Unit 16: Target Language (by phase)

Mark's Notes:

No real surprises here. For phase 2 and 3 I will teach the second sets for "hobbies" and "recess". Since the kids are probably a little older by then it makes more sense for practicing "always", "sometimes" and never". So if you are doing phase 1 with older students you might consider using Recess 2 instead of recess 1.

Phase 3, becomes a lot more project focused and working on putting everything together. Some of the suggestions here are just ways to do that.

Phase 1:

Both recess and hobbies here are designed to both practice adverbs of frequency. It also helps students to talk about themselves in the present tense and habitual actions. I use recess to introduce adverbs of frequency once we've covered the vocabulary. They need to understand the word "recess", so you can go back to the subjects cards if you need to. Then I draw the same "V" shaped design you see on the back of the cards. I do this on the board and add in percentages at the top (100% - always) and bottom (0% - never.) In the middle somewhere, I write "sometimes", but without a percentage. I then ask a few kids questions, like "Do you jump rope at recess?" and Instead of "Yes." or "No." I indicate that I want an answer from the board, "Always.", "Sometimes." or "Never." Over time, I add in "yes" and "no", to get answers like "Yes, always.", "Yes, sometimes." or "No, never." Again, over time they start to form full sentences, like "Yes. I always jump rope at recess."

Superhero cards are fun and a good way to continue to expand on character descriptions (in the third person.) A few of the characters appear a couple times with different abilities, so students can talk about all of the abilities. They can also guess at what some other abilities the other characters might have. (That's more for phase 2 but why not.)

Tastes/Smells rounds off the senses groups. It's a nice vocabulary unit to end with and I generally do it while I'm working on the self-intro project. There is one more senses set, "feels" and we can get to that when we circle back for phase 2 or 3 instead of taste/smells.

The self-introduction project can be written but even at the end of phase 1, the students have done very little written work. So, for my students this is all done orally. They practice and practice. I allow them to take some flashcards to the front to help them remember everything they want to say. In front of their group, they give a small presentation. This can be done all at once or one person each lesson. (I generally just have 1 small group, so I like to ask questions to the students that were listening and have the students ask one question back to the presenter.)

Running content notes:

This is a judgment call. If I feel my students are ready, I will introduce, "if..." clauses. It's fairly simple, but you'll also need to explain "will" for future tense. I introduce it in the same way I introduced "when ...," clauses in unit 15.

For one of .../some of .../all of ... I like to use animals and talk about colors. I use the plural flashcards sets and you can use other photos from books or off an internet image search. I start with just "some" and "all". "Some horses are brown. Some Horses are white." "All penguins are black and white." Later, I start to discuss groups and how "of" creates a certain group among a group. Not "all friends" but "All of my friends can speak English." As mentioned above, if you are using worksheets, BogglesWorldESL has some good ones.

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

With each phase I post a bit about some of the main things I do with my students to introduce and practice the language. Each group is different in size, age and level, so if you have questions about what might work best for your group or want to discuss how to modify an activity or share a successful activity you have, please join the forums and MES community. We'd love to discuss these things with you.