Practicing skills with monster activities

In the previous post I talked about the four types of skills which are: listening, reading, writing and speaking. For that reason, today I would like to show different tasks related to the topic of monsters that will allow us to work on different abilities. Let’s start!

If we use our imagination, we can create a lot of fun activities related to the same theme. For instance, if we want to teach children description and parts of the body or face, we can ask them to draw a monster. But pay attention at this point as it is better if  we do not give them a model because we need them to be creative so each monster can be different. Once all the monsters are finished, we can hook them on the board in order to everyone can see them. I am sure  our pupils will love the idea very much because they will be proud of their creations.

I reckon children have a lot of imagination, for that reason after working the description we could ask children to go to the board to describe their monsters. Through this way we will work on listening and also speaking due to the fact that pupils will have to produce the description of their own monsters and also understand the questions from the teacher related to the topic. For example, one student can say: my monster has got three eyes, it has got four legs and one big mouth,… and so on. In addition, it can be the teacher who asks questions like: How many monsters have two heads? Or who’s picture has one ear? and children have a look for it. For me the key is that students can use the same vocabulary in different activities because they will learn it, but with a dynamic method and almost without realizing it.

There is a great diversity of activities!! For example, another one we can do is to ask children in pairs to draw the body shape of each other and then, they can draw and paint inside of the shape. I’m pretty confident kids will like it because they can not only learn the names of different parts, but also measure their shapes with their hands or feet. For instance: I am ten hands tall or I am seven feet tall and they can compare measures. Through this activity we will be working  listening and speaking skills because the teacher will go around asking what are they drawing. Therefore, they will have to be able to express the parts of the body they are drawing or painting. In addition, we will be practicing Maths too. I would like to do this activity with my future students when I start working in a school as I believe it is a fulfilling activity.

I remember when I was in third grade I learned the parts of the body with a song. I learned them at the age of 8 for the reason that in my school, we started English at six, but now that children begin English at P-3 we can do these activities and the song in first grade. Through the melody  they will practice listening.

As you have seen, we can use many resources from a single topic, if we have in mind what we want students to learn. In this post, I have shown you some ideas, but  we could use a lot of other materials as for example a puzzle with the parts of the body, a story, a poem, among others. Furthermore, as children grow, the difficulty of activities need to be increased. For example, if in second or third grade they already know the parts of the body we can play the following game with all the class to practice actions associated with body areas. To join it children have to form groups of 4 or 5 students and by turns they will roll the die and depending on the color that comes out, teacher will read a card with an action and they should imitate it. If they do well they have a point and so on until the teacher finishes the game. Next, the points are counted and the team with more points will be the winner.

I hope you like it and see you in the next post!!