Context:

 ¦Private classes of English;

 ¦A group of 6 children aged 5-6

 ¦Children attend the lessons once a week for 1h

1. Lesson / task description - before

TA aims : to teach SS grouping elements according to certain parameters (positive, negative, neutral emotions and more or less positive, negative), to check if the ss are able to exclude an element and explain why (we’ve been working on sorting for a month)

In terms of subject matter: repeat (learn) emotional vocabulary

 Materials I am going to use:

-  prepared cards with emotions and three images of positive, negative and neutral smileys

Tasks I am going to use: 1. Take one card with an emotion on it and put it accordingly to a + - or neutral smiley. 2.Range emotion from less to more expressed ones inside the emotional groups (3-4 cards). 3. Odd one card out explaining why is it odd.

2. Lesson / task description

Procedures: First I told children that we are going to play a game. They have to run to me one by one, choose a card and put it below the correspondent smiley attached to the wall. To put the process of running under control I asked to come a boy, wearing green socks first, a girl wearing a skirt second and so on. When the cards were below the smileys, we discussed what are positive, negative and neutral emotions. Then I asked were the cards arranged correctly. There was one misplacement and the children identified it with a little help from my side (I told that there should be three cards under each smiley. There were 4 under positive and 2 under neutral smileys,  I suggested them to rethink the grouping. Finally someone found the odd card within the positive group and added it to neutral).

With 5 year olds I stopped here, but with 6 year olds I continued giving them more challenge. I asked them to regroup the cards within each group according to strength – more positive -  less positive, more negative – less negative. I was stuck with the neutral emotions – could they be more or less neutral?  Nevertheless I asked my SS to range neutral emotions as well. One boy didn’t cope with the task. My guess is that he didn’t get the task. The other (3 children) got the idea and produced a grouping. Then I asked to odd each card out. Children were already tired, so we made this activity together, I suggested more, then they,  I think I should have stopped before this task, but I wanted to know were they able to cope. Two children could.

Then we switched to a different activity, After a while I came back to our sorting tasks, (summarizing phase), asking what did we do, what did we do first and then and did they like the activity.

Home work (a worksheet from PASS Universal activities cards)– to draw one positive, one negative and one neutral emotion to the train window. The next lesson we will start with  naming emotions and proving if the match is the correct or not.

3. Overall reflection on the lesson / task

Aim aspect: I clearly saw, that it was easy to identify negative emotions. Neutral emotions (picture of concentration, of thinking process, of a bored bear) were more difficult to sort. And only after the task I thought was it appropriate to sort neutral emotions according to the level of strength.

This time I put attention to dozing of challenge. I put maximum challenge to the elder students and less challenge to the younger ones.