Hello-Chorus Frogs and Preposition Charades

Imagine walking through a school building and hearing "hellohellohellohello" every few seconds and from every direction. After a while, it sounds like a pondful of frogs. Good thing I like frogs.

Today, I taught 5th grade students with Ms. K. She'd asked me to prepare a game that would help students review the contents of Chapter 3: "It's Under the Table." I decided to focus on prepositions, specifically: under, on, in, next to, near, between and behind. I brainstormed til I had a short list of activity ideas, having learned that a teacher always needs a back-up.

First period, after a quick review of the preposition powerpoint presentation (ppp), we played Simon Says, focusing on commands that contained prepositions, such as "put your hands ON your head." After I acted as Simon for a few turns, I asked students to be Simon. There were three problems with this: students could not think of their own command sentences; students had trouble remembering the sentences I whispered to them; students spoke so quietly that few if any could hear them. After class, the Ms. K., when asked her opinion about the activity, said that the students had played Simon Says many times, so it was no longer fresh for them. I decided to try Charades next time.

Second period, we reviewed the ppp, then played Charades. Ms. K and I demonstrated how to act out a preposition. Then we chose pairs of students to act out prepositions while the rest of the class tried to guess which word was being shown. When this proved too easy, Ms. K told the students to make sentences about what the actors were doing. She said "one, two, THREE" and told students to stand if they wished to make a sentence. We listened to all sentences. Then, I stated some examples of correct sentences about the situation ("The book is behind the girls.") Each student who had spoken a good-enough sentence recieved a no-homework pass from Ms. K. [She hands these out very liberally. I wonder whether any of her students end up having to do homework. Maybe only the ones who never participate have to do it.]

Between second and third period, I wrote the prepositions on bits of paper, folded the bits and put them in a box. Now the actors would have to choose random prepositions to act out for the class. Ms. K. coached the actors (in whispered Korean) and handed them props such as books, pencils or boxes.

I noticed that she usually told both students to do the same thing, such as stand with books on their heads, rather than work together to show a spatial relationship. At lunch, I mentioned this, and said that I wanted the students to do the latter.

During the next class period, we tried it. The results were hilarious. Students giggled when a girl put her hand on a boy's head or two students held a stuffed rabbit between them.

I also noticed that students had some trouble correctly using the preposition "in." In Korean, one uses post-positions. In Korean the sentence "The cat is in the bag." is "고양이가 가방 안에 있서요." (The cat bag in is). Due to this difference in syntax, Korean students are especially prone to saying things like "bag cat in" or "bag in cat" when they mean "cat in bag."

To address this confusion, I drew two pictures on the board. Picture A showed a stickman inside the belly of a large fish. Picture B showed a stickman eating a fish. (I later changed Picture B to a small fish inside a stickman's belly.) Again, we asked students to make sentences about the situations.

The activity improved throughout the day. To be honest, I had not been expecting to have to play a game for most of the class period. I thought that Ms. K. would, as she had done many times before, give a quiz first or something like that. I was not clear on how long the game was supposed to last. Next time, I'll ask.