One of my favorite books to teach is There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly. It is just so ridiculously funny that it's never long before even my "coolest" students are giggling and coughing to try and cover up their amusement. Over the years I've found, made, and developed several different activities to go along with our lessons, culminating in a week of silly reading and fun. Teaching newly arrived ESL students means that vocabulary and basic comprehension are always my number one priority. In order to help with that we always start our week discussing the key vocabulary from the book and doing matching activities. The activity packet I developed also includes rhyming cards and sequencing sentences. A great retelling activity can be found at The Thoughtful Spot Daycare. Angie Kobolt suggests using a flip lid trash can to make an old lady. I purchased a standard trash can from Amazon (would you believe I couldn't find one in stores?) and the rest of the supplies all came from Dollar Tree. I made the hair by using the strings from a mop and a hot glue gun. I then evened it all up by giving her a quick hair cut, including making the short bangs in front (I will NOT be quitting teaching for cosmetology any time soon!) A quick circle of hot glue and the hat was in place to hide the mess on top, a couple of googly eyes, and my old lady was ready to eat. One tip: I glued the hat all the way around, if I were doing it again, I would glue only the front and the back, the parts on the flip lid. I believe it would swing better that way. All of the animals were purchased at the Dollar Store or garage sales, and I just need to find a fly (I use a paper picture for now) and I'm ready to go! The best part of this activity? All the others fit inside the trash can for easy storage and access when it's time to teach! The next activity I like to do comes from Tammy Dube at Housing A Forrest. I first saw it on Pinterest (of course), but it is a lot of fun and great spelling practice. Tammy suggests using an empty Mrs. Butterworth's syrup container (thanks, Mom!), short pieces of pipe cleaner, and alphabet beads to spell out the names of the animals and "feed" them to the old lady by putting them into the top of the syrup container. My kids enjoyed this activity so much they begged me to let them do other words as well. Our poor old lady ended up eating every one of my students, as well as their academic vocabulary words for the week, and a few other more, ahem, interesting words (middle school boys, what am I going to do with them?). I've just recently found another retelling activity that I'd like to make, though I'm still working on obtaining the materials and thinking about the best way to go about it. It comes from Laura Marschel at Lalymom. Laura suggests using a wipe box to make the old lady and printing pictures and words on stickers that are stuck on the top of milk jug lids to feed her. I love the idea, and have plenty of lids (thanks to my mom and sister-in-law indulging my weird creative requests), but need to come up with a few wipe boxes. The other thought I had was to use disinfecting wipe containers instead. I think the taller tubes would make a more convincing body and I'm going to try and talk my sewing mother into making a couple of tube dresses and aprons to dress her up a bit. The idea of printing the pictures and words on stickers is genius--no glue mess! Well, I'm off to ponder this newest idea and see if I can figure out the best way to make it happen....OK, so I'm really just procrastinating working on the math vocabulary curriculum for next year, but what do you expect? I'm a language teacher who just pretends to teach math! |
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AuthorI've been teaching since 2000 and love what I do! Archives
May 2018
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