Haven’t blogged much since beginning of term so here goes…
I’ve been working on a unit about animals with S1 since we came back to school. I discovered http://www.africanimo.com/ last year. It is great for teaching reading skills – after demonstrating with Nile crocodile on the Smartboard, highlighters are wonderful for this – class divided into pairs with a print out of one of the other animals. They hightlighted high frequency words and cognates – they were challenged to find at least 10 facts from the text, we also discussed that although our own general knowledge could aid comprehension, we had to check that anything we thought we knew was actually mentioned in the text.
The class coped with this well, delighted to be able to understand an authentic passage and almost all groups found the required 10 facts with one group coming up with an amazing 20 – facts covered everything from the gestation period of elephants and ostriches to how much meat lions eat in a day. At the end of the period everyone went to have a look at everyone else’s facts and had to have three ready to tell me as their “ticket out the door”
It’s when I’m doing this kind of task that I’m reminded of the quote from HMiE “let’s do something fun today, let’s do something difficult”
This is a great idea. I shall try it with my trainees! BTW I have found out some very interesting information on the reproductive organs of the hyena! Would like to hear you explain that one to S1!
I’m sure with a bit of time S1 would be prepared to explain them to me!
I use bzzzspeek.com and get the kids to guess phonetically how animal sounds in French are spelled. I will use this as a lesson next week when I teach reading comprehension before our graduation exam! Merci beaucoup!