Unit 6: Primary: Young Learners

 Unit 6: Primary: Young Learners

In this video, the teacher presents a grammar lesson using "the rainforest" as the guiding theme (content area). She used movement, singing, colour, and repetition to engage students and to reinforce grammar points and vocabulary. The teacher used pacing and a variety of activities to keep the students engaged and the lesson moving forward.

They were second graders, who were arranged in groups of four. They behaved quite well in class, which helped the teacher to conduct the lesson smoothly. They were focused and polite. In the Warm-up, the teacher used a water circle song with which they were familiar to introduce the topic. Though the vocabulary is complex, such as evaporation, condensation and precipitation, Ss managed to pronounce them. There were more than only three advanced lexeis, which were beyond the level of most of their peers.

I liked the way how the teacher checked or helped students to understand the vocabulary and grammar points very much. Students were supposed to make sentences according to the sentence structure "adjectives+nouns+verbs+prepositional phrases". For instance, poisonous red snakes eat quickly on the ground.

The teacher was trying to raise the awareness of sentence orders by asking students to think about comparing English sentences with their mother tongue, Spanish. And they started from each column of the part of speech one by one, which turned out to be a substitution table for them. The teacher asked students to use their L1 to check their vocabulary understanding (e.g. poisonous-venenoso). When they had sentences, T asked them to read the sentence by using the tune of "London Bridge" to sing the sentences out and asked them to perform, which brought a lot of fun to the students. when writing on the paper, the teacher tried to raise the awareness of capitalising the first letter in the sentence and writing the period in the end. She also asked students to use a lot of TPRs to help students get interested in learning and having fun in class. For example, poisonous red snakes eat quickly on the ground. The teacher asked students to perform the sentence step by step. In terms of some words, like "fight", some students fought with each other at the beginning, but the teacher asked them to stop. Then, it did not happen again.

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CiBR7lNQUM