Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bonbon]

Can anyone suggest a fun activity for a 6th grade public school class for a lesson where we are teaching ordinal numbers? I have an open class tomorrow and I want it to go very well. Thanks in advance.

[Dodgy Al]

One of the tricky parts about ordinals for Korean students is the pronunciation, so you may want to focus on that. Afterwards, you could play a boardgame with a set of cards that have the endings of ordinal numbers (ie. st, nd, rd, th) and another set that has 10s - then they have to name a number with that ending. You could also make a class game along those lines as well I guess. Just off the top of my head. Good luck with the open class.

[talltony4]

Korean age is just ordinal numbers.

The year you were born is your first year, so your age is 1.

How about an activity where the student has to convert between korean and western ages?

Hmmm, I'm not sure how it would work in practice though

[Korussian]

My group recently had to do Ordinal numbers as a demo lesson at the GEPIK orientation. I prepared presentation materials (in PDF & Apple Keynote format) and posted them here on my website.

The primary activities we used were:

+ Familiar celebrities (Kim Yu Na, Korean baseballers) & Olympic medal positions to introduce the concept of ordinals
+ A �Hotel Game� in which a bell hop moves from cell to cell on a grid, and the students have to yell out, for example, �3rd floor, 5th room!�
+ A bit of a math challenge to engage the students in figuring out which number in the series is next, previous, first, and last
+ A physical activity to engage a dozen students in organizing themselves in order according to the ordinal written on the card they received

Hope this helps!

[Tokki1]

You can try dividing the class into teams and do various activities.

You could try, to warm up, simply going through the ordinal numbers on the calender and working on pronunciation.

Then you could try pointing at a team and saying a number, having them change it into an ordinal number.

Then you could have individual students say 'first', then point at another student who says 'second' all the way up to 31st, then go backwards to 1st.

I like the previous post. Getting students up and moving around is the best thing to do when you're being observed. Whether this be by handing out cards and having them line up, or circling words/numbers on the board, it's a good idea.

I'd definitely work on pronunciation first. Nobody has their birthday on the 'force' of any month of the year.

[Robot_Teacher]

Ordinal numbers.

When objects are placed in order, we use ordinal numbers to tell their position. If ten students ran a race, we would say that the student that ran the fastest was in first place, the next student was in second place, and so on.

The first ten ordinal numbers are:

First
Second
Third
Fourth
Fifth
Sixth
Seventh
Eighth
Ninth
Tenth

[WendyRose]

When we taught ordinal numbers we played a "fly swatter game."

Use flash cards that have the ordinal numbers spelled out. Put them on your black board. Give 2-4 students a fly swatter and then either you, a student or your co-teacher will shout out a number. The students try to smack the correct ordinal number first. The fly swatter makes it easy to see who won. The kids will laugh, cheer and have a lot of fun with this one.

[Leslie Cheswyck]

You can throw Henry VIII in for fun.

[Tobias]

[MissMaggie]

I played buzz with them... once they could go around the classroom saying the numbers in order I would write a series of numbers on the board (5th, 15th,25th for starters, then I added in 10th, 20th, 30th, then 3rd, 13th, 23rd) that they had to replace with the word "buzz" and whenever they made a mistake I would start back at 1st with the next student. After a while they were really getting into it and trying to make it to 31st without a mistake.

Another activity you could do is print off two sets of ordinal numbers, have the students form two lines standing, and have each student take a number without looking at it. On "go" they have to look at their numbers and race to get their line in order and sit down first to score a point. For increased difficulty I had many more numbers than people so there would be gaps. This works for the months as well, I used it because I realized my students needed to work on the order of the months.

[yeremy]

I made up an ordinal number battleship grid with numbers from first through thirty-fifth. I used it with my Korean co-teacher at my circulating school and it went over well. The students practiced using ordinal numbers a lot. Afterwards that co-teacher remarked that it was, "Good material [because the students practiced a lot and did not get bored]."

Some teachers on Dave's like to diss games, which practice what you've taught in class, but they do work.

The same co-teacher further commented, "Our students get bored when we teach ordinal numbers because we just practice their pronunciation in class."

I also made a spelling gameboard a la www.bogglesworldesl.com using their blank gameboard. I haven't used it yet, but I might try it out next week.

A third thing I tried with ordinal numbers, which was not as successful as the battleship game was an ordinal number survey in which I wrote a birthday survey asking the students to find those who had a birthday in the first month, the tenth month, etc. They did not think too much about the survey after they raced through it. These are three things I did. One worked well, another was OK, and the third one I do not know how it would work because I have not tried it yet. Hope this is useful. Cheers.

[Tobias]

[yeremy]

I have to with your very pessimistic, dry and orthodox view of ELT and games.

Games go further than teaching a few phrases or bozo English and I never said that I only use games in the classroom.

You could further educate yourself about how games work, why they work, what works, etc, if you want, by looking at Ways of Doing by Paul Davis, Barbara Garside & Mario Rinvolucri, Grammar Games by Mario Rinvolucri, Games for Language Learning by Andrew Wright, David Betteridge & Michael Buckby, Teaching English to Children by Joan Cameron, and Teaching English to Children in Asia by David Paul as well Dave Deubelheiss's Englishclassroom2.0. And there are far more resources on the web, too.

The truth is that games are motivating to young learners but I will concede that you do have to use them wisely and never like candy.

I think you should reconsider your analogy of the Korean medical and engineering students by pointing out that the US Military uses game-like software for training soldiers. And what do pilots use for refreshing their skills, flight simulators.

FYI, my co-teacher, who is a twenty year Korean teaching veteran was happy with using the Ordinal Number Battleship game in class. She remarked to me that in the past, when she taught and had students practice ordinal numbers in a serious, traditional way that they were bored and did not respond. She liked how they responded to the Battleship worksheet and how they kept playing, I mean practicing enthusiastically and without a prompt from she or I. It was a departure from the teacher-centered methodology she was trained in, but afterwards she did a solid and serious review of ordinal numbers.

Game playing is an accepted part of the EPIK program's English teacher education program in the last program held in Gyeongju.

CALL has been called the future of ELT and what is at least a significant part of CALL, games which practice language. I think it is clear that our students in Korea and elsewhere have changed since I went to school with the Internet, text messenging, cell phones that are like tiny computers and Skype on your computer.

BTW, I do use Hangman occassionally, but only to elicit and review what the students learned in the last class. Call me what you will (I was SpongeBob for an Open Class once.) but I am a serious user of games as a mode for learning in the young learners classroom.

I was accepted to an MA at an English Uni not too long ago, but we decided to buy an apartment so I put that on hold. I was hoping to do my MA research dissertation on studying games in the EFL classroom. Maybe I still should.

In the end, we cordially the chance to respond to the charges of being a Bozo in the classroom. That's not totally true. I'm a very serious and motivated Bozo at times in the classroom and I do know my games.

[cruisemonkey]

[Tobias]