Ixchell Reyes
The DIESOL podcast

Brent Warner
Digital Integration in English as a Second or Other Language,

Ixchell Reyes
Episode 53: Warm-ups for the language classroom

Brent Warner
Welcome to DIESOL! This is episode 53. We are your hosts I am Brent Warner,

Ixchell Reyes
and I’m Ixchell Reyes is Hey, Brent.

Brent Warner
Hi.

Ixchell Reyes
Ogenki desu ka?

Brent Warner
Genki Desu! Why are you asking me in Japanese?

Ixchell Reyes
Because I recording from Japan, Aichi prefecture. Yeah. So we we’ve now covered South America are you know, recorded from Columbia. Now recording from Japan!

Brent Warner
Yeah. This is like, the most international show there is. Ever! It’s the most international podcast that exists anywhere. Nobody prove me wrong, please.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, so how are you?

Brent Warner
Well, we’ve been holding on to that one for a little bit, right. Like we’ve we’ve kind of got your you’re in Japan or traveling to Japan. And we had to hold that just because the timing of when the episodes came out. Right. How are you liking it?

Ixchell Reyes
I love it. People are friendly. The you know, I get to have Japanese food every day and taste a variety. And yeah, everything is good. And, of course, we’re still dealing with COVID. But people follow the rules here, which is awesome. And, you know, I you know, that’s just there’s the you know, it’s funny, because no mask mandate here. But people wear their masks.

Brent Warner
Oh, yeah. Well, the great thing. Yeah, I always thought, you know, in the past, when the masks first started coming up, I was like, oh, maybe it’ll be like in Japan, where people just wear masks, because they’re trying to protect other people. And maybe that will become a cultural thing that we accept in America. I now when I walk around and go to the coffee shops, I am the only person wearing a mask. Yeah. So I don’t think the culture is going to hold I think people are, you know, people are people.

Ixchell Reyes
People. Yes, yeah. But it’s kind of nice not to have to feel you know, it every you know, people use hand sanitizer everywhere. People are very careful about it. And though they have relaxed, a lot of their actual guidelines for COVID. And their numbers are dropping, it’s still nice to see that people are people do care. Yeah, yeah. Or I feel like they care.

Brent Warner
I am. I could honestly just do the whole episode just talking about Japan, Japan, but I think we’ll have to move forward a little bit and kind of get into the episode. So today we’re talking about warm ups, warm ups for the language classroom. So I think it’s time we’ll just jump right into it if you’re ready.

Ixchell Reyes
I love warm ups, I actually love warm ups. Because you know, if you’re, you know, opening up the class for the first time, or if you’re introducing a topic, it’s just fun to see how the students are going to react usually for me, that defines how I’m going to proceed with the activity. But of course, we know that warm up activities are used to help students participate and then create confidence before moving on to the actual main activity.

Brent Warner
What do you mean? Sorry, I just want to hold on, you say it guides what you’re going to do so. So if the warm up activity doesn’t go? Well, sorry, just clarify that a little bit?

Ixchell Reyes
Well, it’s not that it might not go well, I kind of I can typically predict how the students are going to react to a warm up activity, but I can never predict what they’re going to actually say or share or how they’re going to perform. So I technically tend to use that warm up activity as an informal assessment to see oh, the students are well number one, they’re not really talking to each other. They don’t seem to get along or they’re having trouble communicating. Or it might be a group that’s that gels very well together. I know I think oh, I can actually push this one a little more and I can give them a little longer with a warm up. So it kind of sets the tone or pace or whatever I am about to introduce.

Brent Warner
Nice, nice. Okay, so that makes sense. So let’s talk a little bit about why we do warm up so you kind of mentioned a little But here, but yeah, let’s jump into some reasons because some people, it’s very tempting when we have a limited amount of time to just go, we’re just gonna get right into the real content, right. But why is doing warm ups important?

Ixchell Reyes
Well, I mean, it’s, of course, it’s really important to it gives you a little bit of a glimpse into where the students are at, obviously, you’re going to be generating some of their background knowledge and tapping into that. But for those students who don’t have background knowledge, you want to create a point of reference, because oftentimes, you might have a new student that has never talked about either a cultural point, or that vocabulary activity or whatever that that context is that you’re going to be giving them, you need to create a point of reference to later say, remember when we did this, and that actually helps them to track back and be able to recall. So that that’s why I think we do warm ups.

Brent Warner
Yeah. I always love that, too. It’s like, when sometimes I tell my students, I’m like, Yeah, I didn’t just do that for no reason. A lot of times, they think that this stuff is just random, you know? And it’s like, no, there’s, there’s

Ixchell Reyes
designed actually.

Brent Warner
Yeah, not for very long, but I thought about it. So a couple of other things that I, you know, I think that we could also talk about in terms of why we do warm ups, and depending on where you are in the semester, or what students are sitting together, whatever, just as general icebreakers, right, like get the, you know, that this idea of like, hey, you need to know these people that you’re going to be talking to, right. And so it gives them the opportunity to really make friends with each other. And, and, and oftentimes friends with people that maybe they wouldn’t have talked to otherwise. Right, right. And I love that at the end of the semester, like when I see like, students are like, oh, yeah, we were out at coffee together, or we went and had lunch together, or whatever that is, it’s like, oh, it’s because they’ve had the opportunity to sit together and talk and maybe do something that’s not high stakes and high pressure, right. And that’s, that’s a great spot for where warm ups are. And then also, you know, the, the, the maybe the more fancy way of saying this is that idea of lowering the effective filter, right? We’re right, where they’re opening themselves up a little bit to the idea of the language, maybe they’re mentally transitioning out of whatever they were doing before class or, you know, wherever their headspace was before that. So I think there’s a lot of these other parts to it, that are kind of along the, the social emotional learning side of things that also have a lot of benefit with warm ups as well. It doesn’t have to be that long of work. It can be, you know, right, pretty quick,

Ixchell Reyes
something very quick. Yeah. And I think another that’s, here’s an important point, there, sometimes there’s their students who are just really shy. And I always think of myself as a as a language learner, I would have never talked to someone that I didn’t know, I want to stay in my comfort zone. So when there’s something that’s low stakes, you’re going to make that that contact in class. And then that’s one of the things that I used to tell my students in university is you need to have two buddies, you know, two buddies that you exchange information with, just in case you’re, you’re late in case you’re absent in case an emergency arises that you can ask for notes or ask for, you know, the homework assignment and that we don’t you know, that it’s the, it’s a skill to be able to have someone because once you go into the university, you’re going to be surrounded by native speakers. And if you have not practiced reaching out to someone, then you’re going to be all by yourself. And that can be you know, that can be isolating. Yeah, well,

Brent Warner
there’s so much stuff with like, with language class, and building interpersonal skills, and all of those types of things. I mean, it gets kind of brushed over I think a lot of the time, but it’s, it’s super important. Right? Yeah, I totally agree with you there. So. So I found this a post on a on a website called bridge.edu. I never heard of it before, but it looks pretty cool. Like there’s some interesting information, but there was, they were talking about warm up activities. And they had a nice little list of like, some of the things of what makes a good warm up activity. And so I thought we might just kind of go back and forth through a couple of these points. You know, because a lot of times we might not, you know, I mean, I think once you have some experience, you do pretty pretty well with warm up activities. But sometimes, like, I spend like all this time and I’m like, Okay, here’s this form of activity, it’s like I spent like two hours building a five minute activity. Less so these days than then, you know, in my earlier days of teaching, but I think we might consider what makes a good one so so you want to start with the first one on the list here.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, so you know, an effective warm up activity should be considerate toward the student’s emotional and physical state when they enter the classroom. So let’s say that it was a big weekend they just finished midterm exams or etc. You know, they might be tired or if there was something happening out like for example, that the pandemic, right? We had to be very aware of that. Perhaps something’s going on in a student’s country, whatever it is, you might want to, you know, shift use your your warm up to energize the students and get them back to focus. Like you said, get them out of that headspace and and into the classroom. So it’s a transition to that. Yeah,

Brent Warner
yeah. The next one on here is making them simple to understand and simple to execute, right? I think if there’s more than like, three rules to it, it’s probably not gonna I mean, it might be a fun game, or it might be, you know, like, you get something you get more into. But I think with a warm up, you want it to be something that they can understand pretty quickly. And that’s, you know, not going to take more time to explain than you have time for for the activity itself.

Ixchell Reyes
Right. And so, as you said, it should be easy to carry out and require little to no preparation, because that’s, you know, we don’t want to be spending our time inefficiently when we’re not when we’re supposed to be focusing on something else. But short and sweet.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. The next one, age and level appropriate. This. So I’ll kind of share one that’s kind of come up for me as a problem in the past, which was, you know, I brought something up. So I was like, sharing like a Google page. I guess it wasn’t Google. It must been Yahoo or something. But, you know, the ads that yeah, like they still use Yahoo

Ixchell Reyes
here in Japan. Yeah. And I’m judging you for using Yahoo.

Brent Warner
Well, this I don’t know if it was Yahoo. I’m just trying to think of something that had advertising Hey, come on.

Ixchell Reyes
Internet Explorer

Brent Warner
for being you know, you know, when you talk trash on big on Twitter, they they straight up respond to you, like I like, like, come in mad at me. And like, sorry, being anyways. So Aiden level appropriate, basically, the idea being, I don’t know what happened, I went to some site, and then there’s like, sexy pictures on the side, or like, Hey, are you interested in a, you know, a husband or a wife from a country? And it’s like, Oh, my God, like, and it’s not that that’s the worst thing? You know, when you’re dealing with adults, it’s not that big of a deal. But at the same time, it’s like, well, that’s probably not really appropriate. And it’s totally going to distract from the game. Right. So that’s a little bit of preparation. it’s age appropriate level appropriate, but also just like content appropriate to do a quick check to see that the site that you’re going to be sharing, for example, is clear?

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah. Right. And I could piggyback on that. Because if you don’t check your act- you mean it’s hard. If you think I’m just going to do a Google search for this and show them a picture. A friend of mine colleague was trying to explain the word wart W-A-R-T to the students. The students didn’t know wart. So

Brent Warner
oooh. yeah. Yeah, so geez, Google, come on Google, you should not be showing that stuff without like (laughter)

Ixchell Reyes
yeah. And then it just, you know, it just ruins your moment of trying that you don’t want that to be the frame of reference

Brent Warner
Ruins more than my moment. My entire day or week probably get me fired. So, all right, so what else?

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, so should be, again, should be time efficient, not take up too much time, because you’ve got other things to focus on. And it should be it’s a warm up. It’s just an easy little. Let’s, let’s introduce this activity, maybe assess a little bit and then move on. Yeah.

Brent Warner
They also said it should be interesting and appealing. So, you know, find something that is going to be actually fun, right? You know, not? There are some games and activities that are just like, really, do we have to do this thing? Right. And so, I would be, you know, maybe reticent about the games that have been used a million times, like, hang man, or you know, something?

Ixchell Reyes
I don’t even think that’s politically correct in many places. I was reading somewhere. They don’t play hangman anymore. Because of you know, lynching

Brent Warner
Oh, yeah!

Ixchell Reyes
I mean, that I now I feel like, wow, yeah.

Brent Warner
Good point.

Ixchell Reyes
Build Something! instead of destroy build something.

Brent Warner
Yeah. Build a builder block? I don’t know. We’ll have to come up with a different idea for that. I didn’t even think about how horrible that is.

Ixchell Reyes
Okay, so if you’re, if you’re thinking about like, what students that come from countries where hanging is an actual punishment, that’s a trigger. And we don’t think about that.

Brent Warner
Yeah. So don’t play hangman. I like that.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah. And so of course, you should be choosing something that is leading toward the lesson content or the target language is not just a random filler time activity. It’s an activity with a purpose. Like you said, you are designing this moment to create a starting point for the students.

Brent Warner
Well, and I like so there’s a couple things in the show. I’m not sure if you One way or the other, I think with warmups, you can either do a review from the previous lesson, or you can do it kind of as a preview for the upcoming lesson, right? And so depending on what students are needing, but and what’s appropriate for your class, but you know, you can either pull backward or pull from, you know, the back or push forward, I think, right? Absolutely a couple other things inside of there. One was using mostly known vocabulary so that they can participate and be confident in it, right, because this is not about trying to get you or you know, do an AHA or anything like that, right? It’s, it’s just, you want them to be able to participate. So same thing with the easy rules is like language that they can use to do it, right. And then I threw this one in the end here, myself, but I like the ones where teachers can play and teachers can also lose, right? So sometimes that little bit of students being able to beat their teachers at it, or if you know, depending on what the game is, or, or, or play together with their teacher, it kind of makes that that connection a little bit stronger for them as well. So I like it when the teacher is not just monitoring the whole thing, but also was able to jump in. So this is kind of just the the basics. I mean, warm ups are not like, you know, nothing big surprise or anything but but just some things to consider. And please, I certainly hadn’t considered the Hang Man thing, but we’ll jump on.

Ixchell Reyes
You Monster!

Brent Warner
I know, I am a monster. All right, M-O-N-S-T-E-R.

Ixchell Reyes
As always, we’d love your support for the show. With 30 seconds of your time, you can support us with an iTunes review. It does wonders. And as fall rolls out, you can keep us warm by buying us a coffee on buy me a coffee.

Brent Warner
Yeah, a couple people have been buying us coffees.

Ixchell Reyes
Mmhmm! Thank you!

Brent Warner
Ixchell, I have a question

Ixchell Reyes
Can’t ever go wrong with coffee. Yes, sir?

Brent Warner
If you could just choose for people to either leave a review for the show or send us money, which would you choose?

Ixchell Reyes
I like the reviews. I like to hear people’s feedback. It’s it’s nice to, like the coffees are great when they come with a note. But which is fine. It just you know, but I like to know what people found useful. Or if someone you know, if they’re using an activity, I really like to know that because it sort of helps me to feel like oh, this was useful.

Brent Warner
I think in the in the same boat with you here is like I mean, you know, like, we have a couple of things for for sending money for participating and those types of things. But at the end of the day, like I think it’s for teachers, we’re not really doing it for money, right? It’s it’s right. It’s that feedback. It’s the learning that we hope is useful. So I’m kind of on the same page there too.

All right, tools, Tool Time. Yeah, some ways to actually do this stuff. So what are some things that people can do? Let’s think we’re just gonna bat it back and forth.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, so what I really like to use, of course, this is a we’ve talked about this many, many times before. But jam board is great for any kind of matchups. So you can have phrasal verbs and their meaning you can have vocabulary words and their meaning you can have pictures with a vocabulary word, you can have parts of a question and how you end the question, all sorts of matchups, and you can do them with students together one at a time or as a team or three volunteers just to you know, get the get their brains going. Jam board is kind of a quick, quick prep, low tech also, I think, because the students don’t necessarily needed to have it. It’s just you could just have it injected. Oh, just

Brent Warner
have it up on the board. Do you mean projected up there? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, jam board is great. And I mean, there’s tons of different things that you could do for jam boards. But I like that idea there too. So cool. So my first one I’m going to share is 20 questions. You know, the traditional game of 20 questions asking? Yes, no. And even speaking of you being in Japan, when I was living in Japan many years ago, I had one of those. Did you ever see the 20 question ball that lives like a little digital ball? You remember this thing? And

Ixchell Reyes
it narrows it down? Yeah, like narrow? Yes. Yeah. So

Brent Warner
it always starts with is it bigger than a breadbox? Yes, no. Right? And then it goes into like all these different questions. But anyways, there’s a website for it. Now that’s pretty robust. It’s a little bit like web 1.5 ish. But 2020 And then the number or the number 20 dotnet. You can play the whole game on there. And then it’s pretty cool because you can show it up on the screen just like you said, and then students can try to beat the computer. So if they if the computer gets in less than 20 questions, then they lose. And if they if they it takes longer than 20 questions then, you know, then the game or then the students win, right? And so it’s a pretty fun little one that gets students going. And they it’s not too hard because they’re just kind of screaming yes or no. But they’re also listening to question practice and kind of getting a sense of like, you know, simple yes, no questions, is it can it does it right, those types of things. So 20 cue dotnet is a great one. That’s, you know, basically no prep, just popping it up on the board. And then, and but it can sometimes inspire some debate by students. So they’re like, they’re like, No, it’s not, it’s not bigger than a breadbox. It’s smaller than you know, like, whatever that is. So there’s some fun stuff there, too.

Ixchell Reyes
That sounds cool. I used to have one of those for The Simpsons characters. And it would guess who your carrot who the character was that you’re thinking of, which is pretty

Brent Warner
cool. The website itself also has that too. So there’s like categories. Yeah, I can do there’s a separate section down below with like Star Wars Disney Simpsons movies like so if you want to just play for a little bit more specific things. You can play that as well, too, if your students are ready for it.

Ixchell Reyes
The next activity I like to do is his word letter. I don’t know if you are familiar with word letters, not sure. So it’s you start off with a word. And then you can replace one of the letters to form a new word. And you can continue on until you get to a you know the final word that you want. So let’s say for example, you have the word cat that can become caught, the ca t become co t, then caught can become dot, dots can become dog, etc, etc, etc. And of course, those are three letter words. But you can have something more complex it depending on what what it is you want students to be talking about, or practicing or thinking about. If it sounds if it’s about you know, long vowel long vowel sounds, short vowel sounds. But there is a website that actually creates the word letter sequence for you. So let’s say you want to start with the word fight, but and you want them to end up with the word, mate. It will create that sequence of different words that you would have to get to to find to get to meet. Oh, okay. Yeah, so it’s kind of cool. I get some to think it gets them to think about letter placement and how to shift over to the next letter and what they have to do. So it’s kind of a cool, warm up with words and spelling, in many cases may be sounds as well. Nice. Nice. Okay.

Brent Warner
So I’m going to take it way back to Super, super simple ones. But Pictionary, I think, is a great one. For students, especially, you know, if you’re in a physical classroom, you can do this really easily with with just having them stand at different sections of the board, right. And then one student’s going to get the list of clues and the other students going to get whatever, and they’re going to be guessing. But you can also do it really easily online with all sorts of like, you know, interactive whiteboards as well. And so I think we talked about Pictionary as an idea back when we did you know some of our game episodes or interviews or something, but, you know, you can pull one student up, if you’re in a zoom setting, you can just pull one student up, and then whoever types in the answer of what they’re drawing first can be the fastest one. It doesn’t take a lot of prep, and you can just give them the word real quickly.

Ixchell Reyes
The next idea is something that I learned from you, Brent, and that we use here on the show, and it’s the pod Dex app, which is a random random question generator. Because you know, coming up with unique questions that will get people talking and thinking it can be challenging. And this app just has different decks that you can pull from. I’ve been using it right now to do conversation starters, and answering questions and also asking further questions after you’ve answered a question. So for TOEFL, this is great, because sometimes in interviews, you don’t know what they’re going to ask you during the TOEFL interview, and or any other English test, but you can create your own deck as well. Right now I’m in a note tech classroom. So I use pod decks to get ideas, and then I write them out. So that also works.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. Great. So another one that I’ve liked when we’re doing like stuff is kind of more like an intermediate or lower intermediate class, if you’re doing directions, right, if you’re doing kind of left, right, move forward or something. So the traditional one is put a blindfold on a student and then I would rearrange the desks in the room and then have Have you ever done that before? And then they have the class Oh, to go straight forward, and they try not to bump into the desks as they go through a maze of the desks, right? So is that a safety hazard?

Ixchell Reyes
How to injure a student while teaching English?

Brent Warner
I mean, you could do it for yourself, you can make yourself be the blindfolded person, I guess.

Ixchell Reyes
You monster

Brent Warner
M-O-N-S-T-E-R. So, uh, so I thought of another way to do this, though, that could be really fun, which is like the Google Maps, right? So you could actually give students a link to a specific drop down place on the street view of Google Maps. And then you could try to get their classmates to guide them to, you know, this the donut shop or guide them to the school or like, find a place where they actually have to say, Okay, you’re going to start when you’re looking at the McDonald’s, right, and you’re going to turn right, and then go down one block, and then turn left, right. And so they could actually physically walk through the city using, you know, the Street View on Google Maps as a way to kind of learn directions as well.

Ixchell Reyes
You know, that is a great idea. I just this week, we had, you know, the typical old school maps that come from a textbook that you probably follow photocopied locations and you filled in the map, my students have to learn how to give directions, of course. But let my some of my students are going to specific places, they already know where they’re going, one is going to another state one is going to another country. So if I can use Google Maps of that neighborhood where they’re already know they’re going to be they can learn how to tell directions. Yeah, and be a little bit more familiar. That’s a great idea. I think I’m going to try it this week.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And you know what you can do your show on a note in no tech classroom, if you don’t have access, you can download the Google maps onto your iPad or onto your computer. So you can have like, that neighborhood already loaded in so you don’t have to be connected to the internet for it as well. If you’re not,

Ixchell Reyes
that’s a great idea. And yeah, good, good point here that you can have Google Maps offline, I’m going to try that. Because of course, you know, you want to recreate the situation as realistically as possible. And you know, our neighborhoods are not just parallel blocks all the time. So cool, nice. So the next activity I have is the our good old Scattergories. That’s a category game. But there is a website, it’s called Scattergories Scattergories, online dotnet. And it’ll be on the show notes where you can decide which categories how the length of the word to choose from, and you can decide how many players are or what you know how long of the time you have, but you can do this, especially if you’re teaching online or just, you know, put it up on the board. You don’t have to have the actual physical game. You could also it’s just like a generator, but it’s again, one of those 1.0 web 1.0 type things but it does the job. You don’t need to have all that extra stuff.

Brent Warner
So So speaking of the advertisements, I’m clicking in and looking at it right now. And the first thing that’s coming up is the new season of Dexter and it says time to kill

Ixchell Reyes
Hey, I’ve got a pop up blocker so I see none of that pop up blocker I have a pop up blocker that in

Brent Warner
the show notes Alright, so next one up. I think I’ve talked about this a few times over the years like Rory story Rory Story Cubes. Just really great. Kind of same thing is like the emoji sentence builder or the emoji power paragraph which we did a we did a blog post a while back the the power emoji power paragraph and those types of things. But basically just the idea of like bringing up images as ways for people to start talking to each other so so if you do Rory Story Cubes, I have it on my iPad or on my phone and I put it put it on the projector and I tap the button and it brings up three little dice pictures are for the little dice pictures. And students can talk to each other and try to make a story out of whatever they’re seeing on there. So that’s a, that’s a great one. It takes almost nothing like it takes a lot longer to connect it to the projector than it does to start playing the game.

Ixchell Reyes
Cool. Well, the next one I have came from. It’s an idea from the podcast brains on it’s a children’s podcast, but it’s got a lot of complex structures and academic language that benefits our ESL students. So I use it in the classroom for adults and higher ed very often. But in the show, they have something called a mystery sound and they always take a break and they’ll give you the mystery sound then they play their ads and then you come back to the mystery sound and you have to guess what that is. And I tried This week and one of only one of my students got the mystery sound it was the sound of popcorn popping. But there’s this teacher online. His his YouTube account is Mr. Teach, and he’s got videos of mystery sound. So for example 10 Mystery sounds 20 Mystery sounds. And this is really great if you’re trying to generate vocabulary, descriptive vocabulary. So for example, one student knew the word popcorn. And with the word pan, and with the word popping, the other students gave something not random, but it also gave me an idea of what they knew what they could use to

Brent Warner
describe Oh, cuz you can see the limits of their vocabulary. Yes, yes.

Ixchell Reyes
Yes. So there, you know, but it’s kind of a cool thing to start off with. And of course, if you can tie this to something you’re about to introduce, if it’s let’s say you’re talking about animals and habitats, then you could have different animals. I know teachers who have used the sound of dolphin different sounds of Dolf different calls that dolphins make. Okay, so you know, I don’t I don’t speak dolphin Japanese. So no, I you know, I’ve got to be culturally appropriate.

Brent Warner
Come on.

Ixchell Reyes
I know how to, I know how to, I know how to make a snail sound.

Brent Warner
Oh, how’s that? Go? Ready? Listen. Very clever. I bet you they’re picking up the microphones

Ixchell Reyes
Well, next time you need it anyway, Mr. Mr. Teach.

Brent Warner
Next time you need a great joke, hit up Ixchell.

Ixchell Reyes
Ha ha ha, you monsterrr!

Brent Warner
M-O-N-S-T-E-R. Last one is my last one. I don’t know if you have more beyond this. But I think this might be the last one, which is camera games. So one of the cool things about how

Ixchell Reyes
our game is related to squid games.

Brent Warner
Killing any of my students for

Ixchell Reyes
just giving, just giving them directions in the classroom and killing them.

Brent Warner
So I was thinking, everybody has a camera in their pocket. And like maybe doing something like just walking around the classroom and trying to take like macro pictures of something or something from a unique angle and trying to make and then just having your classmates guess what your picture is of right. And so. So you could just do simple things with the camera and just like take a picture and then show it to somebody and then talk about that, right. And so if you get creative, like you could see all sorts of different possibilities with like, ways that you can see things or ways that you can talk about things, I think it’s kind of a parallel to the mystery sounds right? But they’re creating

Ixchell Reyes
like pictures. I was just listening to a podcast on a book called Zoom, where the book zooms into something. And then you go to the next picture, and it zooms out a little bit, and you start to see what that is. But your first impression is never what that end picture is.

Brent Warner
I have no idea what you just said what? So

Ixchell Reyes
a macro, a macro of something, right? It’s a book. Yeah, it’s a book,

Brent Warner
a picture book, a picture book, okay. It’s not like a not a

Ixchell Reyes
no, but it reminds me of that, because you’re, you know, taking a picture of something. And your initial impression is, I don’t know what this is, or you have guesses. But then at the end, you’re zooming out to see what that is. Yeah,

Brent Warner
well, oh, you know what you could do with this game, too. You could actually just do it that way. Like take a regular picture. And then and then just pinch and pinch and zoom into a section. And then when your classmate guests, then you could you could pinch out and see that see, actually the whole thing and see if they got it right to right.

Ixchell Reyes
You mean use the zoom function? Well, but like

Brent Warner
I was originally thinking of like bringing your camera up underneath the camera, or, you know, underneath the document camera or something, but I’m thinking a further version away. And then like, just zooming. And you could do that. Yeah. Cool. So lots of different possible things. I think today’s was a little lower tech than maybe we normally go. And that’s okay, that’s great for me, partly because I’m finally going back way into the classroom. I started this week with one day back in the classroom with my students. And so I’m like, oh, what can I do in the classroom? Get students going. So this is, this is great. But lots and lots of different things. And you know what I would I’m gonna throw this one out here because I would love for people to come in and share their favorite warmup activities on the show notes. Because there’s so many different ones that different people have and, and I really hope that we can, you know, maybe just if there’s a little collection if you listen to this episode, you can go to diesel.org/fiftythreethenumberfivethreeandleaveusacommentwithwiththegameortheactivitythat you’d like to use The most because I think they treat us back or tweet us out. For sure.

Ixchell Reyes
It’s time for our fun finds. And this time around, I have the sticker Lee sticker app. And I, you can make stickers of anything you want. So I happen to have a lot of funny pictures of my nephew. He does a lot. He makes a lot of funny faces. And now that’s just become you know, and in the generation of memes and emojis and reacting with pictures. I love to react to the comments that that my friends make with like a funky picture of my nephew. Like

Brent Warner
stickers. You’re talking about digital stickers, like on your phone. Yeah. It’s like a real sticker. I’m so no, I’m old. I’m sorry. When I think of stickers in my day when we said something.

Ixchell Reyes
Well, yes, digital stickers. And so I went wild last month when I had time. And I made a whole sticker pack of my nephew and my sister and I use them back and forth. But you could do things like let’s say you have a catchphrase that used in the classroom like, I don’t know, whatever

your morning. I always say good morning sunshine, especially when they come in on a Monday morning. And they’re like, oh, it’s Monday. So you could make some you could do something funny. You know, sometimes teachers have WhatsApp or iMessage groups to communicate with students. And depending on what you’re you know what your class understanding or agreement is with social media. You can do stuff like that. But you can take anything and make it a sticker. It doesn’t have to be a photo. It could be text. Oh.

Brent Warner
So you’re saying you could build stickers of yourself doing like different poses and stuff like

Ixchell Reyes
Oh, yes. Yeah. So you know that it’s kind of cool. It lightens up the mood in a group conversation about Monday’s homework or Friday’s assignment to do something on the weekend. And if that’s you know, if you’re communicating with your students that way, so stick early sticker up, it’s free.

Brent Warner
It’s it’s Sabby Licious.

Ixchell Reyes
I have to make that happen. I have to make that happen

Brent Warner
on the media’s gonna be

Ixchell Reyes
a monster picture with your face on it.

Brent Warner
M-O-N-S-T-E-R. So So speaking of being old, and not knowing the difference between a digital sticker and a regular sticker, mine is the Thera cane. Which is, like, you know, when you get like a kink in your neck or in your back or something like that, and by the way, when you Oh, well, these things were all over Japan, it’s like a hook, right? And you put it over your shoulder, and then you pull on it and you like, rub out the knot in your, in your back or whatever the muscle is. And it’s funny, the pictures on the little instruction booklet that come with it are hilarious, but there’s also you know, like, you can put it up against a wall and like dig into a knot in your lower back or like in your thigh or all sorts of different things. But anyways, I got this thing. And I got like I I tweaked my neck a little while ago. So anyways, I’ve been trying to like physical therapy, but the therapy Thera cane has been a great little tool for getting older.

Ixchell Reyes
You is old. Well, thank you!

Thank you so much for listening to the show. You could win a one of a kind DIESOL pin by leaving us a review on Apple podcasts. If you’re giving us a shout out any other way. Be sure to tag us on social media. We are on all the platforms.

Brent Warner
Are we still on all the platforms?

Ixchell Reyes
Well, what’s the new the new meta? Are we on meta?

Brent Warner
I don’t think meta is a platform. I think that’s a company. There Yeah, well, we’re okay. We also have Patreon buy us a coffee. You know, those are great too. If you’re if you’re looking to support the show, we do really appreciate it. And we’re still I’m not the best at it, but we’re trying to figure out ways to like make it a value add on top of everything else too. So Patreon. All the links of this are in on the website@diesel.org for the show notes and other episodes you can check out diesel.org/53, the number fifty three and of course you can listen to us on VoiceEd Canada That’s vo i c e d.ca. The number one place I think to find us is still on Twitter so you can find the show @DIESOLpod and you can find me @BrentGWarner.

Ixchell Reyes
You can find me Ixchell @Ixy_Pixy that’s I x y underscore p i x y

In Okinawan Japanese thank you is Nifee Debiru. So, Nifee Debiru for tuning in to the DIESOL podcast.

Brent Warner
Thanks everybody