Tiny Class

cimarch · Post by **cimarch** » Sun Apr 18, 2004 12:44 am

I need some help. Twice a week I have a two hour class with the boss' son and two of his friends. They're typical Grade 2 Middle School students, he's got quite good English but the other two struggle in a basic conversation. The main problem is that the classes begin at 5pm when they're exhausted, they've been in school since at least 8am, sometimes earlier. They're really nice, good kids but it's becoming very hard to find ways to keep their attention and stop them carrying on a two hour conversation in Chinese. We've done Tongue Twisters, riddles, games and even had cooking classes and gone shopping. Any advice?

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Sun Apr 18, 2004 1:02 am

Off the top of my head:

When you go shopping, do you just go out shopping, or do you shop for something specific? How about going out for something technical, like a computer, for instance? Pre-arrange with a computer shop to do the whole thing in English, then go in with your students and start asking questions.

Could do the same with a car dealer.

Motorcycle dealer (although it might be harder to find an English speaking one).

Hotel.

Larry Latham

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Sun Apr 18, 2004 2:15 pm

Great suggestion, Larry. I had a similar class and got the boys to bring in their favourite CD's and we either tried to copy down the words and sing them together or went to lyrics.com to get the lyrics. They even made up a little routine to show their parents at the end with rap style movements. I also brought in my lap top and we played games like Blood and Worms and I commented on everything I did - Oh, he is trying to shoot me. He killed the blue guy and so on until they started doing that as well. I got the Cheats from the internet and they are full of English words - usually not nice ones. We played a lot of board games as well and made one called Star Wars based on the old game of Who Killed Colonel Mustard? Miss Scarlet in the library with the lead pipe. We had different planets and had to move from one planet to another by throwing the die and then when we were on Tatooine say, Luke killed the Emperor on Tatooine with a lazer. It is as fun to make the game as to play it. We looked up all the characters on StarWars.com and all the possible weapons and planets so it was a lot of reading. I used all the bad guys as movers and they were trying to avenge the Emperor's death. You could do the same for Matrix. It is fun to try and make it all balance out - I think we had 12 characters, 12 weapons and 12 planets cards to shuffle and deal out for four players. I played too. For a present, the boys made me a photo album of the town and the area and labelled it in English. Makes your day.

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Sun Apr 18, 2004 4:01 pm

Atta girl!

Larry Latham

cimarch · Post by **cimarch** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:41 am

Thanks guys, I really like the board game idea, they can be VERY competitive when they want to. I'll have to look around for some friendly shopkeepers, most of them get annoyed and accuse me of wasting their time when they realise we have no intention of buying something, although I suppose I could say I'm giving their staff free English lessons too...