Alonso and I used his trip to New Orleans as a jumping point for going over past tense verbs in a recent lesson. He was excited to tell me about the zoo and going out in such a cool city so that made it easier for him to talk about. We first reviewed the conjugations of words like 'to go' and 'to see' and then I had him create sentences for each variation of 'I, he, we, they...' It was more of a speaking lesson than a written one so he answered verbally for each question. I did give him a paper with all of the questions on it 'What did you see?" and "Where did you go?" and "What was your favorite thing about the trip?" type prompts. Rather than correcting him in the middle of him presenting I typed up what he was saying as he replied and we went over the grammar afterwards. For a lot of the errors that he made he was able to recognize them when he looked over the written copy. It was definitely helpful for me as a teacher as well to see what points to work on later, as well as what his strengths were.
Another highlight of the lesson was the lack of Spanish used, only necessary in translating a few of the animal vocab words (Although Alonso guessed at a few and came up with some pretty awesome sounding Spanglish animals, haha) and clarifying a couple of things. All of the zoo talk led to us looking at some animal attack videos, which turned out to be pretty hilarious, and ended in plans to visit the gator at the Tallahassee Museum!
I love how you integrated Alonso's experience into an English lesson! Way-to make it personal!
ReplyDeleteoh, and let me know when you visit the museum...I wanna come too!! (like the reduced form there?)