Grammar is not always boring!

Hello everyone! Hope everything’s good. It was on Monday 6^th that I taught my second class in Basic English. Let me tell you that before performing, I felt excited because I had put a lot of effort in this class. The content to be taught was there is/ there are, and also prepositions of place. Though the class I developed was just about grammar, I did my best to make it simple, nice and varied. I did not do it in a traditional way.

To start the session, because it was Monday I started with a warm up called “rabbit, arrow, wall” in which the teacher asks students to stand up and make two lines in front of the board; in this opportunity, each team had to choose the character they wanted to be; they could either be a rabbit or arrow or wall. All the team members had to be the same character. Both teams were given 10 seconds to decide what they wanted to be. After 10 seconds both team faced each other and do the respective action. Students really got animated. I really enjoyed the activity. Everybody got fun. I prized the winner group again. To get in matter with the topic, I asked the class a couple of questions so that they got familiarized with a reading called “The house of the future” which was like an introduction to the topic. Here it is the image.

 I proceeded to read the image and made emphasis on the words “there is/there are”. I underlined them and extracted some others examples from the same text. After giving some examples, I continued explaining the negative, and the interrogative form. I could see that students did not have any problems understanding this. I kept on giving even more examples using realia. After giving examples with realia, I projected an image of a house. (This house specifically) 

This image helped me a lot to keep on providing even more examples. Examples such as : There is a tv in the living room. (Affirmative form)

There isn’t a tv in the bathroom. (Negative form)

Is there a tv in the living room? (Interrogative form)

I gave and asked many questions like these above mentioned; thus, the whole class was involved in the explanation (They are clever).

In order to introduce prepositions, I did it along with there is/ there are. I said that if we say that there is something, we have to say where that something is located. “There is a marker” Where? I said and put the marker “on” a desk, so they said “the marker is on the desk”; then, I put it under the desk, and then in my pocket so that they follow the same pattern; I did this just to prepare them to see the preposition. Afterwards, I showed an image containing the majority of prepositions.

I used this image.

 To explain each of them, I used realia again; Even, I put myself as example for prepositions like “in front of”, “next to”, “behind”, and also I put some students, if it was the case, to make the examples even clearer. I noticed the students got the meaning and use of the preposition quickly and with no problem. This made feel satisfied and happy. To make even clearer the use of prepositions, I did use ,again, of the image of the house (the one which is above) to checked if students had gotten what I said; I put an emoticon called “Tiburcio” on that image in different places; then, I located Tiburcio above the roof and asked my class “Where is Tiburcio?” Tiburcio is on the roof, they said. Is Tiburcio on the floor? (With Tiburcio still being on the roof) No, he’s not. He’s on the roof. I did that using all the prepositions as the image allowed me to do it. To close, I showed a video in which all of the prepositions were depicted; I could see the students really enjoyed it. Here I leave the video in case you want to see it. 

In this way, I consider that though it was a grammar explanation class, it allowed me to do develop it in an interactive and creative way. It took me a lot of time to prepare this, but now I can say it was worthy. I am really happy with what I did.