American accents, continued.

9 Nov 2011

With my 6th grade class, I followed up on the discussion about American accents by showing them a clip of a documentary called American Tongues. In the clip, you can hear people from all over the US reciting part of "Mary had a Little Lamb."  I wasn't sure how well there were going to be able to tell the difference between accents, but they were able to hear the difference between the Southern accent and the New York accent.

My 6th graders just started a new chapter about Sightseeing in London, and they're working on comparatives. So after taking about accents, we played a game (it's actually an activity, but I call all activities games) in order to practice comparatives called Who am I?. I created a powerpoint slide with pictures of a variety of English-speakers--like Barack Obama, Daniel Radcliffe, and Hilary Clinton. I included their heights and ages as a reference for the students.

Then, I asked for a student volunteer and asked everyone to choose one of the six figures on the board. I told them to write three sentences about this person while comparing him or her to the student volunteer. One sentence should be about their height. The second sentence should be about their age. The third sentence had to include some sort of description--like hair color or eye color.

For example: I'm taller than Juan. I'm older than Juan. I've got brown hair and brown eyes. Who am I?

The activity went really well--since it was more straightforward than some of the activities that I plan.

Barack Obama ended up being really popular with the students!