LESSON BREAK ACTIVITIES - LANGUAGE

CONTENTS

Making Faces

Early Stage 1 & Stage 1 ……………………………………………………………1

Sorry I’m late but…

Stage 1 & 2 ………………………………………………………………………….2

Enhancing News Time

All Stages ……………………………………………………………………………3

Getting to Know You

Stage 2 ………………………………………………………………………………4

Story Challenge

Stage 3 ………………………………………………………………………………5

What if…?

Stage 2 & 3 ………………………………………………………………………….6

What am I?

Early Stage 1 & Stage 1 ……………………………………………………………7

Opposites

Stage 2 ……………………………………………………………………………….8

Tiggy

Stage 1 & 2 ………………………………………………………………………….9

Whose name has..?

Early Stage 1 & Stage 1 ………………………………………………………….10

MAKING FACESEARLY STAGE 1 & STAGE 1

GOALS

Students will:

  • Brainstorm descriptive vocabulary
  • Respond through drawing specific descriptions of facial features
  • Use descriptive phrases
  • Follow instructions
  • Use metaphors
  • Develop active listening skills

Activity 1

Brainstorm descriptive vocabulary. For example ‘Sam has short red hair. Kelly has straight brown hair. Elliott has curly blonde hair. Sara has pierced ears.’

Prepare the children for a drawing task by highlighting descriptive language. Select five students who have some features in common, such as hair or eye colour, and give an accurate description of one of them. The class identifies the student from the description. Alternatively, use magazine pictures or books, and ask the students to take turns giving accurate physical descriptions of the people in the picture.

Activity 2

Ask students to draw a large oval shape on their page. Model accurate descriptions so that the class can draw a distinctive face. For example spiky hair, round eyes, puffy or thin lips, wrinkled forehead, pimply nose, bushy eyebrows, bald head, moustache, dreadlocks, round glasses.

Compare and discuss class results.

Students can also take turns providing the information for this activity.

Activity 3

Use metaphorical language to the features of a face. The students must listen to the description you give and draw these features to complete the face on their sheet. Lead a discussion around the characters that the students have created. For example ‘What kind of person have you created? What makes you think so? Can we interpret feelings from these facial features?’

Some suggested similes:

Pointy like a spear, long like Pinnocchio / NOSE
Puffy like a balloon, red like apples / CHEEKS
Floppy like Dumbo, like a pixie / EARS
Thick like a forest, bushy like a shrub / EYEBROWS
Small and round like buttons / EYES
Heart shaped, wide open like a cave / LIPS
Like pearls, sharp like a knife / TEETH

-1-

SORRY I’M LATE BUT….STAGE 1 & 2

GOALS

Students will learn how to:

  • Formulate their excuse/reason based on a given stimulus word
  • Express concepts of time and consequence of behaviour
  • Maintain appropriate verb tenses

Give each student or a group of students a stimulus word which must be used as the bases of an excuse for being late for school. Words which express time and consequence should be highlighted to the students as these help them to express the causal relationship between events (so, because, and then, after, when, but, etc). A students response may be reality of fantasy based.

For example: ‘I’m sorry I’m late but I’ve just got a pet elephant for my birthday and after I’d taken him for a walk, he drank lots of water and sprayed it all over my school clothes, so I had to go back and change my clothes.’

Suggestions for stimulus words:

Socks
Ambulance
Keys
Band-aids
Monster
Dog
Lunch
Brother
Milk
Car
Telephone / Party
Visitors
Dream
Dad
Money
Shoe
Alarm
Homework
House
Witch
Grandma

Extension of the activity:

  • Once the children have given their excuses orally they could use their excuse as the basis for writing a recount of the event
  • Ask specific children to provide an explanation of why the character in a book behaved in a certain way
  • Brainstorm with the class reasons/excuses for not doing your homework, forgetting to bring your lunch, not having a tidy bedroom and so on. Ask the children to decide if the excuse is acceptable? Why or why not?

-2-

ENHANCING NEWS TIME STAGE 1,2 & 3

GOALS

In these activities children learn to:

  • Provide news reports about theirown personal activities
  • Sequence ideas into speech
  • Adjust speech rate, volume and information for presentation to an audience

News time or show and tell is a very important it is still one of the few opportunities for children to have an extended turn in oral language rather than the short exchanges typical of conversation and question and answer routines.

Following are some variations you can use at news time:

  • Partner news or group news, allows more children to present their news. On occasions, when time permits, the small groups could choose one person from their group to present the news to the whole class.
  • The teacher can direct the news time by asking for news according to different criteria for example, Who has some news on something that happened on Saturday…? Other subject choices could be wet, early in the morning, lost, excitement, sad, loud noises.
  • At the end of each week ask one class member to recap his or her news of the classroom for the week. Students may comment on class themes, special activities or visitors, excursions or unexpected happenings that were important to them during their school week.
  • Select a child to give a class report at school assembly.
  • Use a show and tell plan which helps children understand the four stages of the show and tell genre (see appendix)
  • Stimulate discussion around news time by using who, what, where questions regarding the news item presented.

-3-

GETTING TO KNOW YOUStage 2

GOALS

This activity helps children to:

  • Ask questions and obtain information from another person
  • Recall information heard
  • Summarise and present information to the class
  • Practice the formal language of introductions

Each student is paired with another student who is not their friend. Instruct them that it will be their job to find out about their partner by asking appropriate questions. Spend a little time discussing which types of questions will lead to interesting information.

Each student will be asked to draw a picture of the person they are interviewing and write down five important things about them. These notes are then helpful for the students as a reminder when they ‘introduce’ their partner to the class.

Ideas for questions:

  • What do you want to be when you grow up?
  • How many brothers and sisters do you have?
  • When is your birthday?
  • Do you play any sports?
  • Have you ever been on television?
  • What is your favourite food?
  • Can you do something nobody else can do?
  • If you could go anywhere in the world where would you go?

Example:

Good morning everybody, I’d like to introduce you to Molly Smith. Molly is 6 years old and has two brothers Jake and Sam. Molly also has a pet dog called Rex. Molly likes to collect shells and wants to be a Scientist when she grows up.

-4-

STORY CHALLENGEStage 3

GOALS

In this activity students will:

  • Be introduced to a simple story framework
  • Create a simple story sequence
  • Build awareness of sentence structure
  • Understand a model of imaginative story making

Students are placed in groups of 4-5, they are given one word from the following categories setting, character and a problem. Each group is asked to make up a short story including their three words. In a clockwise direction each group passes on their story to the next group, this group must then add to the story with their three words. Get the students to give a title to the final story and ask one person from each group to read aloud the final story to the class.

Ideas for settings:

  • A cold windy day at the beach
  • A rocket trip to the moon
  • In my stomach
  • Up a tree
  • In the outback
  • Inside the fridge

Ideas for characters:

  • A little mouse
  • A naughty little girl
  • A bird that talks
  • An astronaut
  • The tallest man in the world
  • A wicked witch
  • A funny little gnome

Ideas for problems:

  • Run out of lollies
  • Doesn’t want to eat bananas
  • Lost homework
  • Fallen down a well
  • Trapped in the supermarket
  • Sucked into the television
  • Shrunk in the microwave

-5-

WHAT IF…?Stage 2 & 3

GOALS

In this activity students will:

  • Understand a model of imaginative story making
  • Provide alternative resolutions to problems
  • Brainstorm descriptive vocabulary
  • Look at topics from another perspective

Divide the class into groups or brainstorm as a whole group what life would be like if something was different in the world. Some topics you could use for discussion include:

  • What if cars had square wheels……….?
  • What if the sun shone all day and all night……….?
  • What if fizzy drink came out of the taps instead of water………..?
  • What if chocolate tasted like broccoli…………?
  • What if animals lived in houses and people lived outside……….?
  • What if we could touch the moon………?
  • What if we had scales instead of skin…………?
  • What if gravity did not exist…………?
  • What if we could fly………..?
  • What if we lived on Pluto instead of Earth…………?
  • What if the world was flat…………?
  • What if children were the boss of their parents…………?
  • What if you didn’t have to go to school………….?

-6-

WHAT AM I?Early Stage 1 & 2

GOALS

In this class activity students will:

  • Integrate auditory language cues
  • Access semantic knowledge for making appropriate matches for meaning
  • Practice providing semantic cues

Read out clues to the class, pausing after each one to encourage students to reflect on the information. If they select an inappropriate solution, provide feedback as to why their suggestion was incorrect. Young children find this task easier if the semantic class has already been selected, for example, ‘This is an animal’.

Suggested Ideas:

I have saggy skin

I am very large

I can squirt water

I am long

I have no legs

I can be poisonous

I live on a farm

My tail is not straight

I like to play in the mud

I am small

I have wings

I like to make honey

I open and shut

You can see through me

I have a frame

You wear me on your feet

I have laces

I can get smelly

-7-

OPPOSITESStage 2

GOALS

Students will:

  • Gain skills in comparing and contrasting
  • Become familiar with antonyms
  • Gain skills in processing information rapidly

Get the class to line up in two teams, one beside the other. The teacher stands at the front of the two teams and says a word eg hot. The child who replies first with the opposite of this word (cold) goes to the back of the teams line, the person on the other team steps out of the game. The team with the most people at the end wins.

Suggestions for topics:

Hot / Cold
Skinny / Fat
Wet / Dry
Closed / Open
Clean / Dirty
Light / Dark
On / Off
Day / Night
Messy / Tidy
Long / Short
Empty / Full
Sharp / Blunt
Happy / Sad
Bald / Hairy
Black / White
Hard / Soft

-8-

TIGGYStage 1 & 2

GOALS

Students will develop skills in:

  • Integrating auditory listening skills
  • Letter and word recognition skills
  • Develop semantic category skills

All the children stand in different spots around the classroom. The teacher announces a category and the first child to put up their hand to answer gets take a step in any direction (only if the answer was correct). The game continues with the teacher changing the topic or asking children with certain letters in their name to take steps. If a child is close enough to another child they are allowed to tap them on the shoulder and that child must sit down, the last person standing is the winner.

Suggestions for topics:

Chocolate bars / Animals beginning with ‘s’
Sports that you play with a bat / Countries beginning with ‘t’
If your name starts with ‘b’ / Something you use to write with
Name a feature on your face / A girls name starting with ‘m’
Something you eat / Something you can use in the water
A type of dog / Something you put on a sandwich
Something you find outside / Types of birds
Something you wear when its cold / Something you take on a picnic

-9-

WHOSE NAME HAS...?Early Stage 1 & Stage 1

GOALS

Students will develop:

  • Word letter recognition
  • Increased auditory listening skills
  • Respond to instructions

Get the students to line up in a straight line across a wall. A ‘black letter’ is selected at the start of the game, and if this letter is called out you must take as many steps back as that letter appears in your name. The teacher calls out random letters and if that letter appears within your name you must take as many steps as it appears.

The first person to reach the teacher is the winner, and is the person who must select the next ‘black letter’ of the game.

NOTE

To make this task suitable for early stage 1 children, have their name written on a piece of paper as a written reminder of the letter within their name.

Produced by the Riverina Schools Project Partnership, 2006.