleader, loves makeup, kind, her feelings for people are always changing, sporty girl, smart
Peter- football player, the popular guy in school, funny, madly in love with Emma, romantic, smart, kind
Jonathan- the bad boy, football player, not that smart, romantic, popular, like parties

After that night Jonathan had a lot of wounds on his body. He told the cops that he has these wound because he fall down the stairs. Emma was alright, but one of the cops saw a cut on her right hand, but he didn’t say anything.
One of the suspected was the science teacher. She told the cops that she saw everything and that Emma was holding a glass. She was crying and Jon was hugging her. During her interrogation the teacher was crying and repeating ,, it’s Emma’s fold” and that she didn’t effect him well.

Camp crime answer:

Our group think that the killer is Jonathan. We think that because of the broken glass with blood and Emma’s make up pallet.

Treasure Hunt

Riddles

What can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks, has a head but never weeps, has a bed but never sleeps?
I turn once, what is out will not get in. I turn again, what is in will not get out. What am I?
I am always hungry and I will die if not fed, but whatever I touch will soon turn red. What am I?
I have lakes with no water, mountains with no stone, and cities with no buildings. What am I?
Only one color, but no one size, stuck at the bathroom, yet easily flies.presents in sun, but not in a rain,doing no harm, and feeling no pain.
What has a tail and a head but no body?
You measure my life in hours, and I serve you by expiring. I’m quick when I’m thin and slow when I’m fat. The wind is my enemy.
Who is that with a neck and no head, two arms and no hands?

Answers

A river
A key
Fire
A map
A shadow
A coin
Candle
A shirt

Activity 2

Revising vocabulary has always been a boring task, especially if teens have to do it for a test. They don’t pay attention to it, so I altered the requirements. They had to read the texts from the last four lessons, find the difficult words, make a list and just then to make an attempt to organise the words in a way that can help them learn more easily. As a result I received different arrangements– a mindmap, a list divided in lessons, words in different lexical categories, a lot of example sentences, invented definitions etc. It took them more than a hour to find out what suits them best, which, I hope, has improved their knowledge about themselves.

Brain Game. Word Search

Wordsearch is very popular game during English lessons. It helps students to learn the new vocabulary and what’s more, their spacial awareness. In order to finish among the first a student has to look carefully at the possible letter combination (let’s say– tch, –ung) in different directions. It is fun and it’s useful for both students and teachers.

The Actual Grammar Exercises

Studying prepositions of movement is one of the topics which is hard to succeed in. As everyone knows there is no logic in this area so we decided to make visual – contextual links between the prepositions, the text and the picture. To make it easier to exteriorize I asked all of the students to draw a picture, then to write a description of the possible movements.

As a follow-up I made them swap the pictures to check their partners’ work. The majority of the group was more motivated to do that than to make regular exercises. In my opinion, this type of lesson not only stimulates different ways of perception, but establishes a rational way of planning and executing a task that actually has a lot of requirements- to be easy to draw, to be visually suitable for explanation, to be clear for checking-up.

Writing a Story

A competition took place in our school on the 24th November 2021. It is usually loved by younger students but this year nearly one third of my class took part in it. It was the week after the online skillful thinking-active learning sessions and the students were still under the influence of them.

As a rule, they like games and stories but when it comes to writing a story, they lose their interest. This time it was completely different. They saw the beginning, and, as it can be seen from the properties of each document, they put a lot of effort. What was amazing was the fact that using the same topic sentence they thought of many plots and characters. They were given three options to choose from:1. The land was completely covered with ice, all but that one tree;2.If we shouldn’t eat at night, why there is a light in the fridge;3.I went to bed on New year’s eve and woke up in 2026.

Although all three beginnings don’t look serious and academical, they require a lot of thinking and planning to be written as well as logical development of the plot.

8.1 The land was completely covered in ice, all but that one tree

One day back in 2000 Kelsey and Ben went on an exotic vacation to Hawaii. They were so excited because they love warm places nearby the seaside.

When they arrived their first wish was to dive into the crystal water. Later they drank a nice alcohol-free cocktail with juice from palm tree leaves. They enjoyed their first day very much.

When they went to bed Ben fell asleep immediately, but Kelsey couldn’t close her eyes for a second. She was hearing a strange noise. She got up from the bed to see what was happening and it was a miracle. There were millions of snowflakes that were falling from the sky. Kelsey screamed ` Oh, no. What is going on?’ She was a little bit upset but went to bed again.

In the morning, when Ben and Kelsey woke up, Kelsey thought that the snow she saw was just a dream. When they opened the door they were surprised. Kelsey understood that the snow from the last night was real and even now it became ice.

They walked around their cottage and saw that the whole island was covered in ice. Ben came up with an idea to walk further from their place. They felt really cold and Kelsey said ` Who will remember to take warm clothes to Hawaii!’

After a while, Ben and Kelsey saw in distance a very strange palm tree which was still green. They even could see some clothes on it. When they got to it they found out that these things were jumpers and skates. Kelsey took two jumpers and skates and they both decided to make their vacation more interesting. They skated on the frozen ocean for hours.

And even if they did not have their dream vacation with swimming and diving all the time they found another way to entertain themselves.

8.2 If we shouldn’t eat at night, why is there a light in the fridge?

Hailey was six years old and she has never seen her father. Her mother’s name was Daisy. She’s never told her anything about his personality or appearance. Although Hailey started dreaming her father, which is absolutely normal, but the unusual thing was that she imagined him with green skin and in her dreams he didn’t look like a human being and his language was unfamiliar but somehow she could understand. Hailey was one really smart and curious kid and what made her even more curious was that her mother never let her go near the fridge at night. They would always buy food from outside when the sun went down.

When Hailey became six years old, she started school. One of her favourite subjects was Art, because she was really creative and she used to draw her dreams. One day, the kids’ task was to draw their fathers. Hailey was so excited to show her painting to her mother later, so she could find out if she imagined him in the right way. The little girl thought everything was normal until it was her turn to show the drawing. Suddenly, the kids looked at each other with confusion and started laughing. The teacher, Mrs. Cookie, stood still and tried to hold her laugh. Hailey’s arms and legs started shaking and she ran out the room crying because she didn’t think she did anything wrong. There was one little and green creature painted on the paper. It was bald and it had only one eye. Its eyebrows and eyelashes were missing. It looked as if the creature came from a cartoon. The girls kind of liked it because they said it was cute but although it was funny for everybody. They started calling Hailey “The monster’s daughter”.

She came back home looking ill. Her face was pale and her hair was messy. There were still tears in her eyes but she kept holding the drawing. Mrs. Cookie phoned her mother and told her about the situation. She almost passed out and took the paper away from the girl’s hand in aggressive way. She has never seen her mother so mad. Hailey told her that she looked like a monster and ran to her room.

The same evening, Daisy had to work night shift and before she left for work, she put chains all over the fridge. The angry woman made the girl promise not to open the fridge.

She went to bed and waited for her mother to leave. Immediately, when she heard the front door closing, she ran to the kitchen and saw the chains. The girl’s curiosity became stronger and she started searching for the key. The key was hidden on the highest shelf and she couldn’t reach it.

Out of nowhere, something lifted Hailey up and she grabbed the key.

When she unlocked the locker, the door opened and pushed her on the floor. There was mist and sparkles. She kind of regretted the thing she has done and started crying. Hailey was frightened of the view and wished she would have listened to her mother. Suddenly, a small creature came and kissed her on the forehead. It grabbed her hand and put a small paper in it. She went back to bed and looked at the message. It was written “I love you, my daughter” in the strange language.

Many years have passed and Hailey used to tell her story to her daughter. One night, the little girl asked Hailey “Why is there a light in the fridge?” and the grown woman smiled and said “Well…maybe because there is something in it.”

8.3 I went to bed on New Year’s Eve and I woke up in 2026

Ella Hunt, an ordinary girl, was celebrating New Year’s Eve at her grandparent’s house as usual. But ordinary girls don’t travel in time. Ella was a time traveler.

Long ago in 2021, Ella was celebrating the upcoming year 2022 at her grandparent’s house. All of her family members and relatives, including her dad John, her mom Aurora, her cousins Bob and Sidney and of course, her grandparents Jade and Hunter, were gathered for a traditional dinner. In the morning they all received gifts. But this time it wasn’t just a usual New Year’s Eve celebration.

After the dinner, they all went to sleep, except Jade, she stayed up all night. In the morning, Jade noticed that Ella still wasn’t awake, which was uncommon for her granddaughter. She always wakes up first to see what she has received as a gift. Last year she got a very strange watch. But this watch wasn’t just an ordinary watch. It was a time travel machine. Ella found the gift a bit strange, however she was delighted, because she had always wanted a watch. From this moment, the girl never took the watch off her wrist.

Five years went by. It was New Year’s Eve again. Ella still hadn’t woken up. Her parents had tried everything possible to wake her up. Nothing. Everyone was really concerned about Ella and they all were wondering what might have happened to her. Except Jade, she wasn’t worried even a bit. She knew definitely knew something that the other didn’t.

In the morning of 2026 everyone woke up, as well as Ella. She was all grown up and five years older. When her parents saw that she had woken up, they started crying joyful tears. Everyone gathered around her. Immediately, they all asked her as many questions as possible. But Ella was in shock. She couldn’t talk or move. So they decided to give a little time to recover from whatever had happened.

After a while, Ella finally spoke up. She began the story with the night she went to bed. She told them that she felt really dizzy that night. Then she fell asleep. She had a dream that her the same thing had happened to her grandmother many years ago. And it was true. Ella’s grandmother was a time traveler as well. And that watch was hers. She knew that Ella was the next chosen one, but she couldn’t do anything to stop that from happening. She only knew that Ella was going to wake up sooner or later.

Eventually, Ella wasn’t the only one shocked. Everybody’s jaw had dropped down to the floor. They all thought that the stories they were told as kids about time travel machines weren’t true.

8.3 I went to bed on New Year’s Eve and woke up in 2026

Hello my name is Florencia and I am going to tell you, my story. Before 5 years at New Year’s Eve, I was with my family and we were preparing the dinner. After we did it, we go to the table and started eating. I ate a lot I ate banitsa, sarmi , meat, pasta and a lot of Bulgarian meals. After all I have eaten, I feel badly, so I decided to go to bed and get up few minutes before New Year. I said to my grandma to wake me up at 11 p.m. and 40 minutes, so I could have time to watch tv and dance with my dog, but something happened she did not wake me up so now it is 2027 and I am I a hospital and doctors told me that I ve been in coma, but everything has changed everyone wears a mask, every car is electric people are very good with each other, which is amazing, but how we get to hear I don’t remember. I wake up at 2026 and when I get up, I saw a beautiful gay in which I think I felt in love, he was so beautiful with blonde hair, green eyes and he was so nice with me. I don’t know how but now I am sick and I can’t go outside. We both can go outside we were sick from cystic fibrosis, so we need to have distance from 5 feet, we were so happy, but one day he couldn’t breathe, I do not know what to do but I wanted to safe his live so I made a fake breathing, but it doesn’t work – that day I lost my best friend my everything he knew everything about me , but we we value something when we lose it .I am so happy now I have kids and husband who gives me all the love I ever dream about. Every day I go outside and I do sports , because that was my best friend dream – to do sports , so now I am living with his dreams , I thought that it would be so hard to live without him , it was at first but now I know that I’ve done everything that I could and that motivates me to keep going . My call is to dream big and push hard!

8.3 I went to bed on New Year’s Eve and woke up in 2026

It was 31st December, year 2016 and my friends and I were celebrating the New Year’s Eve. Suddenly I had my sleep out and I quickly sent my friends home. I didn’t even wait the New Year and I fell asleep. I woke up not long after or at least, that’s what I thought.

I went to the bathroom to took a shower and to got ready for work. After that I had breakfast and I was going to get dressed, when I took my phone to see what’s the time and I was shocked. It was written ,, 2nd of October, year 2026”. At first I thought that my phone was broken and I went out of my house. When I saw what was happening outside, I was going to fell. Everything was different, but not in a good way. I didn’t know what was happening and then un old lady called me in her house and told me everything.

The technology was so advanced and the people had made robots to help them. But everything was out of control. Something in their system was wrong and they had started a war- ,, World war three’’.

I asked her when, why and who did this? Who made the robots? She replied me, that it happened in 2023, because of the new president of America and NASA. They changed people’s minds and said that the robots are for helping people.. For example to shop instead of them and in the beginning it was good. But after that they started to kill people. And the main reason was to reduce the humidity, because the birth rate became high.

She told me that the only way for salvation was to help our soldiers.

Suddenly, I heard loud noise. That was my phone alarm for work. I’m glad that it was only a nightmare…

8.3 I went to bed on New Year’s Eve and I woke up in 2026

Rose got of her bed and went to brush her teeth. After that, she went down stairs to have breakfast. She was so happy and excited, because tonight was New Year’s Eve, she loved this holiday, it was one of her favourite. For her that was very special thing, not only because of the presents and the fireworks, because it’s a new start and you can change your life to better or to fix bad things from the past.

Her family also liked this holiday and all of them were so excited, even her brother- Jack, who was usually very sad and always in a very bad mood.

After she ate, she went out with her friends to buy some presents for their families and other friends. Then she got home.

The day ended really fast. And at this moment the time was eight pm. So Rose’s mum- Katy started to make the dinner. They finished eating around night pm. At twelve pm, outside it was so loud, because of the fireworks and light was so beautiful.

About an hour everyone went to sleep. But something wasn’t right and no one knew…

In the morning Rose woke up in a very strange bed and the room was different. She came out and it was summer. She wondered where everyone is. In a while the girl found some people. She asked them if they know what is this place. And they answered that they are in California (where Rose lived). But she was stilll so confused. There were some flying cars and the people were wore very weird things on their wrists. She went to buy some food, but in the supermarket there weren’t any cashiers. She didn’t know what to do, so went out. Also all of the people watched her like she was an alien. She missed her family and friends and the feeling was awful. Rose started crying.

Suddenlysomeone knocked on the door. It was her brother, but very old. She saw her in the mirror and after a very long time she realized that she was old too. The girl thought that this was a dream, but it wasn’t. Jack told her that he is also confused.

While they were thinking what to do, they saw a small box. They touched the box. Immediately they were in 1934, they touched it again and then they became back in home. And everything was the same. They didn’t tell anyone about it, but they hide the box under the bed…