Wednesday, January 16, 2008
If...Will
This is a really fun and creative Smith’s School of English
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It was another busy night at Kyobashi! I had a rather fun lesson with 3 students at 8pm today. I was a bit worried before the lesson because there was some last-minute change to the schedule. But when I realized who had been moved to my class, I was relieved because he was a very cheerful guy and always mixed well with any other students. I was not disappointed in this class either.
When we started on the Item part of the lesson of the day, which is “If…will…”, I knew we were going to have some fun. I presented the card “ if I become rich…” , and I could see the dreamy smile on my last-minute student’s face. He volunteered and set an example for the other two students who were at a lower level than him. We all had a good laugh when he said “If I become rich, I will spend all my time scuba diving. But when will I become rich?” The girls followed suit and made up two similar examples with their own hobbies. The two girls are friends and usually don't like to be mixed with others in the class. But the little laugh we shared made the atmosphere rather comfortable for them and they started loosening up as well. One of them made a sentence “ if I meet my friends, we will go to the river!”, this made the other two laugh and her friend asked” how old are you?” well, I guess it was not a usual place a grown-up would go these days, especially in Osaka? But it was also nostalgic for all of them and the conversation about childhood activities went on for about 5 minutes.
The picture cards were also a big help to create a fun lesson. This time we had some matching pictures. I lay them all on the table and my students raced to match them up. After that, I asked each of them to give me an “if...will…” sentence with the cards that they paired up. They all got really excited about some of the funny pictures and joked about them. But the point was, they practiced using the sentence pattern and we all had a lot of laughs through the whole Item!
This is a great lesson for getting to know more about the student. That you also shared some laughs makes the lesson all the more enjoyable and entertaining for all involved. I think that it's wonderful that people of all ages can get in touch with nature with their friends.
I always enjoy doing this lesson especially for new students or for students I don't know so well. Since the grammar structure includes an "if" it usually elicits some interesting hypothetical answers.
The students seem to really enjoy this lesson and its contents. They often struggle with the picture cards but I always look forward to explaining them.
Then during the if conditional question session things really get interesting. The students try to answer each question
using as much creativity as they can. The first question "What will you do if you win the lottery?" often triggers the beginning of their imaginative responses. I am glad this is the first question listed because it usually gets the ball rolling. Some humorous answers are the norm after this. This creates a fun enjoyable atmosphere that continues naturally through to the end of the lesson. Its positive impact is magnified in larger 3 student group lessons where the students listen to and sometimes try to outclass their classmates with better more competitive answers.
Time management seems to be my weakest point in this lesson. I usually find the time slips to the 45 minute mark instantly which means I have to integrate the one point at the end as efficiently as possible. By the time this happens 50+ minutes usually has elapsed. You may feel overtime isn't always the best habit to maintain constantly especially with a busy lesson schedule. But I don't mind it in these cases where I see the students learning process is really excelling.
This is perhaps one of my favorite lessons because it encourages the students to create answers to hypothetical questions that require them to imagine outside of their mastered list of responses.
One lesson in which I chose to use "If... will" as the item had the students competing to see who could come up with the more outrageous answer. We quickly zipped through the provided list of "What ... if" scenarios in the textbook so now it came time to make up some new ones. I challenged the first student by asking her, "What will you do if you meet Tom Cruise?" I remembered that she was a big fan of Tom Cruise so it was great to see her get all excited as she fished for an answer. When she replied with, "If I meet Tom Cruise, I will hug him," I laughed at her boldness. Next, it was her turn to make up a question. Turning to the student seated at the far end of the table, she asked, "What will you do if you are a woman?" The well dressed businessman laughed amiably and easily answered, "If I am a woman, I will eat chocolate cake everyday." While that may or may not be a hobby exclusive to being a woman, his response kept the positive energy going so that the next student accepted her question with just as much humor. She accepted the challenging question posed to her with, "If I live on the moon I will make friends with aliens."
This lesson was a great deal of fun and a great example of how well "What...if" works in a class environment.
It was an unusually busy Monday night at Smith's School of English, Kyobashi, and I had a class of three pink students.
E.T.
As they usually all come in together, they all had the same onepoint, which was easy to review. "Can I see that?" I asked, pointing at their pen or book, giving them a chance to say "here you go".
Routine 1
In this lesson we focused on the questions of routine 1, and I had them ask one another and answer the ten questions of routine 1. There were a few questions about asking the questions, and we fixed up a few of them on the board. I made sure to use the questions that were causing difficulty a little extra at the end.
Item - If..Will
I wrote up some sample questions about the word cards on the board, and I placed the Will part of the sentence cards face up on the table. I gave each student an If card, and asked them to match it to the Will card on the table. Then I had them asking each other the questions from the board about each topic.
When everyone seemed fairly comfortable with the If...Will sentences I decided it was a good time to start practising some dialogue. I changed the dialogue a little bit to let all three students have something to say each time we went through it. This dialogue was a little tricky because it required a lot of fast thinking. The materials for this lesson, especially the cards, is great for guiding the conversation, but it certainly isn't spoonfeeding the dialogue, and so the students really have to think about how to express the idea presented on the card. Sometimes it is a good idea to go through each If...Will idea on the cards before going through the dialogue, especially for lower level students. It gives them the confidence they need for speaking and using what they already know.
At the end of the lesson everyone was having a good time, as they'd all gotten used to the dialogue, and were slotting in amusing If... Will statements, rather than the run of the mill ones that would be just as grammatically correct.
Onepoint
At this point I introduced the onepoint, which was "either will do". Do you like fruit or cake? I asked one student. Cake! She said. I then asked her to ask me, which she did and I could say "either will do" as an example of how to use the phrase. I like both cake and fruit... I don't mind... and so on. I made sure to ask all three of them a few questions so that they all could say "either will do" and feel a bit more comfortable with it.
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