April 18th to 20th - Greetings - part 2

1st and 2nd grades

I like to expand a topic as long as I can, as long as I feel the students are enjoying and there are activities ideas to explore, even if I get a little late in the schedule. 50 minutes is not enough to create a memory for them, as they easily forget many things we have done in the previous week. When I used to attend tango classes once a week, I noticed that I was like that as well, that I needed the teacher to do a review of the last steps, otherwise it was hard to remember by myself. So, even though I taught only four sentences (Good morning, afternoon, evening and night), I considered it important to have one more class about Greetings, for 1st and 2nd grades only. For the 3rd grade, I considered my class as a review, not an introduction, so I did not repeat this topic.


I repeated the three drawings on the board (sun rising, sun, moon with stars) and pointed to each one while saying "Good morning, afternoon and evening". After that I asked them "How are you?" and it is funny that anything that I say after greeting the students they usually repeat. I repeated the question, they repeated again. With thumbs up or down, I asked "Fine or not good?" to make them realize that it was a conversation. I repeated "Fine or not good?" and some of them said "Fine". So I started to ask one by one "How are you? Fine or not good?". Only two kids in the 2nd grade said "Not good" and I just cared them on the shoulder saying "Oh, Júlia is not good..." (the only thing I could think of). The song I used now had that vocabulary, was shorter and there was no "Good night". 

First, we sang a capella - I sang, doing some gestures and they repeated - with our microphones (pencils, water bottles). I played the song once for them to listen to. We sang a capella one more time and I played the song one more time for them to repeat. The ones who wanted to sing before their classmates in pairs, or small groups did and I explored the rest of the class asking them to continue coloring the activity from last class. I know that while coloring they were not practicing English, but I believe that at this age, by doing that they increase their creativity, coordination and maybe unconsciously, they could remember more the class vocabulary. While they were coloring I used to walk around the class, pointing to their drawings, repeating the names of the colors they were using and sometimes asking them "What color is it?", because I wanted that moment to be associated with English. A few students wanted their drawing to be black and white. I considered it a choice and did not insist them to color. I just said "OK".

I case there was some time left, I repeated the first part of the numbers song:







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