No, it’s my computer!

This week we’re working on months with 3rd and 4th grade.

We started out by putting the month cards in the right order. with 4th grade I used half of the memory set, and for 3rd grade I printed an extra set of a4 month flashcards (after the lesson the girls took those to colour). It went quite well, because the month names are quite similar in Russian and English.

After that we sang the month song a couple of times. I chose the one by Harry Kindergarten Music, because it was among the few that are not done in mousey voices and because it actually presents the months in a rhythmical manner. I also liked the graphics and the melody in the song by Howcast, but I didn’t like the way the actual month words were presented (it gets a little tiresome when there’s no rhythm to them and they are just sort of listed). Still, I may use it next lesson for some quick revision.

Then we practiced recognising the words in writing and pronouncing them, and after that we did a few rounds of the memory game (the classic with turning cards over and finding pairs). This time I used a set of colouring pages from Doodle Art Alley to make the (flash)cards.

3rd grade has almost mastered the Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe rhyme by now, so we are more or less saying it in chorus (4th grade is pretty good at it too, but they’re not as much into counting rhymes in general). A. even attempted to do it herself, but everyone else said that it’s still the teacher who does the picking. In any case, I guess we’ll be using a new rhyme soon, I just need to find one that’s not too evil.

It also seems like everyone has mastered “It’s your/my turn” by now. In 4th grade everyone uses it regularly, and in 3rd grade E. was trying to conduct the game today by saying “It’s your turn” to each player when their turn arrived. Everyone also seems to have a good understanding of “Whose turn is it now?” and “Is it my/your/(insert name)’s turn?”, though I haven’t noticed anyone using these so far.

With 4th grade we finished class by doing an unscrambling worksheet (as usual I spent quite a while worrying whether we should do it or not, and whether it would be too easy or boring or something else, but it worked out very well, and it was great to see D. engaged to his full). I decided to use the version without the hints, but I left our memory cards out on the desks, and we ended up using them as reference to verify the spelling. I think, this is actually a much more communication-provoking method than just typing the month words onto the worksheets, and in fact, today F. even asked “Where is November?” while looking for the right card, which was really cool, partly because he chose* to ask the question in English, partly because we haven’t specifically worked with Wh- questions yet, most probably he just caught me ranting things like “Where’s my computer/phone/pencil?” on numerous occasions.

Another great communicative moment today was when at the beginning at the lesson I opened the song video for playback, and D. started pressing spacebar to turn it on. I said something like “Please don’t, D., this is my computer”, to which he answered “No, it’s my computer”. And whatever I may think about other people touching my computer without permission (which I actually don’t see in black and white either, at least in a very limited context of a language classroom when it’s actually used as a means of non-verbal communication), hearing my students making jokes in English is amazing. To me it’s actually a very strong indicator of the fact that the language acquisition process is going in the right direction, and that the language is actually being put to real use.  Another great thing about this is, that I’ve actually been noticing 4th grade using “it’s” quite a lot, which is amazing, as it is not a directly obvious structure, and teaching it in the traditional way usually takes a lot of reminding and pointing out and explaining (and explaining all over and over again). In general, it really was a great day.

*Actually, choose may not quite be the right word here, the cool thing is, it’s sort of happening automatically, English is gradually becoming part of their communicative system, and I love seeing this, because even though I do know a lot about the mechanics behind that, it still feels like magic.