Teaching adjectives through favourite words.

Level: Beginner/Elementary. Age: 8-10. Aims: Teaching Adjectives pertaining to the topic “Face”. Time: 1 lesson (50 minutes). Equipment: e-board if possible; pictures, paper; crayons, colour pencils and pens.

Tell your class that they are going to watch an interview with six famous football players from different countries. Repeat the interview title several times, make sure the children understand its meaning: “What Are Your Favourite Words in English?” Write down two questions on the board in block letters:

1)      How many players say their favourite word?

2)      What are the words they say?

Then play the interview.

Answers: 1 – two players, Sun Jihai and Gilberto Silva; 2 – Hello and Thank you.

Give your class a few minutes to discuss the importance of those words in English and in their own language. Suggest that they draw some pictures to illustrate both words. They may draw a word in the colours of the rainbow, or make a schematic picture of people shaking hands or bowing to each other.

To introduce the topic “Face”, you may play the interview again, telling the class that each person has a Face, and point at the players’ faces in turn. Divide the class into two groups, and give each group a worksheet. Worksheet A is a list of words. Worksheet B is a list of pictures. Let students with worksheet A each choose a word they like, and students with Worksheet B should choose a feature of the face. Tell them to begin, with one student pronouncing a word, and another pointing at the corresponding part of the face. Once they are done, let them swap worksheets and repeat the whole exercise, with the roles reversed. Those who said the words should now point at the corresponding feature on the drawing, and those who pointed should say the words. Notice that in one of the pictures, there is no nose on the face!

I took those pictures myself, a doll at home, and the other one in the street in Hong Kong. You may wish to use your own pictures of faces.

NB: this activity may become quite noisy! Once everybody had a chance to speak, clap your hands to attract their attention and establish order, and turn to the main exercise of the day.

If you have an eboard, you may open up a presentation with different colours and sizes. You may show your students a picture of the rainbow, and ask them if every colour can be used when describing a person’s face. You may also show them pictures of the same things but in different sizes, and ask if all the people have got the same size noses, eyes, ears, lips, cheeks and faces. Since it is the Beginner/Elementary level, and the pupils are quite young, you may prefer to stick to the basics, giving them a manageable list of adjectives:

Blue, brown, grey, black, green, yellow, white, red; big, small.

To make this a fun activity and to help them remember the new words, ask your students a few silly questions:

1)      Do you have blue hair?

2)      Does he have red eyes?

3)      Do we have grey lips?

4)      Does she have big ears?

5)      Do they have small cheeks?

6)      Do we have green faces?

For the final exercise of the lesson, and/or for home-work, ask them to make a drawing of any face, using all the colours they can think of. Turn on the video again, say Thank you to the class. Hopefully they will chorus back!

Worksheet A. Words.

Face, eye(s), nose, cheek(s), ear(s), lip(s)

Worksheet B. Faces. (В прикрепленном файле).

Нина Коптюг, кандидат филологических наук, Новосибирск

. Words.   .