Today we dove into a unit on families.  We started out with students shouting out every family word they could think of and putting on a giant list on the board.  We were definitely not starting from square one  at the beginning of this lesson!  They know a lot of this vocabulary already.

We started out the unit by studying President Obama’s family, using them as models of the vocabulary (husband, father, son, grandson, step-son, etc.) and pretexts for grammar practice (“Who’s she?”  “She’s President Obama’s daughter.”). 

It’s really helping them sort out the meaning of possessive sentences.  With a sentence like, He is her husband , it’s pretty easy to get confused about whether the subject is the man or the woman.  Talking about well-known, interesting people helped make it less abstract.

After class one of the students stayed just a minute late.  He asked me, “You like mathematics?”  I said so-so, and asked why.  He handed me a scrap of paper and said, “What after?”  The paper said 2, 6, 42, 1806.  As I read it, he refined his question, “What is next in sequence?”  He had stayed after to give me a math puzzle! 

I have no idea what his motivation was for doing this, but it made me happy. I think it because I felt that I was (whether this was his intention or not) being recognized as a whole person with varied interests, not just a teacher-robot of basic English.  I wonder if that’s how students feel when we break free of the grammar and textbooks and delve into what’s interesting to them.

Have you completed the math sequence yet?