This 20-minute long video shows a typical lesson with my Lincoln Students.
I came across an interesting video from YouTube (Tom and Jerry Real Life) which one of my Chinese friends shared with me and I felt like to share it with my students as well, and I was thinking that the extension of the story from the video could be the story of Cat and Rat from Chinese Zodiac. We could talk about why the cat didn’t get any place in the Chinese Zodiac! Cool! With that thought, I started to do backward planning.
First of all, I came up with a list of vocabulary with high frequency words which my students would need in order to be able to discuss about the video and the story of Chinese Zodiac. Then I introduced the vocabulary to them by creating gestures and by asking them personalized questions. Toward the end of this video, my students co-created a class story with me using the new vocabulary. The student actors demonstrated their understanding of the language by synchronizing their actions with the storylines as the whole class was creating and the rest of the class showed their comprehension by feeding me the details of the story and by answering my questions.
First of all, I came up with a list of vocabulary with high frequency words which my students would need in order to be able to discuss about the video and the story of Chinese Zodiac. Then I introduced the vocabulary to them by creating gestures and by asking them personalized questions. Toward the end of this video, my students co-created a class story with me using the new vocabulary. The student actors demonstrated their understanding of the language by synchronizing their actions with the storylines as the whole class was creating and the rest of the class showed their comprehension by feeding me the details of the story and by answering my questions.
After the class story was created, I retold the story and had the whole class act out and did gestures to show their comprehension at the same time. In the 2nd student work, all students showed their understanding of the class story by doing gestures and by acting out the story in groups of three while I was retelling the story one more time.
A student artist helped me illustrate the class story while I was retelling it. When we are done with retelling, I showed the illustrations to the whole class using document camera. We discussed about the story one more time. In the 3rd student work, students demonstrated comprehension of sentences describing certain pictures by showing me the corresponding numbers using fingers in the Chinese way. Then students wrote out the class story on the storyboard.
After students wrote out the class story, we did a "Movie Talk". I showed them the YouTube video, “Tom and Jerry Real Life.” It was only about 1 minute 25 second long, but we took time to talk about the colors of the rat and the cat and we talked about what had happened and why it happened. We discussed the video in depth using the vocabulary they just acquired. Then I pulled out the story from World Language Games’ web page which I had typed out earlier about this video. In the 4th student work, students showed comprehension of the written languages by reading and translating it into English as a whole class. At the end, students worked in pairs and put the segments of the story in order. Then I confirmed their responses by showing them the correct order on World Language Games' "Colorful Stories".
After the reading activities, we moved on to discussing why cats always chase rats and rats are scared of cats. Students shared their thoughts in Chinese. Then I shared the reasons from the Chinese perspective with them through the story of Chinese Zodiac. In the meanwhile, we discussed about the different attitudes and feelings towards dragons in Chinese and Western cultures and the similarities and differences between Chinese Zodiac and Horoscope. In the 5th student work, students were able to articulate the order of Chinese Zodiac animals and explain why Cat didn’t get a place in the Chinese Zodiac and how Cat and Rat became enemies.