Idea for teaching school subjects

school subjects

Objectives

• Learn range of school subjects
• Describe your timetable i.e. how often, what time, which day, teacher etc.
• Revise telling the time, days of the week and adverbs of frequency

Plan

Starter:

Make pupils wait outside. Hide flashcards of pictures representing school subjects around the room (like we did in Andrew Maccullan’s lecture) with the name of the subject underneath in the TL.

Before pupils come in tell them to go in and find the 10 pictures and workout and write down what the subject is in English.

Collect the flashcards in and then go through them again with the pupils. Repeat using various games.

Moving on:

Tell the class that they are going to describe their timetables.

Put a written example of your timetable on an OHP as a model answer. To help them revise using days of the week, adverbs of frequency and telling the time, put 20 mistakes in your text related to these areas that they have to correct e.g. “An Montag hat ich Erdkunde”, “Jeudi j’ai history à 3 heures” and go through the answers.

Brainstorm a list of information they could include in their description and write on the board for reference e.g. name of teacher, do you like the subject, time, frequency … (This is good for all abilities because it leaves the task very open. The weaker ones will use some of the information, but the more able pupils don’t feel restricted)

Doing the Task:

Put pupils in mixed ability groups of three. Pupils have 15 minutes to design A SECTION of their own timetable to present at the end. It may be made more fun by allowing them to choose who their teachers are e.g. “On Wednesday we have Robbie Williams for French”. To challenge the more able pupils you could choose the ones in each group to try and present their timetables from heart rather than reading it from the paper. Another option would be to have each group write their work on an OHT and have the class correct each others afterwards.

Homework.

Pupils write the rest of their timetables including at least one additional / invented subject which is not on the list to make it more fun e.g. “Moon Landing lessons on Fridays with Tony Blair as our teacher.”