Innovating
Sometimes classroom
teachers struggle to make our work enticing and also to engage students. With
my students, we collected data. Finding out the different ways students had started
their sentences. What we found out by tallying the different ways students started their writing was interesting.
We established that most of
them started their sentences in similar ways. Whilst researching other ways to
start sentences, I remembered the acronym ISPACE, which I had used before (I am
not sure where or who developed it) for creating variation in our sentence starters. This is what it stands for: I
is for ing words, S is for Similes, P is for Prepositions, A is for
adjectives, C is for Conjunctions and E is for words with ed.
As soon as I realized my
students did not know the P in the acronym, I decided to teach them about
prepositions in an innovative way. Groups of students were given a cup and a dice, they were asked to place the dice with the cup in different ways and to talk about what they had done. They could talk about where
they placed their dice and cup. The aim was to use their work for a class
display. They talked about where they had placed the dice and the cup, prepositions
where noted and listed on the white board.
I read a book by Ruth Heller, World of language, Behind The
Mask, A Book About Prepositions to the students and shared more
prepositions.
The students really
enjoyed the tactile and visual way they were learning. Those new to English could
refer to the display when needed.
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