As I posted Part I - Would You Come to My Morning Class?, one of my teaching English projects here in Bangkok, Thailand. It's time for Part II of the day I teach my students about Hobbies and free time. That day's class was mostly about teaching grammar and vocabulary, moreover, and I quoted myself "The afternoon, when things would get louder, messier but most important... more fun!". I invited you guys to see if I lived up to that.
In This post I'll share with you how I run the class and also share a bit about how and why I use these methods. If you find it interesting, please feel free to try it out in your own class. Or if you have any questions, I'm glad to answer them down below in the comment section.
These are the slides we used that day.
The objectives of that day are
- (1) the students know and learn about themselves,
- (2) They can tell others about their hobbies, their likes and dislikes and
- (3) preferably able to talk about their friends' hobbies, likes, and dislikes.
Moreover, they'll have to understand the grammatical notes within these sentences and use them correctly.
- What do you like to do in your free time?
- In my free time I like Ving/to Vinf.
- What does he/she like to do in his/her free time?
- She/He likes Ving/to Vinf.
The first thing I did, as a main teacher and organizer of this project, was gather my team and give them a briefing of today's sequence and assign who was gonna be responsible for what. And at the same time having my lunch. lol (Ps. Here that I gave everybody sunglasses, I thought we look cool like a gang meeting. lol)
Let's begin our afternoon vocabulary session! At precisely one o'clock (13.00), we started our class by using an energizing game, asking "What's your hobby?". Everybody was sitting in a pair and told the other person about their hobby.
Not only that, Each pair has to discuss the pros and cons of each other's hobby. I find this activity helps them relax and get more loose about today's topic.
In this exercise, I let them say in both Thai and English however they want, with no pressure, so they get to warm up to others, which works out nicely as I hoped.
Then I instructed 3-4 pairs to get into bigger groups, then they went around the group, asked "What's your hobby?" and answered "My hobby is ..." This time only English is allowed.
Then they had to write down the vocabulary about hobbies and remember the translation.
When every group finished with their writing, they were asked to present to the class and then my team and I would write the vocabulary down on the board.
Here I wanna say writing board tips: The key here is not just to write the words down, but it would actually help tremendously if you could `group´ the words into categories. Then connect the words to a mind map. And trust me, the students would have SO MUCH easier time to understand and reel the words in (their brains, even).
Other than the vocabulary from the students, we also prepared a set of vocabulary, some of which are new. These are some vocabulary slides we use.
I used Canva for the template and I find it such an easy way to make presentable and very cute slides. It's so useful how Canva provides tons of designs, which can be adaptable and fit to every and any occasion.
Here you can also see that in my slides, I also group the words to help them learn more effectively.
I told the students that if there are new and different words from their group, they'll be jotting them down in the notebooks.
And that's for the vocabulary session for this post, which seems like I have to save the "activity" part for later, yet again. that I don't keep this one post for too long.
I hope you guys can see how our class has gone so far and (if you want) find some tips that can be useful for your classroom. As of today thank you for stopping by and remember to...
stay open for new learning!
Khob khun kaa,
Nomnomnoodle 🍜