Friday, February 19, 2010

Those wonderful matching cards!

I wrote yesterday about the stuff I keep in my bag. One of those things were my matching cards. Just since yesterday, I've used them for a couple more activities. Here are some things I've used the cards for:

1. Matching. Clever, right?
2. Draw-a-card. Students (or teams) draw a card (or cards) and create sentences with the activity on the card. Sometimes, I give them guidelines, minimum requirements- so that they don't just write "I like soccer."
3. I have them create questions, using the activities. They can ask the questions of each other or write responses to their own questions. OR, they can switch questions and answer each other's questions.
4. Tonight, I had a lesson planned for my Beginner's class. Of course, when they showed up, I discovered that I needed to change/ adapt to the needs of the ones who showed up. They were having trouble with how to use the different forms of the verb "to be."

First, we made a chart
I: am/ was
You: are/ were
He, She, It: is/ was

We: are/ were
You: are/ were
They: are/ were

Then, I gave them prompts.
1. I am hungry. I will ___________.
I had them sort through the matching cards and find the ones that could be used to complete the thought (like, "get ice cream," "go to McDonald's").
2. I am bored. I will ___________. ("play soccer," "go for a walk")

This worked really well and gave them a lot of opportunity to practice making sentences. I seemed to give them a lot of confidence to have prompts. After a while, they began to create their own sentences!

1 comment:

Jaclyn.... said...

I always enjoy your posts, Erin! The matching cards with prompts is a great idea. My beginners (who have been coming for quite some time) still need prompts and a lot of confidence! I will use this next week.

I'm always taking from you, so here's a fun activity I did today with my Int/Adv class: We read an article on personality last lesson, so we continued the theme today by discussing several words that describe personality or character traits. Then the class helped me make a list on the board of heroes and celebrities. We agreed that heroes and celebrities are famous or well known people, but yet they are very different. Then we wrote wrote another list in "t-chart form" of words that describe heroes and words that describe celebrities. I supplemented the lesson with other vocab and questions. Fun stuff!