My Body: teaching ES students about their parts

Maria Filippone

OBJECTIVES:

PROCEDURE:

Beginning (5 minutes):

ALT: "Okay everyone, let's begin English class. Please stand-up.

Good Morning Everyone."

Kids: "Good Morning Maria."

I tend to do a warm-up total response type activity with the first through second or third grade kids first thing. From the first class I teach this by doing and most of them are accustomed to it from kindergarten at this point.

ALT: "Let's stretch."

We use words like up, down, left, right, turn,... and just move around. I have the kids repeat the words as they do the action. I tend to lull them into a false sense of comfort with the whole Up, Down, Up, Down,... and then BAM! Turn or some such.

With fourth graders and potentially the third graders we do something more phonics related instead. Keeping it fun by making strange noises instead of jumping around. There will be plenty of jumping around later.

Word Presentation (2 minutes):

Introduce the words: head, shoulders, knees and toes.

Use pictures and pointing and have the kids stand up and do that little dance.

I tend to teach hands and feet as well because I think they are more functional parts of the body to learn in English. (Later on in the school year I play twister with the third or fourth graders combining our expert knowledge of positional words left and right, our astounding control over the color words red, yellow, blue and green, and our grizzly prowess over the body words hand and foot.)

First Activity (15 to 20 minutes):

Hospital Tag.

Using gestures and the homeroom teacher we demonstrate hospital tag. The person who is IT will go around tagging others on the body parts we have learned. They must say the correct body part when tagging their classmates. Once a part of yours is tagged you must use one hand to cover that part, presumably from bleeding uncontrollably, the student then runs around with their hand on the tagged part of themselves. Second time they get tagged the same thing happens. Now kids are running (hobbling) around with one hand on their knee and one on their head, or one hand on their shoulder and one on their toes, etc... The third time they get tagged they drop to the floor and die a theatric death, thrashing and howling are encouraged. (For those of you that feel the hangman dilemma might come into play here you can always opt out of the third tag clause and stop the game to switch IT and simultaneously heal everyone. Sometimes I run variant of having a healer. Or have the students regroup and tell me "How many times were you tagged?" It all depends on the level of your class and their and your willingness to expand on things.) We play the game a handful of times. Each time there is a new IT and after a couple times we stop, repeat the vocabulary, then start up again. Each iteration of the game only runs three or so minutes.

Word Presentation (3 minutes):

Now they pretty much have a handle on major body parts because for whatever reason there are some words that these kids know in English and some that you think they would know that they never get exposed to. I present the finer points of the face now via pointing and pictures: eyes, ears, mouth and nose (to continue the prior rhyme) sometimes using face and hair.

Second Activity (15 to 20 minutes):

Make a Face (first and second graders):

I have magnetized cutouts of all the pieces of the face and a blank face. I pull out these pieces and place them on the board. Typically I have one set for every seven or so kids. Typically the kids think I am putting an egg on the board. Long story short we make a face. Each group will stand by the blackboard and one member will put on a blindfold. They will be given a piece of the face and told what it is in English. The rest of the kids (using words we know from our ritual beginning of class stretches) will direct the blindfolded kid by saying Up, Down, Left,... When they have it where they want it they will shout out Ok, ok! in chorus or Stop, stop!

Change kids for each part and make the whole face together.

Ouch! (third and fourth graders):

By the time they get to third grade the kids are probably well aware of most of these words. They tend to get rightfully bored if you try and teach it like it's the first time they've ever witnessed such English. So I like to begin to teach the third and fourth graders some phrases. The dialogue runs like this:

Student A: Approaches B and hits them (lightly/fake punch) on a body part we know the name of.

Student B: "Ouch! My (insert body part)."

Student A: "Oh, I'm sorry. (So so sorry.)"

Student A affixes a band-aid (or sticker) on the wounded part.

Student B: "Thank you."

The dialogue clearly relies on Student B having a lack of short term memory in order to thank A for bandaging the area they were the direct cause for harming. That aside it's pretty fun and the kids tend to retain the words. It's also a good way to then discuss possession. "My..." something you can use for other lessons.

Anyway, the activity involves students being shown an example between you and the homeroom teacher. You act out your roles and then switch. After the students have gathered the meaning via this role play you can practice the dialogue with them. Then I pass out three band-aids to each kid. I tell them they are going to find a partner and act out the dialogue and then sit down when they've both adopted each role. Then we switch partners as a class to avoid confusion and so that we all finish more or less simultaneously. We switch partners three times and the kids tend to love looking around at their band-aided classmates post activity.

Final Activity and Goodbye (5 minutes):

At the end of the class we repeat all the words we learned that day. The first graders will still have trouble with the face words and the fourth graders will be pretty pumped with how eloquent they are. If there is time we play Simon says with the words we know. If there is not time or after Simon says we say our goodbyes. Typically they stand up to do so, but it's not a requirement. Basically I just make sure I have their attention and then say the class is over and goodbye or bye bye. I think a few variations on saying goodbye or good morning are useful throughout the year with classes so they aren't completely befuddled when you say hi to them in the halls or it's afternoon and they are still saying good morning.

NOTES:

I don't ever time my lesson plans and I would probably be a poor in-class presence if I kept looking up at a clock to stand by some sort of rigid timing structure. Figure out what you want to do and how long it takes the class in front of you to do it and modify on the fly as well as in your plans.