brothers!

[eire]

I have a class with two brothers. One is 11 and the other is 9. They have similar English standards but intolerable behaviour. If my full attention is not being paid to the elder, he throws tantrums and refuses to cooperate in class. He also has the attention span of an ant. The younger is a little better, but if his brother answers more questions than him or does better than him, he starts to cry. They have an assigned text book which bores them and me to tears and when I play games they end up fighting, throwing fits and crying.

What on earth can I do with them to keep their attention, make the hour fun and keep the peace? Even hangman causes huge fights!

[Sally Olsen]

How about some co-operative games that require they work together rather than against one another. This is long standing behaviour of the family though and probably requires that you be more of a counselor than a teacher to iron out rights and duties to each other. You can tell them that love is not divided but multiplies and that your friendship or caring about them is the same. I think I might get one busy on something while I talk to the other and then switch because their levels must be so different. I am sure that if you put those boys in front of a good video game their attention span wouldn't be so short so it is probably that they don't like the book or the fact that they have to learn English. You can get them to design games that they have to work together to accomplish and in talking about how to do that, they will be learning English. My favourite for that age was a form of Star Wars. I used the Darth's as my evil characters and movers. I had 12 weapons cards, 12 good guys cards like Luke and Yoda, 12 moving cards (you can move 3 spaces or go back 5 spaces, etc.) and 12 vehicle cards. The Star Wars site gives you all this information and pictures of the characters to put on the cards. I drew 12 planets on the playing board with connections drawn in dots. The problem was to get to all 12 planets and then to home, I suppose Earth. You had to choose a character card, a transportation card, a weapon card and moving card for each move and leave these on the planet. They say things like, "I am Luke, with a lazer gun, driving a speeder and I will go to Tatooine". You can also play it competively like Clue. Darth Vader has been killed and you have to find out who did it. You guess, "I think Chewy did it with a light saber on the Sith moon." You chose a card from each stack and hide them under the board and you keep track on paper of who accuses with what weapon and where. It is complicated and long and would probably take more than one lesson to complete at first. It will take a few lessons to create the games but it is all learning as they figure out how to make things work. You can play any path type game with just one mover so they both take turns moving it to the end of the board and you can put things along the path that they have to learn and have obstacles to make it more challenging. You can build word trees on a scrabble board with them helping each other and a time limit for the challenge. Take the emphasis off the challenge between them and get them to work together.