Sunday, March 25, 2012

I Spy - Week 4B

I tried a new lesson about 'Personality' with my second graders today.  I assigned each group a personality type (5 in all) and through watching a video and discussion they had to come up with 3 traits and 3 jobs to go with their personality.  I employed the Ss asking Ss questions strategy in order to get some group to group interaction going.  However, I found that I had to write the question on the board because they had trouble remembering it.  A very simple question like 'What are extroverted people like?' was not easy for most to formulate.  Am I cheating as a teacher by letting the students read the question from the board? 
In the activity portion of the class, the students have to fill in the blanks of a dialog with their personality type followed by the traits and jobs that they discovered.  The students then, in pairs, performed the dialog in front of the class.
Overall I felt the lesson was successful with lots of opportunities for students to ask questions, and read aloud.  Originally I wanted the students to memorize the dialog but there was never enough time.

2 comments:

  1. No you're not cheating -- it's called modeling, remember? Your ss are still afraid to make mistakes in public, which is why they want to read aloud. You should remedy this ASAP by modeling partial questions on the board (e.g. "what _ _ name?" for 'what's your name' while doing whole class choral repetition of the full form before starting them on individual speaking.

    Did EVERYBODY do the dialogue in front of the class, or just 5 pairs? Generally, I find encouraging reading aloud like this to be a big waste of time, but at the same time I know that each context is different.

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  2. Not everybody. Just 5 or 6 pairs selected at random. The goal was for the students to see the vocab used in a realistic conversation. Also, even though it's just reading I thought vocalizing would be helpful. Some students still have trouble reading. Maybe the lesson content is too hard.

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