Classroom Activities

Teaching Pronunciation

03/24/2020 by admin

As a teacher with limited class time, how can you best meet your students’ needs when it comes to pronunciation practice? With younger kids, if you teach phonics with a rigorous focus on phonemes, pronunciation is built into the program. In this post I detail some additional activities that you and your students may enjoy. When teaching older kids and adults, a bit of time set aside for pronunciation can allow for focused, effective, and enjoyable activities in an otherwise busy schedule. Importantly, consistent practice is key to making a difference in your students’ pronunciation.

There are a variety of downloadable pronunciation games and templates in this post. They are free for you to download and use in class. There are also numerous resource links you may want to return to in the future, so be sure to bookmark this page! As always, if there are activities you especially enjoy using in class, let readers know in the comments!

Let’s begin! I’ll start with activities for younger students and move toward activities appropriate for older language learners.

Read to Your Kids!

When I read a story in class, I seat my kids close to me so they can hear and feel the sounds resonating from me. I often invite students to turn pages, point to pictures, and when possible, participate as a group in the reading of the story. Your kids will be picking up your pronunciation as it arrives to their ears in word inflections, emotions, and the rhythms of the story. A tale well told can make a powerful impression on little kids!

Books are numerous, but here is a short list of 10 books I especially enjoy reading in class. As I’m always on the lookout for new titles, please let me know the books you enjoy for story time in the comments below!

Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
Today is Monday by Eric Carle
Polar Bear’s Underwear by Tupera Tupera
Clap Your Hands by Lorinda Bryan Cauley
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle
Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Eric Carle
No, David! by David Shannon
Excuse Me! by Karen Katz
Cat in a Hat by Dr. Seuss

Teach Phonics!

Phonics and Spelling Kinney Brothers Publishing

Phonics lessons are the cornerstone of my kids’ classes. Over the years, and with intention, I built pronunciation practice into my program and that includes phonics and spelling lessons all through elementary school. From the outset, songs, storybooks, and phonics associations introduce a vocabulary bank I exploit and build on in future lessons. As students progress learning CVC words, long vowel sounds, sight words, plurals, and verb conjugations, I never have to worry about exposing my younger students to enough pronunciation and listening practice.

The result of this isn’t only for good pronunciation delivery. In the beginning, it’s especially important that students learn how to hear me, to be able to individuate the 44 sounds of my language and then imitate how I vocally vibrate, aspirate, and fricitate as an English speaker. So, the path to proper and consistent English pronunciation starts with listening and identifying, and THEN speaking! Phonics lessons will give you a wealth of material and a consistent focus when teaching young children.

Chants and Tongue Twisters

As I mentioned in my post, The Drama is Real, chants have legs! Like songs, they dance about in children’s heads right out of the classroom. This kind of activity isn’t just for younger students. Older kids and adults can benefit enormously from pronunciation activities that include fun exercises like tongue twisters. Remind your students that professional newscasters, actors, and singers use tongue twisters as warmup exercises all.the.time! Check out engVid for 50 classic tongue twisters that will help your students learn to enunciate. And don’t forget rhymes for choosing players! You’ll be surprised how quickly your students will pick up these chants if you employ them regularly.

Icka bicka soda cracker,
Icka bicka boo.
Icka bicka soda cracker,
Out go YOU!

Bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish.
How many pieces do you wish?
1-2-3 and you are IT!

Minimal Pairs

Minimal pair work is essential and a good deck of minimal pair flashcards is worth its weight in gold! Minimal pairs are words that differ in one sound only, like pit and pet. When you teach English words in groups that point out differences as well as similarities, your students will be able to hear the differences that distinguish words from one another. Early phonics lessons like cat, can, and cap, work like minimal pair exercises and shouldn’t be dropped once students learn to read. Minimal pairs are excellent listening and speaking practice for older kids and adults as well. They can be employed in a variety of ways besides testing and assessing.

Playing games with minimal pairs allows students to flex their vocal muscles and exercise their ears. If you’re looking for flashcard activity ideas, check out my 50+ Flashcard Activities. Try a game where students listen to a string of words to identify one that is different. A simple ‘missing card’ activity is easy to set up and can be a real challenge! Put three or four words on the board, have students cover their eyes, and remove one of the cards. Students guess which card is missing. Try silently mouthing or whispering target words during a game. This is good for focusing on and exaggerating mouth positions for English sounds. If you’re in a space that allows for more rambunctious fun, try relays or positioning students at opposite ends of the room for some loud pronunciation practice. Placing a physical barrier between players forces them to listen more carefully and communicate clearly!

You can download a free set of 25 minimal pair flashcards with five sets of words for each sound pair. The flashcards include master cards, pair cards, and individual word cards so you can adapt them to a variety of games and activities. Also included is a PowerPoint template for making your own! The zip file is large, so have patience when downloading. Caroline Bowen, AM, Phd, of speech-language-therapy.com has created a generous online list of words you can draw from when putting together your own minimal pair flashcards and worksheets.

Exit Tickets

The thing I love about Exit Tickets is that they’re a quick way to assess lessons taught or determine lessons that need to be taught. Hand cards out just before the end of class, go through a quick listening exercise and get them back as students go out the door. Voilà! Instant data to mull over!

These free Exit Tickets are aligned to the Minimal Pair Flash Cards above and include a PowerPoint template. I also have ABC Exit Tickets and CVC Exit Tickets available in my online store that I recommend checking out!

Pronunciation Maze

This pronunciation maze is a simple but effective puzzle I regularly use when teaching my kids past tense conjugations and the three -ed sounds /id/, /d/, and /t/. The grid template can also be used for the plural sounds /s/, /z/, and /ez/ and first, second, and third syllable accents. To play, students move from the top-left starting point to the bottom-right Finish by connecting the same target sounds in a maze-like fashion. Use the same board as a warmup or review in a 4-in-a-Row game! Laminate the boards and use counters and you’ll have this game at your disposal for years to come!

You can download three past tense mazes here. The free download includes an answer key, blank and PowerPoint templates for creating your own mazes.

Record Your Students

Recording your students doesn’t have to be for a presentation or speech contest. Having students listen to themselves can be fun, revealing, and instructive! It’s like a sound selfie! Choose an easy reading passage that students are familiar with for individual recordings or a dialogue where students can work in pairs. A simple passage from a fairy tale provides older students with expressive melodrama and fun characters like villains, princesses, and frogs. Remember, many of your adult students are also parents and can be pretty good at reading a children’s story!

Telephone Activity

This activity will give you lots of listening and speaking practice in a unique and challenging format! In short, you’re replacing the numbers of a telephone pad with a set of 10 minimal pair words. First, practice the set of words that appear in the activity. Hand out the telephone sheets to students and practice the words again until students are somewhat familiar with their placement on the telephone pad. With a prepared set of telephone numbers, dictate the words to your students. When everyone is finished, check their accuracy. This is a good activity for small groups and pairs as well.

Download this free activity with six gamepads plus a blank pad and PowerPoint template for creating your own.

Pronunciation Pyramid

This is a classic activity, easy to set up, and an excellent warm-up or cool-down exercise. Starting at the top tier of the pyramid, say one of the two words and have students circle the word they hear. Gradually work down the pyramid until you arrive at a number at the bottom. Ask students what number they ended on and see how accurately they listened! Up the ante on this activity by preparing a list of sentences so students have to catch the words in context.

Three free pyramid games plus blank and PowerPoint templates can be downloaded here.

Phonemic Charts

Phonemic Chart Kinney Brothers Publishing

Phonemic Charts are a wonderful tool to help students make sense of English pronunciation. Click here to download the free chart above that includes a black and white version. The British Council at teachingenglish.org.uk put together a set of free and very large phonemic symbol charts you can tack to classroom walls or reference during lectures. I recommend exploring the British Council website as they have some excellent online resources!

If you want to transcribe words or grab the phonemic symbols for your own resources, check out phonetizer.com/ or ipa.typeit.org/ You can translate or type in the codes and then copy and paste to your own documents. When working with the symbols, many fonts will not support the characters. Charis SIL is a supported font you can download here. If there are other fonts you recommend, help a teacher out and let me know in the comments below!

Charts, Word Walls, and Games

Pronunciation Practice Kinney Brothers Publishing Donald's English Classroom

To maintain an awareness of proper pronunciation, as an intervention when necessary, or for specialized practice, I developed a series of easy charts, flash cards, and games. With age-neutral images and easy vocabulary, I use these with my elementary through adult English classes.

The charts include consonants, vowels, blends, digraphs, ‘r’ controlled sounds, and plurals. Each set also has aligned flashcards, Bingo games, and I Have/Who Has activities. Click here to learn more about the complete lineup of resources from my online store, Donald’s English Classroom. In a previous post, A Game With Legs, I detail the myriad ways you can use I Have/Who Has activities in class!

In closing…

It should go without saying, just doing a couple of activities once or twice will not guarantee good pronunciation or fix the problems your students may be having. Pronunciation is NOT a one-off lesson. It’s also important to remember, language learners will only be able to take in so much pronunciation input at one time. More is not always better. Studies have shown that you can teach as few as 3 to 5 minimal pairs in order for students to show spontaneous generalization to other words containing the target sounds. Focused practice will lead your students to a better understanding of English pronunciation so that an occasional “nudge” will keep them on track.

The important thing is to integrate these activities into your class routine whenever possible and find ways to make pronunciation practice an enjoyable challenge.

For convenience, here is a quick list of the six free downloads in this post from Kinney Brothers Publishing:

You might be interested in checking out Teaching Pronunciation, A Followup. This post details a variety of activities I created for my own classes and available in my online store, Donald’s English Classroom.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

Using Maps in Class

12/11/2019 by admin

When I began learning Japanese in the early 80s, it was imperative that I learn how to ask for directions from the get-go – especially in Tokyo. Not only did I have to deal with my lacking sense of direction, I was also functionally illiterate as I didn’t know any Japanese when I first arrived. A guide book and a paper train map were always in my bag. I also remember the huge city map on the kitchen wall in the foreigner’s house where I lived; an invaluable reference for fresh-off-the-boat travelers like me. To whatever train station I might be going, I regularly stopped at the local police box to ask directions – even if I already knew where I was going. Why? It was excellent language practice and I milked it.

Looking back, I was lucky. I was in the real world, immersed in a new language, and learning daily. Because we teach in a box, we have to find inventive ways to bring meaningful, real-world language into the classroom. Maps offer a visual opportunity for building language skills.

In my own book publications, I created maps and activities that are included in the Phonics & Spelling series, Q&A worksheets, and referenced for nearly every story in the Stories For Young Readers textbooks. I wanted my kids to know where they are in the world, learn about someplace new, and not be afraid to ask for directions or offer help to someone in need.

Stories For Young Readers Lesson Packs Kinney Brothers Publishing

Consider all the language used when dealing with maps:

geographical vocabulary – rivers, lakes, mountains
community places, cities, capitals, countries
prepositions of place – in, on, in front of, behind
directionals – north, south, right, left, forward, back, around
ordinal numbers
grammar tenses – past, present, and future
map vocabulary – legends, icons, scales

Donald's English Classroom Community Places

Starting early…

As my kids get older and catch on to the fact that I don’t really swim from the U.S. to Japan every day, we start learning community places, easy country names, and playing games with flags. Flags are already familiar to many sports-minded kids and there’s no reason to be ignorant about your favorite team’s home turf. In preparation for the Jidou Eiken tests, community place names and geographic vocabulary are a regular part of my flashcard activities. Keep in mind, these kinds of exercises can be just as informative and entertaining in your adult ESL classes!

When students begin moving about in their community and become aware that some people come from other places, like me, we start working with maps. Map activities pull together a variety of language skills — language you’ve probably been teaching your kids since they were little! It begins with prepositions of place and sight words like at, in, on, next to, and in front of. Interrogatives like where, what, and how come early on when asking the most rudimentary questions.

Once students develop informational reading skills, we look at town maps and tackle exercises in asking for and giving directions. We start with simple commands like Turn right! Turn left! and Go straight! Similar to community flashcard exercises in the past, students express where they are or want to go on the maps, e.g., I want to go to the station, or I’m at the library. Especially with large classes, big wall maps are essential for leading students through these types of activities.

Map making…

I went out in search of maps for my classroom many times and in many places around Tokyo. I could never find what I was looking for! Available maps were the wrong language, too expensive, too complicated, too big, too small, and so on. Yes, I’m picky, and I’m not going to have something in my classroom simply for decoration. What I wanted were easy-to-read and colorful wall maps appropriate for upper-elementary ESL kids in English. Simple to find, right? Nope.

So, I started creating my own. Because I don’t have a poster-size printer, I resized digital images and created wall maps out of regular sheets of paper. The students and I glued them together as a class activity, and viola! I have wall maps of each continent, a town map for practicing directions, and a U.S. map so I can talk about where I came from. Each map is dedicated to the class that helped put it together with a picture of the students and the date.

Doald's English Classroom Map Instructions

I also wanted the maps to be an interactive resource in my lesson plans. So, along with the wall maps, I created charts, worksheets, plus blank and numbered maps for classroom activities and handouts for students’ interactive notebooks. These are items not normally sold with maps you buy at a bookstore. Importantly, all the student materials are congruent with the wall maps and I’m not hobbling together different resources to create a series of lessons.

I’m pleased to say, these maps are now available in my online store. Click on the images to learn more. I hope you find these maps useful in your own classes.

Map Worksheets Kinney Brothers Publishing

Playing with maps…

Here are some map activities I’ve found particularly useful in class. If you have some activities you especially enjoy, help a teacher out and let us know in the comments below!

Create your own town! With a blank town map and a list of community places, allow students to create their own towns! Then have students ask and give directions based on their created maps. Let students visit each other’s town or vote on their favorite town!
Give students a numbered or blank map. Beginning with a labeled place, like a station, dictate directions and have students label the place of arrival on their own maps. This works well as an assessment of lessons taught.
Ask students to imagine a country they’d like to travel to for vacation. Create an outline of topics you would like them to research: weather, geography, food, history, etc. This is great grammar practice for future conditionals. With the online tools available for research, the possibilities are endless!

Historical maps Kinney Brothers Publishing

For practice with past tense, display a historical map next to a current map. This activity gets your students really scanning a map closely to discover the differences.
Teachers who teach from their home country are more likely to have students from a variety of places. A map can be a wonderful springboard for enjoyable and informative language practice. Pin the countries where students are from or have traveled to on a world map. Students love to talk about what they know best: their home country and all its unique cultural differences!

Finally, if you’re teaching about the United States and want your students to know their state names, capitals, and regions, check out my post on U.S.A. Maps and download a free map puzzle!

I hope this post encourages you to consider using maps more often in your ESL lessons. I’ll finish with a favorite quote:

I was completely drawn to other lands. I discovered with time that it’s a thirst for other people, for otherness, for something fascinating and mysterious. Robert Lepage

As always, best of luck in your classes!
Donald Kinney

Nameplates

08/05/2019 by admin

Nameplates may seem like an inconsequential part of a student’s learning materials, but they can be quite useful and have genuine meaning to the individual student. As a teacher, you may have your nameplate on a desk or door. Imagine someone stealing or defacing it. You can’t help but feel personal about it. Nameplates for students are exactly the same.

Years ago, when I was still experimenting, I created laminated name cards for all my students. One student lost his card. He recreated the card at home and his mother carefully wrapped the card in cellophane. I was so touched by their efforts. This told me how important the card was to the student. Name plates quickly became a regular part of my classes.

Why take the trouble to create nameplates when students have name badges? Though a name badge pinned to a student’s chest is convenient for teachers and parents, they’re inconvenient for students. When a student looks at their badge, it’s not only awkward to see, it’s upside down! Nameplates, on the other hand, are for the students. I make sure they’re not only personalized but useful as well. If I had to make a choice between name badges or plates, nameplates would win — hands down.

Many teachers with full-time students will laminate name cards directly to a desk or table. I don’t have that luxury. My students change every hour going from three-year-olds in the early afternoon to fifth and sixth-grade students in the evening. I repeat this each day of the week in multiple classrooms across the city where I teach. Just like attendance stickers, nameplates are part of a class routine that benefits me (I have a hard time remembering names) and the students.

Click on any of the images of the name plates below to visit my store.

Name Plates Donald's English Classroom 1

The name plates I create will vary. Usually, they are simple paper ‘tents’ printed on heavy card stock. They fold out to stand on desks and flatten easily to tuck in a bag. I don’t laminate them unless it is a double-sided card. Whether card or tent, I look at the reverse side as educational real estate for charts. My kids get new name plates every few years depending on their age, with the reverse-side charts focusing on some aspect of their English studies; e.g., ABCs, numbers, colors, bugs, maps, etc. From third grade, I also include their names in cursive writing.

Activities

Of the three game modals — matching, ordering and discovery — there are activities you can use with your name plates that involve all three. Below are 13 activities to try out in class.

Note: I learned early on NOT to play games where students can lose their name card to another player. It can upset them! Make sure that when you use name plates they are not the object of trade between players during a game.

Name Plates Donald's English Classroom 3

1. Name Search When young students receive their name cards, for the first few weeks collect the name cards at the end of each class. At the beginning of the next class, arrange their name cards on a table. During roll call, each student must collect their card from the table. Keep a watch over this activity as mistakes will be made!

2. Seating Use the name cards to determine seating arrangements. Collect all the cards and redistribute them according to your intended activity or arrangement. Students must locate their new seats or desks. This works well to prepare for games, break up cliques, or get students working with different partners during activities.

3. Line Up #1 No doubt, lining kids up to play a game or go home is an important part of class routines. Using their nameplates, have kids line up in alphabetical order. With your littlest kids, point to the ABCs and ask them if their name begins with A, B, or C, etc. This kind of ordering is a preliminary exercise that aligns itself with phonics and dictionary work later on! If your cards have birthdays, have the kids line up in the order of the months. With practice, older kids learn to negotiate their place in line themselves.

4. Line Up #2 I call this fun activity “Roll Out” and it works great as a method for lining kids up. Think of a luggage conveyer belt in an airport. Have kids sit in a tight circle on the floor. Slowly begin streaming student name cards into the circle with students passing the cards around the circle left to right. When a student’s own name card lands in her hands, she rolls backwards out of the circle and gets in line. Keep the cards circulating until all the students identify their own card. Mistakes will be made so be ready to jump in when necessary. Sometimes it will take two or three passes for a student to recognize their card — and that’s OK.

5. Early Finishers If you have early finishers, have students write all their classmates’ names in alphabetical order.

6. Chants Line up all the names on a table and recite your favorite choosing chant. Do this regularly and you’ll be surprised how quickly students pick up and enjoy the language.

7. Choosing Teams To divide students into teams, collect all their cards, and randomly pull each name out of a box.

8. Who’s Turn? When playing a whole-class game where students take turns such as Bingo, put all the players’ names in a box or basket. After one student has taken their turn drawing a Bingo card, they then pull a name card out of the box to choose the next student’s turn.

9. Discovery! Try a quick discovery game using students’ names! Using a piece of paper with a large hole cut out of the center, move the piece of paper all around a name card so students can only see parts of the name. Do the same activity by covering the whole name with a sheet of paper, slowly revealing the name, end to front. Help students out by sounding out the visible letters until a student recognizes her name.

10. Spell it Out! Collect all the students’ name cards. Verbally spell out each name. When a student recognizes his name, return their card. Prep students for this activity by setting students up with the task of spelling out their names for you as they point to the letters on their card. ‘How do you spell…’ is an oft-heard question in my classroom.

11. Name Bingo Because names are already printed on their cards, no prep needed! If using game markers, students cover each letter as they are drawn at random. If the cards are laminated, use whiteboard markers. Keep this in your arsenal of games if, for any reason, you need to fill time, keep students busy, or have an unexpected change in the day’s lesson plan. It happens. It’s also a quick and fun game for students of all ages.

12. Memory Game As your students become better able to read their classmate’s names, try a memory game! Place three students’ cards on the board. Turn your back and have a student-helper turn over one card. Turn back around and guess the hidden name. Don’t forget to sound out and read the visible cards as well. Continue to add cards for each round. Remember, it’s fun for students to sometimes see the teacher struggle!

13. Matching When introducing cursive to your students, write all their names in cursive on the board. Collect all the students’ name cards and ask students to match the name cards to their cursive equivalent.

Over time, and with exposure, kids will gradually start reading and recognizing their classmates’ names. This is perfect as I expect my upper elementary kids to take attendance each week — an activity students love to do and sometimes use to spoof my language. It’s OK. I can take a roasting. They just don’t realize how proud I am they learned to read each other’s names. Nameplates undoubtedly help me get students to that level.

I hope these 13 activities spark some ideas for your own classes! Give them a try and let me know how it goes in the comments below! If you’re interested in any of the nameplate templates pictured above, be sure to visit my store to learn more!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

UNO

06/02/2017 by admin

Think UNO is just a quiet game of number and color matching? Think again!

UNO is a great game for getting your students speaking! I use it to get my students to practice all of the following language:

This is a…
That is a …
These are …
Those are…
What is this?
What is that?
What are these?
What are those?
Not
Colors
numbers

Here is an example of how I use it in a class where students are learning to use the basic sentence structure, “This is a …”:

Deal out seven cards to each student and play the game as usual, only students must say what they are laying down. For example, if a student is going to lay down a yellow 2, she must say, “This is a Yellow 2.” The play then goes to the next student. Let’s say he lays down a Green 2. He must say, “This is a Green 2.” Play the game in this fashion until one of the students lays down all of the cards in her hand and wins.

The special cards in the deck are as follows:

This is a Wild Draw 4
This is a Wild card
This is a Green Draw 2
This is a Red Skip
This is a Blue Reverse

When the students start contrasting ‘this’ and ‘that’, bring that to the game. Now, students must say what the previous student laid down before saying what they are about to lay down: “That is a Yellow 2. This is a Blue Skip.”

As the students progress further, the expectations for play expand as well. For example, when the students are learning plurals, and the contrasting words ‘these’ and ‘those’, support this by incorporating them into the game. When a student has two or more of the same card in his hand, he can now lay them all down at once, saying, “These are Red 7’s”. The next student must then say, “Those are Red 7’s before saying what he is about to lay down. In this game now, students are contrasting ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’, and ‘those’.

Have your students learned ‘not’? Throw it in! Now when a student lays down a card, she must first say what it is not, and then what it is: “This is not a Green 9. This is a Blue 4.” And for added fun, the students can be allowed to say anything that their card is not: “This is not a gorilla! This is a Blue 4.”

And of course, you play the game in which students ask questions too! In this case, the student would lay her card down and ask the next student, “What is this?” The next student must answer, “That is a Green 8,” before laying down her own card and asking the next student the appropriate question.

As you can see, there are a lot of options for using UNO to support the language you are teaching. Give it a try, and let us know how it goes, and how you might have used it differently! Or maybe you have another card game that you like to use to get your students talking. Please let us know. We’d love to hear about it!

Mike

Selling Wellness

05/13/2017 by admin

Health and medicine are major topics in our social and media discussions. How well your students understand the news articles and conversations happening around them determines the extent to which they can make informed decisions about their well-being.

Of course most beginner-intermediate ESL students have learned about the body, and how to talk about simple ailments, but Selling Wellness, from Trends, Book 2, challenges students to take their skills in reading, listening, and discussion around health and medicine to the next level. Starting off with a short paragraph on prescription drug sales in the United States, Selling Wellness engages solid intermediate-level students with reading and discussion exercises that center on health and exercise, taking medicine, pharmaceutical advertising, and the growing epidemic of pharmaceutical drug abuse and unintentional deaths by overdose.

Selling Wellness also includes a simple review of body part vocabulary, commonly-used idioms dealing with illness, and a survey exercise that can be used either in-class, or as a homework project.

The way I run this lesson…

I start off with writing the questions from the Discussion Questions section on the board. Students stand and discuss the questions in pairs, changing partners every five or ten minutes.

Next, I tell students to take out a notebook and prepare to write the questions from the Comprehension Questions section. I then dictate the questions, which the students write in their notebooks.

After this, the students turn to a new page in their notebooks. I then read the report twice, and the students take notes. Then, students pair up and work out the answers to the Comprehension Questions.

Finally, I hand out the two pages of Selling Wellness to the students, and the students work to check the answers to their questions, and practice reading the paragraph for themselves out loud.

From here I have the students drill each other using the Selling Wellness Drill section. With this, students change pairs, with one student turning his or her paper over, and the other student asking the questions. The partner listens closely to each question and gives a full answer. For example, if the question is, “Are Americans taking less medicine?”, the student should answer, “No, Americans are not taking less medicine. They are taking more medicine.” This is a great listening-and-response drill, and it further reviews the information given in the reading.

Next I have the students work out the Identification: Body Parts section, and then move on to the Discussion Exercise 1 section. For this discussion section, I give the students five or ten minutes to write out their ideas on their own, and then I put them in small groups for discussion.

Finally, depending on the amount of time left in class, I either set the students off to survey each other using the Survey Exercise section, or I assign the Survey Exercise as homework, giving them parameters on how many people they must ask, etc.

Another option for teaching this lesson would be to make it even more student-centered by having the students themselves run the class! See my blog entry titled, The Oasis of The Seas.

Please share your ideas…

Or maybe you have your own ideas on how to run this lesson. Please share! I would love to learn about any other ways you get your students talking and learning about health and fitness.

Michael Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing