Lesson 8-3 The Third lesson - Making Class Schedules as part of ESL teaching...

Making Class Schedules as part of ESL teaching:

Teaching School Subjects with Days of the Week

In lesson 3, we also started out the same way as we did in the last lesson by doing our greetings, review, and the "Days of the week chant."

Then we dove straight into the quiz on page 54. One point here for the quiz is that we did not really explain to the kids what the quiz was really about. The kids had already studied the subjects in English and the Days of the Week and they were performing at about 80% fluency at this time. What I basically wanted to see was how well the kids were able to use their reasoning skills at this point.

So, not to many complaints were heard and if you are teaching Grade 6ers you'll get even less complaints. The basic hints were after we played the first teacher's audio file, was that it is a teacher speaking and he teaches the subject on the days that were spoken so let's listen one more time. Ask the kids if they had gotten it, and you'll see a few hands raised up.

One other thing, you can do however if you are teaching Grade 6ers with Book 1 is after you have checked the answers with the kids is ask them, "What kind of teacher is he (or she)?"

So, the kids can know or review their use of pronouns with he and she and perhaps some verb-conjugation skills in the third person. Thus, after you elicit, "He is a P.E. Teacher!" you can ask the kids or just lead them on with "So... he teaches..." and the kids will most probably come up with "P.E.!" and then just tell them "Let's say it again!... He teaches P.E.!" And then you could ask, "How about her?" "She... teaches..." ...I was hoping so much the kids would catch on and surprisingly enough, they did!

Well, not really exciting stuff, but we wanted to save time for the group activity on page 55 (making your own class schedules in groups). The kids went through the quiz quickly enough and left us with enough time for the activity.

The kids needed 20 minutes or more for this activity, and since we had asked them to make their class schedules based on their true feelings individually and as a group. Also, they had to be ready to answer any questions while doing their presentations next week. So that meant that the kids could not create a whole day of P.E. or Art, but English was ok. Anybody who did do that was told in Japanese, "I'll be recommending you for the Grade 3 English class next year."

I guess the whole point of the activity is to get the kids communicating with each other in either language, English or Japanese, but of course they will use Japanese most of the time.

The peculiar thing I did notice though, was that the kids were calling the subjects and days in English without prompting. But for yourself, you can tell the kids to try and use English whenever they can. Then see how it goes... either way.

Hope you have a good lesson...

The ENB

Videos: These are all brand new! If pictures are worth a thousand words...

Hope you have a good lesson...

The ENB

Eigo Note Book 1 Unit 8 Lesson 4 is now ready...