29th of January - the animal game

Today's lesson was all about the animals that the kids made fact sheet about. I put them all together on a table chart without sorting them in any way.

At the beginning of the lesson I started with the next topic in the question booklet although I think that I would not include this in this "question workshop" anymore if I did it again. But now it's in there and I wrote the following scrambled sentences at the blackboard.

like / you / pizza / do

from / are / Germany / you

I asked the kids to close their eyes show me with their fingers, witch word the sentence would start with, and then, and then, and then... For the first sentence it was the "4", "2", "1", and "3" and for the second the "2", "4", "1", and "3". They all got it right and I let two kids explain why that was the case and they answered both with decent explanation that the question started with the verb to do or the auxiliary verb.

Then we came to the active and fun part of the lesson. I handed out those table charts. The sheets were printed on the front and back with the same table. I also distributed a little paper with each animals name so that each kid got an animal that the others didn't know (not the animal they are having their presentation on). And I showed them some chunks I wrote at the blackboard.

Are you - "as large as"/"larger than"/"smaller than"
Do you weigh - "as much as"/"more than"/"less than"
Are you - "as fast as"/"faster than"/"slower than"
Do you live - "as long as"/"longer than"/ "less long than"

At the blackboard I had the three examples underneath each other and the "are you/do you..." in front of it. With these chunks I sent them through the classroom with their table charts to find out what animals the others were. The fasted to find out all the names could ring the bell. They were all really motivated asking their classmates many questions and it was fun walking through the classroom listening.

The only problem was, that they didn't get finished at the same time and sometimes had to wait a little till they found the next partner to ask questions but they dealt with that just fine and made sure that they went to the next available person as soon as possible since they wanted to be the first to find them all.

So at the end of this lesson each child had actively used questions lots of times and they all got the highest score on their "flag-list".

On Monday I planned to play the same game again but with them imagine that they had pets so the had to use the 3rd person singular to ask about instead of the second but I felt soooo bad that I had to stay home. So, I'll do this lesson on Thursday. I'll think about putting them in a rotating circle and giving them a certain amount of time they had with each partner to find out what he was. But then I'd have the same problem with the fast ones that they have to wait... And it kind of regulated itself so I might just leave it open again. I'll have to think about that again.