Respuestas
Respuesta:
Have you ever thought how to change the way your students can learn grammatical structures in the classes? How to incorporate some fun elements into a typical lesson devoted to grammar?
No matter what age group you teach, try to break the barriers and do something different. Even if your students might not approve of your crazy ideas from the very beginning, later they will probably say thank you, because learning grammar is definitely more stimulating and effective when it is not solely about completing dull exercises in the workbooks.
One example might be the class I held with 12-year-old pupils. They were trying to master regular and irregular Past Simple forms when on the Internet I found a Cinderella story in a simplified version. One feature of this text that made it perfect for my students was that it included a lot of Past Simple forms. Not giving it at first a too deep thought, I printed out the story, because I found Cinderella in a slightly newer and more contemporary version truly appealing to young learners. Only later did I come to think what I could do with the text in my lesson.
As a lead-in activity, I asked my students to tell me what they know or what they can remember about Cinderella. A few students came up with some ideas and I told them what they were going to do.
The first activity was to listen to me reading the tale and draw what they could hear. I read the story twice and children were supposed to draw as many things as possible in order to retell it to me later. First, I asked them to say what they had drawn and the next stage was to try to tell me the whole story. It was a very difficult task, but with my help students managed quite well. To facilitate the task, I asked them some additional questions, e.g. ”Where did Cinderella live?”, ”What time did she get up?”, “How did she go the party?” or ”Why was the Prince sad?”. The aim was to use Past Simple correctly in the speaking activity.
Afterwards I distributed the text of the story to the pupils and asked them to read it and underline all of the verbs in the past forms. When they were ready, we started writing these verbs on the board, always providing two forms: infinitive and in the Past Simple.
To finish I handed out the worksheets with the exercise to fill in the sentences (directly taken from the story) with the verbs in the correct Past Simple forms.
This lesson was aimed at students who had already been introduced to Past Simple and they needed to practise it more. It combined learning grammar with a bit of literature (Cinderella) and art (drawing). It also helped to work on the listening and speaking skills. Mind that the vocabulary in the story had to be easy for the students not to overburden them with yet another challenge in the class.
I hope my short article will trigger some more creative ideas in you and that you will teach grammar in combination with other skills in a fun and motivating way. Good luck!