• Granlund
• English

 

You can see the overall aims here.

Below are the aims for the next few lessons.

Content Aim: to learn and use vocab (fruit and veg) and phrases. To begin to notice and understand DO you…?

Thinking competencies / learning strategies: being able to categorize vocab in different ways. Using this (ENV) to describe and recognise (eg a fruit), by making a ‘passport’ of fruits and playing games with it / them.

LESSON 1: Challenge and aim.
In the previous lessons to this one we had been reading Chapter 3 of Yippee! 3, in which the character, Whiz, is in a food shop for the first time and doesn’t know what the foods are.
Aim: Content: to learn group words (parameters) – food, colour, shape, feel (?) and vocabulary associated. To use these in context to describe a fruit or vegetable.
Thinking: to become aware of some of the parameters of fruit and vegetables, leading on to finding more parameters through sorting. To make them reflect and be aware of how they’re learning. Introduce reflective / learning notebooks.

Introduction, pre-tasks

1. We looked at nine pictures of fruit and vegetables on the board (taken from the vocabulary page in the book.)

2. I asked them,’ Do you like..?’ about these foods. Then they had to imagine they are Whiz and I asked, ‘Do you like..?’ The answer is, ‘I don’t know.’  We discussed why? Because Whiz says, ‘I don’t eat food.’
3. They acted out the chapter in pairs to remind themselves of the situation.
4. The characters were in the shop, but now the pupils had to imagine they’re not in the shop any more. Whiz asks them, ‘What’s an apple?’  They have to describe it to him.  ( I explained why it would be important to be able to do this  in general. When speaking a foreign language, before you know lots of words often have to describe them so that other person understands.)
5. So I asked them ‘What can you tell him about an apple?’  They were slow to get started. But then came up with a couple of sentences. I wrote up their suggestions, putting new vocabulary at the side: It’s green or red. It’s a fruit. This is all they could say in English.

Challenge (Step 1)
6. I wrote on the board HOW can you learn to describe food well in English?  With the third group I was best able to sell this, to present this as a challenge and convince them that it’s a very worthwhile thing for them to be able to do. I told them that I’m often stuck when I forget a Finnish word in a shop and have to describe what I’m looking for. One pupil explained that his mum (who’s English) had had to describe a reindeer in Finnish when she couldn’t remember the word, and it was funny. Another pupil said to me, ‘Why don’t you try English?’ Good suggestion! I said that that can work, but their native tongue is Finnish, so it’s not so easy for them when abroad!
It seemed important to have this conversation as they seemed afterwards to be more focussed on what we were doing and why than the other groups had been.
So the challenge was, how can we describe foods well in English? I asked them,’ What don’t you know? What do you need to be able to do this?’  They didn’t know how to react to this question. Someone suggested, ‘ It is..’ and someone suggested more words. I wrote up, WORDS, SENTENCES, A STRATEGY.

Building the stairs (Step 2)
I suggested to them that a strategy to help us with words might be to sort the foods.
7. I had small cards with pictures of the 9 foods from the board. I gave each pair a set of these and asked them to sort the cards into two groups. They quickly came up with fruit and vegetables, though a couple of groups were confused, because they thought there should be three groups – berries too. Only one group came up with colours at this stage.
8. They then sorted a second time, and came up with round, long and oval foods, and big and small foods. I gave them the words in English if they didn’t know them, so eventually we had a 4 lists on the board:
Fruit, vegetable, berry
Blue, green, red
Big, small
Oval, round, long.
We briefly practised the words by acting a bit, and then I asked what each of the lists told us. With a bit of prompting, and starting with the easy one (colour), they seemed to get the idea. So in the end we had four parameters,
TYPE OF FOOD, COLOUR, SIZE and SHAPE.

Trying out the ‘strategy’ (ie using the parameters and new words to help us describe)
1. In groups of four the pupils were then given a brown bag. Each bag had a different food in it. There was a potato, a banana, a carrot and a mandarin orange. They had to keep their own food a secret and had 3 minutes to write as many sentences as they could about it. The other groups would then guess what the food was. They were very enthusiastic about this, and asked for more words too, though I said to use the board and stick to what they know. The potato caused problems – what colour is it actually? Is it big or small? It also turned out to be the most difficult to guess, mostly because they decided to say it was brown, yellow and black (it had black bits in it!).

ENV
9.  The lesson was almost over so I showed them ‘Whiz’s Food Gadget’, which I’d made in advance. It was basically a chart which forms an ENV of the foods, a passport of the foods.  They stuck them in their notebooks and we filled in the parameters of TYPE OF FOOD COLOUR, SHAPE and SIZE. Their homework was to fill in the values, ie information for each of the foods given (blueberries, a strawberry, a carrot and peas). Their extra, voluntary homework was to write about more foods, so that their classmates could guess them next time. They could also try to think of other parameters.

10. I asked if they might have problems with the homework and they thought they might forget the new words. I had made a sheet for them, which they also stuck in their notebooks.
My reflections on this lesson are here.