Guess who...

17 Jan 2012

As my 5th graders finish up their unit on animals in Tanzania, I prepared an activity to help them practice the vocabulary and grammar they've learned this chapter.

We played a game of Guess Who. I put six pictures of different animals from this chapter. They had to choose one and describe it--using a minimum of three sentences

As an example, I chose the picture of the cheetahs.

I wrote:
They are carnivores.
They have got four legs.
They are yellow and black.

The kids were basically jumping out of their seats in order to guess what animal I had picked. Qué fácil, eh?

This was also my opportunity to sneak in a few useful English phrases for things that they say all the time in Spanish.

When I opened the powerpoint, all of the kids awwwed and said, "Qué mono" about the pictures of the baby animals.

I took advantage of the situation in order to teach them the phrase "How cute!"

Later, someone wanted to go first and said, "Yo primero."

I replied that only students who asked me in English could go first.

They scrambled to think of the word for "first." Finally shouting "First" and "Me. One."

That's the problem with teaching a language. It's really difficult to try to get the students to speak in the target language (in this case, English). They all revert to Spanish--even though they are capable of saying the exact same thing in English.