Prep time: 30 mins.
Class time: 20-30 mins.
Materials:
- Colored construction paper
- Scissors
- Glue
- Markers
- White printer paper or notecards
Confession time: At first, I started this blog only because I had to. The Community of Madrid requires all English teachers in the Auxiliar program to submit a digital teaching porfolio that features a detailed lesson plan that has been classroom tested. This website was born out of this requirement, but as I spent time setting up this website, thinking through my teaching philosophy, and reflecting back on everything I had learned and developed in the first term, I decided to keep expanding it long after I submitted it. I think these web pages serve as an important catalogue of ideas and thoughts and my experiences that can be useful for me to look back upon and others–full time teachers and auxiliares–to explore. I’m also having quite a bit of fun coming up with these ideas and developing this space to store them that’s my own.
That said, all credit for this idea is due to a previous auxiliar, Michael Day, and his online teaching portfolio.
You can find it here: Michael Day: Teaching Portfolio and Resources.
It just so happened that while I was browsing his site for inspiration, my first year classes were learning prepositions. I adapted his cube rolling preposition review game for my own students, who absolutely loved it. To recreate it, I cut A4 sized sheets of paper into squares, which I then taped together to form the cube. One I labeled with prepositions (one per side), and the other two I covered in body parts. In the classroom, I selected one student at a time to come to the front of the room and roll all three cubes at once. He or she then had to read the resulting phrase, with the preposition sandwiched between the body parts. The rest of the class had to act it out, with amusing and silly results:
“Head on knee!”
“Foot behind head!”
“Hand under foot!”
It was a great physical break from their workbook exercises, and allowed them to review body parts in English as well as prepositions. In fact, it was such a big hit with the students and other teachers that I took the liberty of adapting it to other levels. My fifth year students used the cube cues to draw abstract city scenes on paper…
“Car under road!”
“School behind skyscraper!”
…and I used it in a private lesson with preschool age students to help them practice finding and naming their body parts.
Classroom learning is nothing if not a collective, shared experience for both teachers and students. Take these cubes from Michael to me to you, reader. I hope you find them useful.
Educación in English 