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Today's experiment.... .... ...
Sep. 18th, 2009 04:40 pmin teaching technique for all ages:
Today in classes 3, 4, and 5 it was Composition Day, which according to the teacher means Copy A Paragraph From the Blackboard. argh. So once most of them were done, I started asking them questions about the content of the thing - and I didn't accept any answers that just parroted the phrasing.
Class 3: A Trip to the Zoo. The teacher's paragraph had a tiger in the same cage as a giraffe. I told this unruly horde, okay, this table is the cage. This bag is a tiger, and this book is a giraffe. ONE cage, ONE tiger, ONE giraffe. What happens!?
The bag mauled the book and gleefully devoured its entrails to the excited, babbling narration of a posse of seven-year-olds. After that, talking about the zoo was EASY.
Class 4: Mother Teresa. This one was harder to make interesting, especially when there are sentences like "She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1979." Really, D? Really? So first I have to explain that 'was awarded' means 'got', which I did by playing the Awarder and making D into Mother Teresa. My scarf was the Nobel. But then I had to ask them, hey, why'd she get a prize? What made HER so special? And that took them awhile of figuring out that hey, that whole chunk of the paragraph about helping homeless kids? HAD MEANING IN IT. Hidden. Somewhere.
Class 5: D hadn't prepped a paragraph. So she handed the book to me. I handed it back and asked, "Do I have to use something from here?" to which the answer was, well, no, not really. It's just easier. So I told these bright, perky 9-10-year-olds, okay, open your notebooks and open your ears, 'cause I'm going to tell you guys a STORY. And then you have to write it down! Whatever you remember, in your own words.
COMPOSITION. Whoda thunk.
I told them the story of Athene and Arachne. New vocab: goddess, weaver. And I spelled the names for them on the board. And off they went!
Some of them showed me their work before class was over. There were some GREAT versions of this story circling around.
And, c'mon, does it really matter if the grammar isn't perfect? In a sentence like, "Arachne said my clothes are better than your shoes and more beautiful and Athene was very anger", I'm way, way too gratified by the transaction of meaning to care about commas.
They have punctuation drills the rest of the month. Let Composition Day be free-form. Maybe next month I'll tell the class 3s the story of the Elephant's Trunk.
After school extra special omake lesson: Teaching the teachers English. It actually went quite well! On the advice of Senior English Teacher, I kept asking them questions they couldn't easily answer, which challenged them to think that maybe I had something new to offer. By the end of it they had a few better pronunciation rules and a good grasp of necessary objects in a sentence. And the principal seemed more or less mollified by the end-of-class quiz? I think.
*crosses fingers*
Three-day weekend. Broken only by Sunday night English for Local Folk. My first session of that, too. Wish me luck.
Today in classes 3, 4, and 5 it was Composition Day, which according to the teacher means Copy A Paragraph From the Blackboard. argh. So once most of them were done, I started asking them questions about the content of the thing - and I didn't accept any answers that just parroted the phrasing.
Class 3: A Trip to the Zoo. The teacher's paragraph had a tiger in the same cage as a giraffe. I told this unruly horde, okay, this table is the cage. This bag is a tiger, and this book is a giraffe. ONE cage, ONE tiger, ONE giraffe. What happens!?
The bag mauled the book and gleefully devoured its entrails to the excited, babbling narration of a posse of seven-year-olds. After that, talking about the zoo was EASY.
Class 4: Mother Teresa. This one was harder to make interesting, especially when there are sentences like "She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1979." Really, D? Really? So first I have to explain that 'was awarded' means 'got', which I did by playing the Awarder and making D into Mother Teresa. My scarf was the Nobel. But then I had to ask them, hey, why'd she get a prize? What made HER so special? And that took them awhile of figuring out that hey, that whole chunk of the paragraph about helping homeless kids? HAD MEANING IN IT. Hidden. Somewhere.
Class 5: D hadn't prepped a paragraph. So she handed the book to me. I handed it back and asked, "Do I have to use something from here?" to which the answer was, well, no, not really. It's just easier. So I told these bright, perky 9-10-year-olds, okay, open your notebooks and open your ears, 'cause I'm going to tell you guys a STORY. And then you have to write it down! Whatever you remember, in your own words.
COMPOSITION. Whoda thunk.
I told them the story of Athene and Arachne. New vocab: goddess, weaver. And I spelled the names for them on the board. And off they went!
Some of them showed me their work before class was over. There were some GREAT versions of this story circling around.
And, c'mon, does it really matter if the grammar isn't perfect? In a sentence like, "Arachne said my clothes are better than your shoes and more beautiful and Athene was very anger", I'm way, way too gratified by the transaction of meaning to care about commas.
They have punctuation drills the rest of the month. Let Composition Day be free-form. Maybe next month I'll tell the class 3s the story of the Elephant's Trunk.
After school extra special omake lesson: Teaching the teachers English. It actually went quite well! On the advice of Senior English Teacher, I kept asking them questions they couldn't easily answer, which challenged them to think that maybe I had something new to offer. By the end of it they had a few better pronunciation rules and a good grasp of necessary objects in a sentence. And the principal seemed more or less mollified by the end-of-class quiz? I think.
*crosses fingers*
Three-day weekend. Broken only by Sunday night English for Local Folk. My first session of that, too. Wish me luck.
