30th of October 2015 - finally back!!! (much and many)

Oh I was so happy to finally be back. This was the first English lesson after the holiday (and my sickness) and it was an amazing lesson! The double lesson was about "how much" and "how many" and when to use which.

Since I don't like the expression "countable" and "uncountable" at all (because are stars really countable?) I wanted the kids to make up the rule themselves and that's how the lesson was:

First we welcomed our guest, the president of the "Schulpflege" - so basically my boss, with our good morning conversation just with the difference that this time the kids told him good morning and asked him how he was today and all that with no preparation. They just definitely had initialised "my part" by hearing it so often that they could easily adapt it to this new situation.

Then I asked them NOT to take out their stuff yet and just told them to speak along this text they had listened to passively just as much as they could... I read the text out loud and pretty much the whole class was speaking along pretty much the whole text and this after quite a long time without listening to it.

Then I went to the blackboard and wrote "how many" on one part of the blackboard and "how much" on an other. I told them that they have heard and read these two expressions several times in this text and asked if they could recall sentences which had these word in.

(They still had no text in front of them!!!) Well half the class raised their hand immediately but I waited a few more seconds until ALL of them had thought of a phrase: So I asked a weaker girl and she answered "How much spaghetti do we need for 20 people?" (WOW!) So I made her a compliment and wrote spaghetti on the "how much"- blackboard. - Another boy said: "how many tomatoes we put in the sauce" and the next said "how many grams or kilos was that?" and so on and so on. I didn't have to add ANYTHING! They found the onions, salt and pepper, Parmesan cheese. So this was my blackboard:

"how many"
 tomatoes, onions, grams, kilos, packs

"how much"
spaghetti, cheese (which I accidentally spelled chees - and one guy told me that there an "e" missing :-)), salt, pepper


So I asked them, if they could think of a rule to know, when to use which. What most of them saw right away was that the "many" words were in the plural form and the "much" words in the singular. Fantastic, I haven't even thought about this myself. They formulated this aspect in different ways (always ends with a "s" etc) but they couldn't think of counting the objects yet. I gave them more examples like skin, fingers, sand and books but it still didn't click. So I asked a concrete question:

If I asked you: "How many books are there in the shelf" what would you do to find out? I let them think about this for a moment and then they told me, that they would go to the shelf and COUNT the books. And if I ask you "How many tomatoes are there on this desk" - they would count them. So I asked this question with all countable nouns we talked about. Then I asked,  what they would do if I asked how much air there is in this room or how much water in the lake or how much sand the beach. They looked a little puzzled but agreed that the could not really count water nor air nor sand.

So I wrote the words "countable" on the "many"-side and "uncountable" on the "much"-side.

One girl said, that she could count the sand grains (one boy added "or pillars of sand like in the song") and this perfectly lead us to the question, how to make UNCOUNTABLE things countable using the examples of the text. I asked how Betty, Tom and Oliver knew how much spaghetti they had to buy if spaghetti was uncountable? Or how much spices or how much salt and pepper... They all knew it by heart: 4 packs of spaghetti, one glass jar of spices, one pack of salt and pepper...

I gave them some more examples like the ones in the "Young World Pupil's Book" but some of them are a bit confusing. I mean I can count the sun. There is one! But how much sun will cause cancer? So I added some myself like sunshine. For meat I added steaks. And I asked about the stars... About half the class though that stars were uncountable and they are so right but in our case stars are countable. I tried to explain them that if they could start counting like "one star, two stars and MANY more" we say it's countable. Same thing for the Autumn leaves in the forest, we'll never be able to count them all but we can still say "one leaf, two leaves and MANY more"

I handed out an ABC list with with two colons. One for "many" and one for "much" and I asked them read through page 4 of there decoded text and make a preparation for their "part of speech test" (Wortartentest) this afternoon because guess what: If a word is a noun in German, what part of speech is it in English? It a noun too. I chose the last page since there are about as many uncountable nouns as countable nouns and it's not too long. So they highlighted all the nouns and wrote them on the right side of their list. In the meantime I went to "my boss" and the first question he asked me was how they knew this whole "shopping for a school camp" text by heart. I showed him the decoded text and said that we had clarified all the vocabulary and the kids had passively listened to it at home while doing something different. He was very impressed :-)


So the bell was about to ring and I wanted to the kids to compare their solution to their neighbour's and if they had different results they should ask me. One question was the dinner which can be countable or uncountable but with a change of meaning. "I cook dinner 3 times a week" or "I usually don't each much dinner"...

So the bell rang and I let them take a brake and had a conversation with my boss. He seams to have liked this lesson and said he was going to send me an e-mail.

After the break I handed out the "Young World Activity Books" for the first time this year and I asked them to do Exercise 12 on page 7 and the ones who were finished could start with 13. They did so well. From having the text initialised so deeply they could easily fill in the caps and the whole shopping list without listening to the text again.

After having been sitting for such a long time I thought it was time to get them moving so I took them outside with the aim to work in pairs and find at least six things on the school yard which they could ask a question about - at least two countable and at least two uncountable. They had to write down the questions and the answers in their note books.

I realised that they had no idea how to formulate questions like "How many stones are there under the tree" or "How much rubbish is there in the bin" but I just let them try... In the next lesson on Monday I will put some more chunks on the wall and they will be writing those sentences again in a correct form. But they really came up with some real good thing. And just about at the end of the lesson they had all found six or (mostly) more things that they could formulate questions with.