Preperation Unit 1

I'm working with the teaching material called "Young World 4" but I will only cover parts of it. I'll take out at least one text out of a unit and surely cover the grammatical issues.

I have to anticipate something of my thesis that I will define more precisely later on. I truly believe, that if you know the exact meaning of every single word in a text that you hear over and over and over again, you will memorise these words and grammatical structures without actually studying it. Just think of songs that you know the text of...

So I want to work with songs, audio books and one or a few texts out of each "Young World" unit that I have on the CD that comes with it. First of all I need to find the good text of each unit. Texts I can work with and text that cover the most important issues of the unit.

So, Unit 1 in the book is about the way we live. First there are four texts about four different families and the food they eat. I looked up the texts and searched them for the words in the vocabulary list. The text that covers the most vocabulary and also the grammar is the one about the shopping list for a school camp. Even better: This is a dialogue so I can have the kids to do role plays with it once the know it really well.

First I thought about how I can get them to learn the whole vocabulary even if we don't work with all the material but honestly, there are so many words in there, that are not even useful. I'm sure that they learn more, if they internalise lots of other word that I will cover with different song lyrics, audio books and so on, so I'll make use of my right to leave out parts of the vocabulary and in return expect them to know other words (from songs for example)...

So for Unit 1 I will work with the text "Shopping for a school camp" which is track 9 on the CD.
This text I will introduce to the class at the very beginning of the school term and then switch to a song or a short story. Their only homework for English will be to listen to this one text over and over again. Then after 2 weeks of "passive listening" (by Vera F. Birkenbihl => will be explained more precisely) the kids will be ready to work and play with this text.