Activity aims

Why are you doing what you're doing?

This week I am going to post an activity a day! These activities will be communicative and fun. However, it's important to think about the AIM of each activity. These activities can be used as stand-alone tasks or as warmers or fillers. However, they should always have a linguistic purpose - either to recycle vocabulary, practise new language or a specific skills. They should fit by topic or language into the bigger picture of the lesson or series of lessons. Avoid trying to string a lesson together out of a series of these activities but instead integrate them into a language or skills-based lesson. 

For each activity post notice the stated AIM(S). For every activity you use this week in class, see if you can state the aim. If you can’t, then ask yourself – ‘Why am I doing this?’

Primary: Animal rhythms 

Aim: To practise word stress and recycle vocabulary

Age: Ages 6 and up

Level: Elementary and above

Time: 10-15 minutes

Preparation: Write up various animal words that your students know in columns according to the number of syllables.  

• 1 Syllable: cow, bird, cat etc. 
• 2 syllables: chicken, tiger, hippo etc 
• 3 syllables: elephant, crocodile etc.

Procedure

1. Clap out the rhythm of the name of one of the animals from the board, e.g. 3 claps could be e-le-phant.
2. The children try to identify the animal from the list of names on the board. If they can't guess give them a clue, such as making the animal sound.
3. The children then read and clap the name and rhythm.
4. Choose a child to clap out another rhythm and ask the class to guess the animal.

Extension

You can do this activity with any set of words e.g. furniture, food, countries