Unit 1: Target Language (by phase)

Mark's Notes:

Some groups might be getting tired of TPR at least in the way I do it. I sometimes drop this from the curriculum or use it occasionally for review.

For activities board games become a lot more useful from this point on.

Phase 1: Vocabulary is the main focus but students have built a pretty good foundation at this point and you might find that they can handle greater expectations from you, the teacher, as far as production. There is a lot going on in phase 1 and some of the target language could be moved to later units.

Using the plural noun flashcards with animals, I introduce the students to the plural form. We'll just work on singular vs. plural for a while and then for practice I bring back the fruit set and vegetables set. Working with "What are these?", I generally save that and use it as running content for the rest of the unit.

Just to get students used to the future tense, I begin asking them what they are going to do after class. I model the response, "I'm going to ..."I will continue to do this for the rest of phase 1. We'll eventually start working on asking the question, "Are you going to ...", but for now this is enough.

I take a small break in content to work with plurals and introduce the 3rd person singular "s". I have some game cards that have characters portrayed as liking certain fruits. With students, I play Memory and sometimes Bingo just saying over and over what the person likes, "He likes grapes." I do this to just get them used to hearing and saying it this way.

Weather is short and sweet. We cover the vocabulary and questions. I don't spend much time on this and just bring it back occasionally for review. It's useful vocabulary.

Clothes is the first time I get students to focus on the present progressive in the negative, "I'm not wearing a blue coat." I will have covered this with he/she in the running content, but at this point I'll put more emphasis on that.

"How old are you?" is probably something I will have already covered, but just for completeness sake, I put it in here and make sure I cover it if I haven't already.

Animals 3 and desserts are just for building vocabulary. They are a bit arbitrary and could be cut from phase 1 and introduced when you come back in phase 2. Here I focus more on the question "What do you want (for dessert)?" in working with desserts.

Phonics: I'll spend more time on phonics, reading and worksheets here as we start to see TPR run its course. Silent e is a difficult bit of phonics as it requires students to "see" a pattern. So I spend a lot of time on this and go very slowly. I first just have students decide if words do or don't have that pattern. Then once we've been able to see the pattern, I explain about long vowel sounds with just one vowel at a time.

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