Things I have taught

In January I started teaching in Jaime’s Saturday afternoon English class. Once he asked me to teach a class on the present simple tense and daily activities. The first thing that came to mind was Atmosphere’s song Like Today. It was one of those wonderful moments in teaching when the entire lesson comes to you at once. And here is how it goes:

Set-up:

1.) Write a bunch of daily activities on a bunch of strips of paper, like “make coffee”, “read”, “listen to music”, “people watch”, “put on [leave space to insert pronoun] shoes”, “hit on a man/woman”, etc.

2.) write a bunch of “s” and “es” on other little strips of paper

3.) Write whatever pronouns you will need (i.e. he, his) and a bunch of others to be confusing (i.e. theirs, she, ours, us, her, they, we, etc.)

3.) tape them all to the white board

Warm up:

1.) Read through all the strips of daily activities together

2.) Students ask for clarification of new words and pronunciation

Lesson:

1.) Hand out lyrics of Atmosphere’s Like Today to all students with a few present simple verbs left blank

2.) Play song twice and have students fill in blanks with missing verbs

3.) Go through missing verbs together as a whole class

4.) Have whole class use the word strips to list the things he does in the song in the correct order

5.) While arranging word strips, read actions out loud and ask if anything needs to be changed. Students will tell you to add “s” or “es” to conjugate for the third person singular, i.e. he listens to music

6.) Model adding in linking words like “first”, “next”, “after that” and then have students suggest what to add.

7.) Students talk to partners about their perfect day.

Assessment:

Many students knew to add the “s” from the very beginning and knew when to add “s” and when to add “es”. The “s” sound in the third person single is really hard for many English learners so this lesson was meant to emphasize it and practice using it. The class has a mix of levels so the higher level students led the way on the whole group work but I think it was good for the lower level students to listen to their peers make corrections and use new vocabulary. When listening to pair conversations, there was a good level of fluency amongst most students and they all were very descriptive about what their perfect day would look like, using a wide range of vocabulary. Grammar still needs some work.

Reflection:

I’m not too sure how to correctly conjugate “people watch”… do we say “he people watches”? Is it a verb we conjugate or only use in the infinitive? Students really loved learning “people watch” and “hit on a man/woman”, I got a good chuckle out of them for those two. Had to heavily scaffold the word strip activity. The song is pretty tough because it has some slang and uses descriptive language that is subtle and hard to interpret.