My new secret weapon

Thanks to my parents I now have a collection of great illustrations for nearly all of the vocabulary that I plan to teach for the rest of the year! This has already cut down drastically on planning time. On Thursday I introduced emotions to one of my CM2 (fifth grade) classes and it was a huge hit. They each had a handout with twelve illustrations (excited, happy, hot, hungry, mad, sad, sleepy, afraid, bored, cold, curious, dizzy) and we repeated each item expressively. In fact, when I taught the second half of the class, the teacher informed me later that she could hear us next door - I think that means I did well in getting the kids excited about learning. :)

After several times practicing the pronounciation of each word, I taught them how to use them in context: "How do you feel?" "I feel ___." "How are you?" "I am ___." Of course, they were required to do this expressively, also. The boys especially loved saying, "I feel MAAAAAAAAD!"

Finally, we came to the best part of the class: charades! I divided them into two teams and a representative of each came to the front of the room where I assigned an emotion to pantomime. The kids were really excited about the game and kept shouting the answers, as if I would give a point to the loudest team. I was especially happy that by the end of the 45 minute session they were rarely looking at their illustrations to find the answers.

I am going to use this model for all my lessons from now on. It involves visual, oral/aural, and kinesthetic learning, which is important to me, and more importantly, the kids had a great time!