One of the great — and maddening — things about kids is that they are not afraid to tell you when you suck. My lesson plan for yesterday definitely sucked, and the kids were pretty enthusiastic about pointing out its failings.
I made it up to them today with a three-pronged lesson on pronouns.
The first part involved identifying pronouns and their antecedents in a newspaper article. Simple, yes, but the kids seemed to catch on quickly, and they did a good job of explaining it to each other when I pushed them to work together.
The second part was an online quiz, which we did on the SMARTboard. It wasn’t my favorite tool I’ve ever used, but some of the kids got into it, and the rest tolerated it pretty well.
The third part was the piece de resistance:
It’s hard to tell from the lousy low-res cell phone photo, but I got a regular Twister mat and used a Sharpie to write a different pronoun on each circle. Then I wrote an S (for “singular”) on each of the circles on the top half of the spinner and a P (for “plural”) on each of the circles on the bottom half. Using the spinner, the referee would give instructions like, “Right hand red singular pronoun” or “Left foot blue plural pronoun.”
The kids had to call out the pronoun on whatever circle they touched, and if anybody got the wrong pronoun, he was out.
Words cannot begin to describe how funny it was to watch those kids tie themselves in knots while learning their pronouns.
Emily
Red Fork Hippie 