Finger bobs

When you have one class coming in after the last with very little time in between, it is important to have your day thought through. Doing anything in the messy department of arty and crafty certainly needs thinking about carefully - if it can go wrong, it will!

Children are enthusiastic mess-makers, as I'm sure any parent/teacher will already know. Give them 10 tubes of colour paint, and you have the recipe for disaster on your hands - literally. But, today I wanted to see if we could be semi-messy and still keep on track. We were doing an activity that I had not thought of before, and one I will certainly be using again, namely finger-painting. A decent dollop of colour on one finger tip, and make a nice smudge. Repeat until you have sets of ten worryingly colourful & wet fingers.

Instructions here are important - "keep your hands up and in front of your face - do NOT touch anything! Now go and wash your hands, slowly!" Also important that teacher is not tempted to join in (you'll be unable to do anything 'sensible'). Our aim was to put a bit of life into our verbs, by making stick drawings around our fingerprints to show eg "I'm running" or "I'm drinking" with a speech bubble. I find a lot of my students need a line to place their letters on, and poorer writers need two more parallel lines to make sure they get the different heights of letters right (Japanese characters are all the same size).

Another important point I realised here is to write the phrase first, then wrap your bubble around it, otherwise you get clumped up letters/all kinds of confusion squeezing into an inappropriate shape/space. My Japanese students 'naturally' switch to writing down the page vertically if they have to, which is something I want to avoid.

So we have creative work reinforcing a 'physical dictionary' of movement, in colour and 'my' art with a bit of book work (finding the right words, copying the letters correctly)....students clearly had a good time, and with luck a bit more than usual went in :)

Subliminal Grammar - Story Tree exploited

I love OUP's Story Tree graded reader series for a lot of reasons, as I have mentioned before here.
My class of boys on Tuesday were thinking a story about feeding dolphins was a bit naff, so I asked them to find a few words in their reader that were 'new' for them, such as up, down, through...and asked them to tell each other what they figured they meant - encouraging them to look back at where they found the words and to think about what was happening in the pictures (eg naff dolphin jumping through naff hoop!). I asked them to underline each time they could find these words; then we wrote them on the inside rear cover with a simple drawing to indicate the direction of movement (and no, I don't think they want to be blinded with a word like 'preposition' just yet!)

Next, we highlighted words like big, wet...same process but asking them "What is big/wet?" etc. Didn't take them too long to realise what these words were doing ie describing something. Could they think of any opposites? "Are you wet/big?" etc!


Finally, we searched for 'doing' words (I had to cheat and explain a bit in L1 - my attempt to gesture fell flat and time was short) like jump, give, take...their TPR was much better than mine!



End result I think was a 'naff' book  suddenly full of cool words they could readily apply to things they see and do. Acting their way out of class jumping, being big, and going through the door!