Feelings

Details
Written by Alenka Mose
Parent Category: English
Category: English before 7
Created: 05 March 2011

1st  lesson plan on feelings for preschoolers and minis (age 3 and age 5,6)

Feelings: How are you?
Methods:  thinking approach, song
Material:
thinking approach Lexical Tasks /Angry vampire - happy dog /modified
Genki English material (sheets, song)
Aim: to understand feelings from different points of view, to learn vocabulary of basic feelings, to know how to ask How are you in English.

1. Teachers asks how children are
2.  Introduces pictures from the blackboard and tells them to children with gestures.
Repeating by children asking the question ‘How are you’ and teacher answering them in English. They have to come to the board and show the feeling described.
Mini group (3, 4 years old)
There were 2 boxes. One box has pictures of characters  (a teacher, a dog, a tree, a king), other a feeling (several pictures of same character, it feels cold, tired, happy, sad). They picked one feeling/ character and I asked them questions. At first what it was and then: if it that character could feel, for example happy, when could he feel happy, why could he feel happy, what could have happened that the character would feel happy …)
4. Teaching children a song,
5.  Singing the song with the music.
At first I had two separate plans for children of the age 3,4 and those of the age 5, 6.  But seeing the task was too difficult for the small ones, I made the same lesson with the older ones.

Comments  

# Alexander Sokol 2011-03-06 17:07
Alenka, what exactly was difficult for the little ones? How did you go about it? Did it work better with the older kids? And, again, it'd be interesting to see where you see you focused on thinking. If you could connect it with the steps of the thinking task framework, it'd be perfect.
# Alenka Moze 2011-03-22 16:37
The little ones had great diffiulties with empathy. They could not match a teacher, for example, and a feeling of tireness. They could not imagine that a teacher could be tired or that a teacher would be ever feeling sad. I tried to introduce some hints, but realized I was making the thinking for them, which wasn't really useful. I was quite amazed just how impossible it was to imagine such things ... I think they just could not match two separate pictures in their mind. Next time I tried to improve it. I brought pictures, where there were characters already expressing the feelings (hungry dogs, happy dolphins, tired teachers ... )and it went far better! They were very inventive in their thinking about the reasons for the expressed feelings.
The older kids were very inventive in the first lesson. Some just came up with stories and could go on talking. I think that is an example of developping thinking skills. But it was the opposite thing with the second lesson (I think they were just having a very bad day and I could not even start ...)
You were asking for the steps of the thinking task framewotk. ... well, I hope that the first part, the introduction of the pictures and asking about all the possible reasons to what have happened would be - giving room for thinking. I tried to encourage each to think of possibilities.
The step building part of the framework would be sub questions to every statement they made. the last part ... that - I am not sure of.
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