View Content #7706
| Contentid | 7706 |
|---|---|
| Content Type | 1 |
| Title | Ideas for Teaching a Thematic Unit on Monsters, Part 2 |
| Body | Ñandú listserv users responded to a recent request for ideas for a thematic unit on monsters for elementary students with the many suggestions. Here are more of them, continued from last week’s InterCom: --- I paired up my body parts unit last year with monsters. We read "Go Away Big Green Monster" (French - Va t'en Grand Monstre Vert) and there are a lot of peripheral activities you could do with that book. The 2nd and 3rd graders read "Mon Ami Jérémie" a book about a boy who is a bit bullied at school, but he has something in a box, what is it? He describes it, and nobody believes him... The boys knock the box to the ground and out comes a...toy? No, it's not a toy! It's a monster. The bullies go running and the boy says thanks to his friend, who jumps back in the box. Book is by Cristina Ivaldi and mine came with a cassette tape with the story as well as some listening activities. We did a pre-reading activities before reading to prepare them for the vocabulary, took the book in chunks, and then acted parts out. Then the kids all drew their own monsters and presented to the group. Another nice thing to pair with this is feelings, such as whether you are afraid of something or not, as well as adjectives that would be unusual for describing people, you can use to describe monsters. With the young ones (3-6) they like doing monster magnets -- it's a kit you can find at some toy stores. It comes in a metal case with several silly monster heads. You punch out the flexible magnetic parts of the face and place one of the faces on the metal case, then make different faces as you like. The magnets stick to the face because the metal is underneath. There's one or two of the heads and features I just remove as they are too scary. This is a small group activity. I have all the eyes, noses, mouths, ears and hair separated out and then we say the words as we put them on. With two kits, about 4 kids at once. For larger groups if you have a magnetic whiteboard, you could make your own silly monster features and put magnetic backing on them, then have the kids come up and make a monster on the board. For little ones I find that putting things together with magnets flows much better than any kind of drawing, and allows the focus to stay on the descriptions and the words. You could also do this with the "Go Away Big Green Monster" theme, where you describe a monster and build it on the white board, then tell each thing to "go away" and the children take it away. I've seen in lots of places these little rubber monsters that go on the end of your finger. You could also do different little games with these. Kholer, M. re:[nandu] monsters as thematic unit. Ñandú listserv (nandu@caltalk.cal.org, 9 Apr 2008). --- More ideas will be in next week's InterCom. |
| Source | Ñandú |
| Inputdate | 2008-04-27 10:54:56 |
| Lastmodifieddate | 2008-04-27 10:54:56 |
| Expdate | Not set |
| Publishdate | 2008-04-28 00:00:00 |
| Displaydate | Not set |
| Active | 1 |
| Emailed | 1 |
| Isarchived | 1 |
