Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Frequency

How often do you go shopping? Or, do you ever eat cake for breakfast?

When talking about regular daily events it’s important to have some vocabulary related to frequency. People ALWAYS use frequency terms when discussing their life. For example, when talking about someone’s recent weekend activity, you’d be tempted to ask how often they go camping. Whether they go camping almost every weekend, or whether it is really rare for them to be able to take a break changes the impact of the event. Frequency lessons at Smith’s School of English focus on this specific set of vocabulary words and their application.

2 comments:

Bananahead said...

ET: I’ve gone blank
This group of students had the same one point as my last lesson so, I asked them the same question as in my last lesson, as that went pretty well.
Can you name some Japanese baseball teams? Of course they started with the Hanshin Tigers so I had to hint to them to use their one point, and they did.

Routine 6: The baby
Even though these students had done this routine a couple of months ago, they still recognized it so they quickly flicked back in their notes to the last time that had done it to familiarize themselves a little bit more on it.
Since they did so well the first time they done it I thought I would try and make it a little harder. I started off with splitting the sentences into small sections, but this was too easy for them so I began to make them longer, this got them thinking a little bit more, though they did superbly again.

Item: Frequency 2
I had recently done a review on the item Frequency 1 with these students so as I started writing this out they again, looked back on their notes but then I wrote the number ‘2’ and that changed everything, even their facial expressions.
So as we are going through Frequency 2, they found it quite difficult and it took a while to explain some things, but since they asked lots of questions, (which I love students doing) I was able to help them clarify more of these new sentences. They definitely learned a lot from this lesson, I could tell from all of the notes that they were taking down.
After introducing ‘Frequency 2’ I pulled out the picture cards and put them upside down on the table. They knew it was time for dialogue practice! I think they were glad that there was only 5 minutes left of class.

One point: Let me sleep on it
This has been my one point of the week.
I asked them if they knew what it meant, I knew that they didn’t but it got them thinking about it. I wrote up the ‘meaning’ of the one point and put it into action!

Bananahead said...

Impressive Pink Students

One point: ‘Help yourself’
I tried to get the students to use their one point by asking if I could use one of their many pens in their pencil case, and it worked!

Routine: The Restaurant
These two students haven’t done many of the L&R routines so I pre-warned them that it might be quite hard for them. So we proceeded to go through the routine, I spoke slowly to make it a bit easier for them. I thought I would need to help them add in those little words that always get missed out when putting the sentences together but I was completely wrong. I had to help with very few of these, they remembered all of the ‘at’s, ‘and’s and I only had to remind them of a couple of the ‘the’s at the last bit of the story. I told them that I was very impressed with them, (since a lot of the higher level students end up missing out these words).

Item: Frequency 1 (review)
Since the routine took a little longer, which was expected, I decided to do this item as a review. I got the ‘frequency’ cards out and got them to match them up to the corresponding percentage that it belongs to. They looked through their notes straight away but I told them that they couldn’t use them, to see if they remembered it themselves. They got most of them right which was again, impressive. It had been a while since they had done this item.

One point: ‘What’s wrong?’
As soon as I put this on the board one of the students said the Japanese equivalent straight away. I put some upset faces up on the board and asked them what they would say to this ‘person’. They both understood the one point once we had gone through the face examples.