Learner centered activities to teach MY FAMILY for primary classes.

- June 22, 2018

Class: 1st Grade

Subject: English

Unit: My Family

Academic Standards: Listening, Speaking and Writing.

Here is a set of activities, worksheets, and TLM to teach the MY FAMILY unit. I had carried out in my class and explained briefly to plan your teaching more engagingly.

TLM & Speaking Activity:

This is one of the best TLMs to introduce family members and also helps to do a speaking activity to say about their family. You can prepare this with cardboard sheet. You can introduce vocabulary, simple and complex sentences depends upon your children standards.

I started teaching by showing this model and asked interactive questions by explaining,

What is this? (You have to show the house first)

Where do you live?

Which type of house do you have?

How many are there in your house?

Who are they?

What is your father?

What is your mother?

What is your father/mother name?

What do you do with your brother/sister?

Do you love your family?

I elicited related vocabulary by asking these questions and wrote on the blackboard. I targeted important words "father, mother, sister, brother, grandfather, grandmother and house." And now I opened the window of the house and the doors. While opening the window and doors I gave listening input and how to explain the house model targetting the language. I gave below listening input to the class.

"This is my house.

I am Rajesh.

He is my brother. (By opening the window)

He is my father. (By opening the doors)

She is my mother.

She is my sister.

It is my pet.

I love my family."

(Note: You can give more complex sentence depends upon your student's standards)

Later I asked my children to say like me using this model. This helped me to create a speaking activity to say about their family. My children enjoyed a lot.

Word Bricks & Graphic Reading Activity:
This is a good activity to develop graphic reading and identify the words of family members. In this activity, you need to prepare family members word slips (Bricks) appropriate to the strength of your class. Suppose you have 7 members in your class you need to prepare 7 father word slips, 7 mothers, 7 brothers, 7 sisters, 7 grandfathers an 7 grandmother word slips. Now you have to draw or provide seven tree diagrams.
After this groundwork now you should scrumble and place all the slips at one corner of the class. Remember minimum 10 feet distance should maintain between tree drawing and corner (where all the slips placed).
Now ask your children to stand at the word slips corner and instruct them to pick a family member slip in the group, the run to his or her tree and paste the word in the correct box as per hierarchy. Again they should run to the slips, pick a slip, come back and place the slip on the tree in the correct box. Like they have to continue the game until they complete the whole family tree correctly.

Writing Activity:

After all these activities I planned a writing activity to learn the alphabet. In this activity, I prepared flash cards of the family members and a worksheet to identify and trace the letter.

I gave the worksheet to my children and asked my children to sit in a circle. Then I placed all the flashcards in middle. I instructed my children to pick one card and say, who is on the card. After I asked them to guess the first letter of the word and identify the letter in the worksheet and trace the letter on the given lines.

Suppose if a student picked the card mother, he has to say "mother" and say the first letter "M" and trace the letter "Mm "on the worksheet. So they can easily develop and remember the words and vocabulary as well as the letters. This will help the students to learn the family members names very easily and effectively and also targeted the writing skills in an activity-based transaction method.