Thursday, April 27, 2006

Bright ideas please

DarlingDaughter has now received outline details of the school where she will be based, though it's not clear what age group she will be teaching. She has a short induction programme when she arrives in Bankok, but there seems to be an assumption that she will come laden with a plethora of games, songs and ingenious ways to encourage her pupils to get to grips with our mad, mad language. I suspect, from the way she deals with small children generally, that she will actually take to this like a duck to water, but she is currently in free-fall panic mode (now that we've discounted the White Slaver option, being a disaster in the classroom is at the top of her heap of terrors) and convinced she'll not be able to think of anything. So, my dearest blogging friends, may I ask you to join in a coroporate brainstorm...What songs, games or stories would you suggest as routes to painless learning.
So far, I'm thinking "Head, shoulders, knees and toes" and "Put your finger on your nose" for body parts, "Old Macdonald" for animals, "Sing a Rainbow" etc....and games along the lines of "I unpacked my grandmother's trunk", a few tongue twisters and maybe they could make their own Happy Families cards.
We have till Tuesday to boost L's confidence...all contributions gratefully received.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I Spy!?

Hope it will all be a great success.

Anonymous said...

Songs etc weren't up A's atreet, but we went to Staples and bought large quantities of stickers, stars an "fun stuff" generally, which went down really well with all the age groups he taught and didn't take up much room in the luggage.

Chelley said...

How about the game where you put out a load of simple objects and then take one away so they have to guess what's missing (the repetition would help the words to stick). An alternative is using bright cut-out magazine pictures instead of objects: eg cat, dog, bus etc! Neither needs to take up too much suitcase space.

Anonymous said...

I went to the chinese laundry (there are possibly more politically correct versions of this - how about I went to the corner shop) and I bought......
Always goes down well with the 9-12 year olds when T does it.

Pink Shoes said...

Hmmm... There's a fun little game that we call 2 Truths and a Lie ... Students share three statements, two of which are true and one of which is not. Others then try to guess which one is not true.
Games that require using words within certain categories -- food, animals, etc -- that start with the same letter as your name, ie, My name is Pink Shoes and I like Pizza and Penguins." The other students can then repeat them back, or come up with new ones.