Classroom Activities 7: Info Gap Monsters and Writing

Teaching 3rd Person Grammar to Elementary Students

The fun way! 

   By the time my students arrive at level 3 in English Land, they have a good working vocabulary and are proficient with I like..., I have..., I am.... So they talk a lot about themselves. I noticed that the switch to talking about others and other items and their qualities is quite difficult for elementary students in the foreign language classroom, and when I first arrived at my job I was intimidated by it. But now I know there is no need to be intimidated by this.

Activity: Info Gap Monsters With Writing
Draw and Write, First Learning of Awareness of the 3rd Person

Corresponds to English Land Series Unit 3 

All you need is some descriptions of monsters (using target vocabulary your students have been exposed to: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, wings, teeth, skin, legs, arms, etc...) written in a way students can easily understand.  Students are also learning important sight words like colors. 

All students can read about the same monster, but in my small language classroom I like to give each student a different monster. In a large class, each group could be given the same monster so that they can work on the reading together. Also fun would be to give them all different monsters and then when they finish drawing, they can find members from the other groups who had the same monster. 

Students have finished reading and drawing. They highlight I have...  and I don't have phrases. By this point they have already drawn their monsters and arrived in their groups if you are working in the group setting. 

Students then should be made aware that I is strange in this situation, because we are talking about the monster. So we change it to it, he, or she. The sentences are then changed from I have to It has. The repetition is good for the students.
They can then present their findings to the class, which is good reinforcement, and this is possible in group and small class settings.  Everyone enjoys to see the resulting monsters and everyone had a good time! 

The students who generated these monsters are 3rd graders. This activity works well for 3rd grade and above. 2nd graders usually read "I have" and draw a monster only, without having to write themselves. 

Prize Chest Haul September/October 2013

Prize Chest Haul September/October 2013

Motivate to Educate! 

That`s my favorite slogan from the English book we use at my school. Here`s my recent stash from the dollar store. More coming, because I have a big stash at my house that I will bring to the school when my prize chest gets a bit barren again. 

Prizes and stickers: Prizes are for when students get 6 stickers for doing their homework each class for 6 weeks, or 6 times if they do not do their homework. For the little kids I just give them small dried fish with almonds, but the elementary kids are really into these animals and bubble gum. I don`t know why they go cuckoo for the bubble gum, but they do, and it`s packaged in these funny square boxes in Japan. I had some fancier stickers but the kids love the strange puffy stickers from the dollar store. Who knew? Everyone was happy. When word got out that the other teacher had plastic animals in his prize chest, I was bombarded with questions of why there weren`t also plastic animals in my chest. So here they are kiddos! Enjoy! 

Classroom Activities 6: Teaching Phonics to ESL Preschoolers

Teaching Phonics to ESL Pre-schoolers

And Beginning Phonics

When are children ready to begin phonics? They are ready to begin phonics when they have a decent attention span, awareness of written language, and a good working recognition of many capital (and some lowercase) letters. Perhaps best is to work on letter recognition of lowercase letters before beginning. My students from age 5-6 are able to do this (in the ESL classroom) but children may be able to start this as early as age 3 or 4 depending on attention span, exposure, and memory.

Start with a solid structure, this also helps keep track of what letters and blends you have introduced. I use the Sounds Fun series. Level 1 teaches recognition of letters and individual sounds. Students at my school already have this basic recognition before we start phonics, so I start them right from level 2. Before we begin phonics we sing alphabet songs and a phonics sound song, and students have experienced tracing most to all letters of the alphabet on activity sheets. 

A unit looks like this. This is Unit 5, and some target words students should be able to put together. But preschoolers may find this activity dull in the group setting, so I created this game for each unit. One unit takes us about 4 lessons, which is about a month to a month and a half at the school I work at.

I keep the letters in a little marked envelope like this. then I know clearly the target sound, and in this unit we especially want to work on recognition of small I. 

                          I create copies of the target letters of the unit, enough for each student to have 1 of each target letter and sound for the unit. Better than writing by hand is arranging fun arrangements of letters they already know, and finding out the sound! Most students take to this version of spelling very easily and feel great achievement when they arrive at words they have already learned: this unit contains the word p i g. Previous units with the short a sound, students were very happy to create the word c a t. Even if they are not perfect spellers or readers, this exercise is great to reinforce awareness of written words and phonemes.

This is what the letters look like, prepared for a class of maximum 4 students. Perfect small group activity. Great in eikaiwa, or home schooling young children.

Come on Pig!

Come on pig! Hurry up and kill the mosquitoes in my room! So they stop screaming in my ears.

If you don`t know how to control mosquitoes at your place, get one of these!