Meet my family 1

The immediate universe of a primary school child is quite limited: it is centered around their families, their schools and their hobbies. The vocabulary connected to these is probably part of the very first set of EFL lessons. This is a good-enough reason to begin this new blogging series with a lesson dedicated to the family.

An interactive way to teach the vocabulary items about families is by using an app that allows you to create flashcards for your students. These can be used either as study sets or to play vocabulary games. One such app is Quizlet. It has both a free and a paid version. The free version allows you to create the sets with pre-set images while in the paid version you can add your own images and you can record your own text. 

The flashcards are double sided, one in English and one in Romanian. The images appear on the explanation side of the card, which is the "Romanian" version. Both sides of the card benefit from an automated pronunciation of the word. However, in the paid version of the app, you can record your own pronunciation or you can do the recording in class. Having your older students participate in such an activity can also be a lot of fun because, like me, you might be teaching many pairs of siblings and the younger students can recognize their brother's or sister's voice in the recording.  

Here's a link to a study set using family words. For this study set, the voice-over is the one provided by the app. The imagines for the study set were taken from a family tree that one of my students presented in class. Family trees will be the very topic of the next blog post. 

In the link to the learning feature of this app, there is a multiple-choice activity that allows the student to choose the correct answer for each card.

I hope you've enjoyed this study set. Give me some feedback in the comments section on how the lesson went if you decided to use this lesson suggestion. Also, tell more about how you teach family words to your students.