During my first experience teaching ESL at Red Cedar Elementary School this semester, we planned an activity with the kids in which they picked an action word that started with the same letter as their first name and an action to go along with it. I, for example, was "jogging Jenna". The purpose of this activity was to get to know the names of the children in our group and to have them get to know each other as well as to teach them about verbs and letters of the alphabet. While playing the game, there were several things that I took notice of.
To start, although there seemed to be a pretty wide variety of age ranges within our group, when we asked the students who knew what a verb was, none of the students said anything. This could be interpreted in two ways- either the children truly did not have knowledge of what a verb was or forgot what it was, or the students were just feeling uncomfortable in a new situation. Either way, we took this opportunity to explain what a verb was and to use terms that they could understand in order to help them to define it.
When we were playing the game, it was obvious that there were still students who were not entirely sure about the concept of verbs. There were students who needed help coming up with a word. They understood that they were supposed to come up with an action, but something was stopping them from being able to produce or come up with a word.
One student in particular struggled with the concept of the verb starting with the first letter of his name and what a verb was in general. His name started with an S, but he kept saying "karate". It was clear that he enjoyed karate, but "karate" itself is not a verb, nor does it start with the letter "s". We were running out of time, but had we had more time, we would have taken more time to correct the boy's mistake.
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