Seven learners came on Saturday, and they were a wonderful group! We began the class by talking about what each of the learners does for their job, which showed me the great variety of work and skill represented by such a small class. The group has an electrician, a carpenter, two office boys, two cooks, and a housekeeper. This presented a challenge in some ways, as the learners are at slightly different language comprehension levels, according to how often they interact with English speakers at work. I also suspect that they have different vocabularies according to their vocations. This variety comes with its advantages as well; I hope that the learners will teach each other and contribute to the group language learning experience!
I decided to teach about verbs, because I noticed last week that the learners usually spoke with gerunds, and they showed a relatively small amount of familiarity with the past and future tenses of verbs. I passed out different objects, one to each person, in order to first distinguish nouns from verbs. Each learner came to the front to share the name of the item I gave them (such as a hat, or my headphones). We then brainstormed verbs for each object by answering the question, "What do you do with this item?" All of the students were keeping up well and filling in the verbs they learned on their worksheets.
After the break, we took the verbs they learned and discussed past, present, and future tense. This was more challenging material, especially since we dealt with verbs that change in different ways (or don't change at all), such as "buy" and "read." Playing a game with these tenses is what helped to truly solidify the different forms for the students. We split into two teams, and the teams raced to write the correct form of the verb I shouted out. Everyone participated in the game, and I think it really helped to practice these verbs with the students!
The true test of this will be if they do their homework assignment- check in next week!
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