I was flipping though Breaking the Sound Barrier by Gianfranco Conti and tried out Musical "Story" Chairs. As always full of amazing ideas and the whole methodology is very sound in a school context due to finite time, battling monolingualist attitudes and shortening attention spans!
Today I taught the Year 7s possessive pronouns, ie. Kucing saya = my cat. vs Saya kucing = I am a cat.
To cement this, Musical "Story" Chairs is a great low prep listening activity.
It is exactly like Musical Chairs, except there is not music.
The chairs are facing outwards in a circle, there should be one less chair as the number of students.
The target classifiction of words the students needed to listen for was "my"; you could refer to "rooms" if you were doing the topic Houses for example.
I narrate a made up story to the students, e.g. "I like eating bananas, singing, listening to music. MY mum doesn't like listening to music."
As soon the students hear the word "my", they need to sit down. I thoroughly rate this activity for comprehension as well! They really needed to listen carefully for the difference between "Ibu saya" (my mum) and "Saya ibu" (I am a mum).
At the end of the lesson, I always do a 5 finger check in;
"How well do you think you understood this grammar rule? 1- 5".
Most spanned 3-5, including students who normally would be around 1-2. There were still some students who were at a 1-2 understanding, but that's ok! I will follow up with those kids later!
Today I taught the Year 7s possessive pronouns, ie. Kucing saya = my cat. vs Saya kucing = I am a cat.
To cement this, Musical "Story" Chairs is a great low prep listening activity.
It is exactly like Musical Chairs, except there is not music.
The chairs are facing outwards in a circle, there should be one less chair as the number of students.
The target classifiction of words the students needed to listen for was "my"; you could refer to "rooms" if you were doing the topic Houses for example.
I narrate a made up story to the students, e.g. "I like eating bananas, singing, listening to music. MY mum doesn't like listening to music."
As soon the students hear the word "my", they need to sit down. I thoroughly rate this activity for comprehension as well! They really needed to listen carefully for the difference between "Ibu saya" (my mum) and "Saya ibu" (I am a mum).
At the end of the lesson, I always do a 5 finger check in;
"How well do you think you understood this grammar rule? 1- 5".
Most spanned 3-5, including students who normally would be around 1-2. There were still some students who were at a 1-2 understanding, but that's ok! I will follow up with those kids later!
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