Mon Feb 16

Objectives for today:

Language awareness - conceptualizing defining and non-defining relative clauses

For journal writing, sts wrote describing their favourite place.

We then went to p. 76 and discussed the special days listed there (Children's Day, Mother's Day and Day of the Dead). I also gave them information, on their request, about these days in Australia. They attempted to complete the three texts using the relative clauses. The sts got the majority of the clauses correct. We took time to look at the analysis and I wrote on the board the various types of nouns which go before a relative clause (people, places, things, times and dates). The sts identified which relative pronouns refer to each one.

We also read through the language summaries. I didn't find this information so helpful for the sts, in fact it seems to confuse them more. In the future I'll try to find better reference information.

Sts then practiced with relative clauses, first just filling in relative pronouns, then discussing in pairs answers to questions such as "the name of a country you'd really like to visit". They did well discussing these and using the relative clauses correctly.

Finally we played a game. I gave each st a card with some information on it - the name of a famous person, place or film, or information about each one. They had to find the person with the card that matched the information, then together create sentences with the information using relative clauses. eg. "'The Dark Knight', which stars Christian Bale, is a 2008 movie which is set in Gotham City." The game was very successful and all sts participated to create effective sentences. Many of them wrote down the sentences they had made. This also was interesting as they learned about the people, places and movies.