waterbaby
Joined: 01 Feb 2003 Location: Baking Gord a Cheescake pie
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Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2003 10:06 pm Post subject: |
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Hi Zed,
I've been using Up and Away for the past 8 months and while I've whizzed through with my older and more advanced students (12/13 yr olds who despise Sunny the monkey ) I've had a lot of trouble with my younger students who find the grammar concepts rather difficult from Level 3 onwards ... so now we're doing one level of Up and Away followed by the same level in Lets Go. A lot of the kids are only 6, 7 & 8 and the thought of going through superlatives and comparatives with them is quite frightening.
I make a lot of card games from the book. I colour photocopy a suitable page that has pics and words on it (for ex, pages 2, 18 & 19, 31 and 43 in Book 4) and then stick the page on cardboard, laminate it and cut each picture out to make cards. Make sure you do even numbers of copies because pair work is easy and fun.
I play a variety of games, like "Go Fish"... for ex. with the pics from page 2 of Book 4, the students must ask each other "Are you American?" and answer "Yes, I am" or "No, I am not". If the answer is yes, they make a pair, if no, they take another card and it's the next students turn. The one with the most pairs once the cards have run out is the winner. This card game worked really well when teaching any/some and non-count nouns in the third book.
For the younger students, I play a lot of simpler card games like "patience" (turn all the cards upside down and students turn two over at a time to try and make pairs... for an English twist, they have to say the name of the cards) & "snap" (students also have to say the name of the card they flip & call "Snap!" when two cards match and whack their hand down to claim the pile.)
I've also discovered my students love to flick rubber bands, so I made a target board with "Directions" (Book 4, page 31) picutres all over the board (Up 4). They have to collect 9 direction cards by flicking the rubber band and hitting each individual target. I sometimes use a ball... anything they can throw they really enjoy.
As an extension, sometimes I make surveys and get students to wander around the room asking their friends prepared questions... for ex. Up 3 starts with things like like, want, have... get the students to find who likes pizza, elephants, has a baby brother, wants a new computer game etc and have a prize for the student who gets all the answers first.
I also use the discovery school's puzzlemaker and worksheet generator to help them practice & develop their vocab & spelling.
http://school.discovery.com/teachingtools/teachingtools.html
I made up another card game called "THE ELIMINATOR" where I hand out one card to each student and they have to find the other student with the matching card. They must not show anyone their card, just ask them the appropriate question... for ex, with the cards from Book 4 pages 18/19 (Places we go) the students ask... "Are you at the gas station?" I always make an odd one out (sometimes I put three cards of the same thing out there so that there is an odd one out when the student numbers are even) so one child has to sit down each round until there is finally only one pair left and they are the joint winners.
When reading from the book. I use a big fluffy dice and I roll it the first time and whatever the number I rolled, for example 4, we count to the 4th student and that student has to read. They then get to roll the diice. Sometimes we flip a coin to see if they have to read or I do a "Little Miss Pink fell down the sink, how many miles did she fall?" (Like eeny, meeny, moe) and I ask the student I last point to, to give me a number and we count to that person... but they never know if we'll count clockwise or anti clockwise. They love it! |
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