A lesson about Christmas

Lesson outline

This year, my co-teacher (Miss Lee) and I decided to put our guitar skills to some use and play a song with the students. We decided to play "The twelve days of Christmas" because of its simple melody and repetitive nature - making it easy for the students to follow.

We divided the class into two groups, whereby the first group would sing the odd numbered days (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11) and the other the even numbered days (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12) - this way all students would be involved and it added a touch of spice to the song.

 

Before playing the song with the students, we began our lesson with a speaking task. It was a spot the difference puzzle based on a Christmas theme. Students worked in pairs and had to communicate with each other in English to find the differences between their pictures. This worked well and students enjoyed the activity. We then summarized at the end, with the whole class working together, to point out the differences that they had found.

Finally, to end the lesson, we introduced our New Year's Resolutions to the class. We then asked the students to guess which resolutions belonged to which teacher. It was then the students turn to make up at least three resolutions of their own and to write them on some decorative shapes, which were then used to make a beautifully decorated Christmas display outside of our English classroom.
 

A speaking game

Lesson outline

In this lesson, students played a variation of a classic British TV game show called "Call my Bluff". The original game show used obscure words but for this lesson, I wanted the students to describe pictures and to talk about themselves.

Procedure

I divided the class into teams of three.

Each team then chose its team name.

A team was chosen and asked to sit at the front of the class, where three desks were placed. On each desk was an envelope. Two of the envelopes contained pictures, while the third contained only a blank piece of A4 paper. Students were then given thirty seconds to prepare themselves and think how they were going to describe their picture. After thirty seconds, each student took turns to describe their picture - the one with the blank piece of A4 paper having to make up a description of their own.

Upon listening to all three descriptions, the remaining teams then had to guess who was bluffing. If the person bluffing was identified correctly, then two points were awarded to that team. For each team that failed to identify the bluffer, the team describing was awarded one point. The game continued in this fashion until all teams had participated.

I had planned to do a second round, whereby each team member would think up two truths and a lie and then present to the audience. The audience would have to identify the lie in each case and points would be awarded accordingly. However, the one-hour lesson was taken up by just the picture round and they did not have time to do the second one.

The lesson began with three demonstration videos of the English teachers explaining pictures in order to instil some interest and to rouse their curiosity.

A lesson about Picture stories

Lesson outline

This week, the students had to prepare for their speaking test. My co-teacher and I decided to give them six pictures and let them try to tell a story based on them within a 2-minute period.

The students were to practise this in my speaking class the week before their test. My co-teacher had supplied me with picture stories taken from the NEAT examination (Level 2) and it was then up to me to plan the lesson. I had to consider how best to prepare them for such a speaking test. It was a difficult task because each picture story can have so many variations and supplying them with suitable linking words, vocabulary etc. would not be easy.

In the end, I split the class into groups and gave them the first picture story on a worksheet. I decided that they should be encouraged to write down two vocabulary words for each picture during the one-minute preparation time that they had. In addition, I told them to share their vocabulary words with their group members and then finally, I presented them with my own chosen words. This procedure should have generated enough vocabulary words for each picture to at least give the students a good starting point.

The students then had to take turns telling their stories to each other. While listening to each story, the other group members were given the task of writing down ONE great expression that they heard from each member of the group. I thought this would give the listeners a focus and that they could learn from each other in the process. Upon listening to each group members' story, the students were then encouraged to share their 'great expressions' and were shown my own contribution as well. The students were also told to use at least two sentences per picture when telling their story and not to skip any of the pictures. On one occasion, I asked one of them to tell their story to the whole class and got the others to listen for some great expressions. This was a good exercise to do spontaneously, although a little time consuming.

Finally, the students were to finish off the lesson with a practice test scenario. Three students would take on the role of judge and one would tell the story. The students were to be given a set of criteria and the three judges would then split the criteria among themselves. For example:

In reality, it turned out that the students did not have enough time to do this and were only able to complete 3 out of the 4 picture story sets given to them.

A lesson about Traditional Korean Fairy Tales

Lesson outline

This week, with my co-teacher, the students were reading about a famous Korean novel Toji, which translates into 'The Land'. In my speaking class, I decided to continue the theme of Korean stories and wanted them to retell some traditional Korean fairy tales in English.

I chose three fairy tales that they were familiar with:

 


I made three groups and then let one person from each group choose a coloured hat that contained six pictures from one of the fairy tales. The groups then had to order the pictures to tell the story correctly and afterwards we checked their solutions together.

It was then time for each group to designate which person would play which character and to come up with a script. I would be recording their final performances using an audio recorder and judging them according to the following criteria:

A prize was offered for the best performance in each of the three fairy tales. This provided a little extrinsic motivation and as well as this, I asked them to think of some intrinsic motivating factors. They suggested (with a little encouragement) - wanting to share their culture and history with a foreigner, wanting to read the stories to their children when they were older, having some fun, learning some specific vocabulary related to the stories and just generally practising their English.

The groups were then given around fifteen minutes to prepare and practise their performance. I encouraged them not to write a script but to just jump-in and try to speak about it from memory. In my experience, writing a script always consumes too much of their time and not enough is then spent on producing effective speech.

Finally, I gave them the audio recorder, sent them to a quiet room and left them to it. The results were varied but the students by-and-large, were very creative adding sound effects, narration and altering their voices to suit the character they were playing.

A lesson about HALLOWEEN

Lesson outline

This year, my students were lucky enough to have class on Halloween day

- which made it all the more special.

I was teaching with my co-teacher Miss Lee and we wanted to achieve two things:

a) Provide the students with some background knowledge about Halloween

b) Let them experience some of the more traditional Halloween games

In Miss Lee’s class, the students read about Halloween and the origin of the

Jack-o'-lantern. The students then decorated their own pumpkin balloons and hung them in the English classroom. We helped adorn the English classroom and wore costumes too!

In our speaking class, we played Halloween Taboo with the students in order to get them to speak. The students were split into four teams and one member from each team (in turn) would explain a word to the rest of the class. If the team members belonging to the person doing the explaining answered correctly, they would get 2 points - a different team answering correctly would only get 1 point. This game was played at the beginning of the class and each person had only 30 seconds to explain their given word. If they successfully explained it within the given time limit and someone guessed correctly, then their team would be awarded some bonus points. 

Finally, the last activity was based upon the traditional Halloween game of Apple Bobbing. I showed them a ppt slide of the game and introduced its origins. I then broke the news that we couldn't actually play it because of the mess the water would make and that apples were too expensive at this time of year. Instead we decided to do our own alternative version ^_^

Cookie Bobbing