Here's part two of the blog posts about lexis related to family words.
This post focusses on set phrases that are used when we introduce family members. As teachers, we introduce such phrases to our students from the very title of the lesson: Meet my family.
One of the textbooks we use in our school includes an activity in which family members are presented as part of a family tree. The image below is taken from Team Together 2.
As a follow-up on this activity, I ask my students to make their own family trees. Projects that are personal to students are much more meaningful to them. They get involved in them with greater ease and the results are longer-lasting.
Beforehand, I teach them how to introduce each one of their family members:
This is my....
His name is...
Her name is...
Below, you can find an exercise to use with your students or with your child to practice the use of his versus her.
His or Her - exercise by Maria Bob
Once students understand how to use these pronouns, they present their work to the class. Here are some examples of my students work.
To keep the other students in class engaged throughout their classmates' presentations, together with them, I came up with a peer assessment system. They wrote a simple scoring grid at the end of their notebooks and assigned points to their mates during the presentations.
You can infer from the photo above, that three points were awarded to those who presented in English. This photo was randomly taken from a student's notebook.
At the end of the presentation session, my second grade students mentioned (in Romanian) the following:
- "I enjoyed listening to my classmates' presentations because I met their families." (V.M)
- "I liked my classmates drawings. They were so different." (I.L.)
- "All my classmates spoke in English." (A.P.)
- "My classmates were braver than in the previous presentation." (D.P.)
As you can imagine, things were not as short and sweet in class since all students wanted to give feedback to their classmates and read their list of grades. However, with a bit of practice, during the second and third rounds of the presentations, their feedback became more relevant and they became aware of the time restrictions that such an activity imposes.
If you decide to try out with your class or with your children this type of activities, please let me know how it goes for you in a comment.
Disclaimer: The activities carried out in class are inspired by suggestions from the textbooks used with the students. All photos, videos and/or voice recordings of students and/or of students' work are published with their parents' explicit permission. Other photos, videos and/or voice recording come from websites that allow embedding in personal or professional blogs, either for free or based on a subscription. These materials are mostly self-produced, using templates provided on these particular websites or apps and are cited accordingly. The materials that do not come from any of the above mentioned sources will be cited accordingly. You cannot copy and/or distribute any of the materials from this blog without the author's written consent.
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