After my last successful lesson (read about it here) I though that the rest of the week will be uneventful ... boy, was I wrong 😜
This time round, one of my students changed my lesson plan by uttering three words. Those three little words stunned me and have forever changed the way I teach a certain grammar point.
It was a lesson with 5th graders and the topic was: object pronouns. I wrote a couple of sentences on the board:
Jack is tall.
Mum and dad are happy.
This chair is hard.
I underlines words: Jack, Mum and dad, this chair and I asked them what they were. They started giving me words like noun, person, the most important part, the person that does the action, etc. One of them said it was the sentence subject so I asked "and what is subject?"
This is when Mikołaj ( he really wanted me to mention his name 😄) said the words : "THE MAIN CHARACTER OF THE SENTENCE" .... mind blown 😮
Is it just me? Maybe every other teacher on the planet has heard it but I have never though about sentence subject like this! My mind was off ... do we only have the main character in film and books? Do we have other characters? I wrote more sentences on the board:
Jack likes Alice.
Sue's dancing with Tom.
I go shopping with my mum.
"How many characters are there in those sentences?" I asked. "More than one" they said ... I was looking at them with hope in my eyes ... and then it happened! "They are SUPPORTING CHARACTERS!" JACKPOT!!!! 🎉🎊🎉🎊🎉🎊🎉🎊
I kept smiling throughout the lesson. I introduced the term "object" and then we moved onto object pronouns. They made a note in their notebooks and we started practising. With each sentence we were identifying the main character and the supporting character and then we were replacing both with pronouns.
Another student summed up the lesson: "Ms, why is this so easy?" 😀
Have fun creating,
Ewa :)