I love painting and consider myself an artist, which is why I wanted to incorporate art into one of my classes. I was teaching a Literacy/CLB 1 class, and I thought, what better way to teach them about colours than with crayons? As I proceeded to hand out the boxes of crayons, I noticed something – some of the colours were missing. The needed colours were in other crayon boxes, which were dispersed among the class. There were seven students and four boxes of crayons, so they had to share. I thought this would be strictly a reading exercise; however, it slowly turned into a speaking exercise.
I drew a picture of a backpack on a piece of paper, then drew a pair of scissors, a crayon, a pen, a pencil, a notebook, a ruler and finally an eraser. I gave them each a copy of the drawing and on a white board I wrote, “Colour the ruler yellow, colour the pen blue, colour the notebook purple and so on. Since crayons were missing from some of the boxes, I told the groups to ask the people beside them for the needed colours. I wrote the dialogue on the board so they could properly ask the question. It began with, “Excuse me, do you have a yellow crayon?” and the person would respond with “yes, I do” or “no, I don’t.” If they said, “No, I don’t” they would have to ask another person for that crayon. If they said “Yes, I do” they would take the crayon and say, “Thank you.”
The speaking exercise worked out well, apart from a couple of students skipping over the use of “excuse me” and getting straight to the point of “do you have…” I reminded them the use of excuse me is a polite way of getting someone’s attention and is often used in Canada. Either way this exercise generated quite a bit of interaction, and the learners were having fun doing it.
Not only were they learning colours but also how to request a particular item. I guess my point is don’t be afraid if something is missing from an exercise, perhaps it can be used as a springboard to generate conversation in the class and learn something new. I use board games quite frequently in my class and am always making sure all the pieces are there. In this case, the issue of the missing crayons forced me to think outside of the box, and I was able to cover two skills in one lesson (reading and speaking).
Submit a Comment