Unit 8: Target Language (by phase)

Mark's Notes:

phase 1 is going to come to a close here, but if you need more practice or you think the students are too young to proceed to Phase 1.5, you can stretch phase 1 out with more vocabulary building: playground, kitchen, bathroom, time, or any other noun group you think might be useful.

If you have been using the curriculum with 2-4 year olds, you might want to go back and repeat phase 1 as is.

Phase 1:the line between phase 1 and starting phase 2 is starting to get a little blurry. The main thing about phase 1 is to get students ready to talk more about our content from phase 1.

I teach places as is. I just teach them the vocabulary but later in the unit I bring the places group back to focus more on the past tense. I'll ask them about yesterday and whether they went to those places yesterday. "Did you go to ... yesterday?" I'll do this as running content for a long time and later build into more verbs but just be careful. Many young students can't remember what they did very well. It's possible they will confuse this with "Have you ever been to ...?" so it could be skipped here if the students aren't ready.

Verbs 4 are a group of useful verbs and I teach them in the infinitive or that is as bare verbs without "to". We've been working with can and generally with verbs in the present progressive. I don't bother with explanation, but this will be their first time to see verbs presented in the infinitive.

I teach "there is ..." here as it's own content, basically taking a break to focus on this. I play the Table Game and just work on this as a way to describe a picture. There are some cards I use and you can find those at the bottom of the places flashcard page. This is also a bury phase 1 or phase 2 running content issue. If the students aren't ready, move this to somewhere in phase 2 or just wait until we gat back here in phase 2.

House 1 is just for vocabulary.

The characteristics set works with describing people more. I review clothing before we start because it's important they feel comfortable with the vocabulary before we focus on the target language. This is a set that really doesn't have new vocabulary but focuses on a language task, "He has a green bag." or "She has brown hair."

As another break in content here, I teach students "He doesn't like..." in the same way we learned "He likes ..." in unit 7. This could be running content, taught in conjunction with our content or you could just focus on this. Again, I don't explain anything here, but just want to get them used to hearing and maybe producing the language.

At this point, I'll begin to use the Little Town cards for more practice.

Toys are a good vocabulary set to use here. I use them to work on "have", building off of the characteristics set, to talk about "have" for possessions not in your possession. At this point it's just passive but I will ask students about whether they have certain toys at their house.

Phonics: from this point I'll stop phonics as a part of the written out curriculum here. Your group is most likely either behind or ahead of my explanation. Hopefully I'll be able to write out a phonics specific curriculum someday :)

Phase 2: I'll come back to phase 2 and phase 3 once I get all of phase 1 posted.

Phase 2: I'll come back to phase 2 and phase 3 once I get all of phase 1 posted.

Phase 3: I'll come back to phase 2 and phase 3 once I get all of phase 1 posted.

If you'd like to listen to the the curriculum explained, I discussed the curriculum and how it runs on ESL Teacher Talk.com:

The MES curriculum part 1, The MES curriculum part 2, Phonics part 1, Phonics part 2