Effective Fun Teaching (Part 1)

I believe that teachers who truly feel the deeper calling in their hearts to teach, desire to be excellent in their skills, abilities and effectiveness.

If you teach only for a paycheck, then, this article probably won't be much help to you or of any interest to you. But if you do it from a passion of touching the lives of your students and shaping them in preparation for their own life success, then, if you don't already know this little technique, you'll at least find it interesting.  

 

Effective, Fun Teaching

 

One thing I've noticed about Chinese and English is that they both have a lot of compound words. In Chinese, two characters that, by themselves have individual meanings, come together to form a third word and a totally different meaning. The same is true in English. Words like 'workmen', 'playground', 'policeman', 'sandbox', 'sandpaper.' Of course there are hundreds of such compound words.

When teaching these words, take the time to teach the meanings of the words individually before they are compounded. Why only teach one word when you can easily teach three at once?

Also, you can use this technique in words that aren't necessarily compound words.. Take for example a word like 'candidate'. I immediately see 9 other words within this word. I see 'can', 'candid', 'did', 'date', 'ate', 'and', 'I', 'at', 'a'. This also makes for a great game to play with students.

 

Recently, I divided my class up into two teams. Each team was to come up with as many words as possible from the letters (no matter the order) in the word 'candidate.' (use whatever word you want) The winning team came up with 52 words. Not only will this game make them totally focus on their English vocabulary, but it will get your class very quiet as well. They will not say the words out loud in fear that the other team will hear them and use their words.

This class is small so I gave them the added incentive of a reward for the team that found the most English words. I bought some inexpensive writing journals that cost 4 RMB each. The team that had the most words at the end of the class time, got the prizes. If you don't want to spend your money doing something like that, then, reward them in other non-monetary ways. I only had to buy for 4 students in this small class. So no big deal

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If you don't want to do that, then give a little longer break or do something else for them. 'People work harder FOR a reward than they do FROM punishment.' This is why I give rewards.There's no great genius in this little teaching tip/idea. If you already do this, then you will agree with me that it is a great little tool for teaching English. Maybe you can use it more often.

In my next article, I'll share with you a game that I do that is great especially for primary and middle school classes. It will build their English vocabulary very, very fast and also build long term memory for them.

 

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Michael Murphy - - Mo Wen-Long

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