The inevitable teacher's headache
Teaching irregular verbs can be rewarding and painless!
It's all about applying the MSL principles: systematic, repetitive, multisensory, explicit instruction. It means that you will explain the vowel change as well as some consonant changes for each verb or group. Depending on the age of the students, you can either group the verbs in similar categories or let the students figure out the categories themselves. Take one category per week. Rap or chant - WITH RHYTHM - the verbs together with the class. Test their retention after every three to four weeks. Give them various activities: matching pairs, memory, find your match. Let them interact with the irregular verbs cards, and quiz each other with irregular verbs lollipops. Here's an essential 'list' for beginners. They can add verbs to it as they learn.
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Spring brings sun and rainThis activity and learning aid can help beginner students memorize the pronunciation of English letters. I learned about it in the Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching on Future Learn platform. It took me a year to push this up on my list of priorities, so here it is: I created it in Canva, If you wish to have the original size (A3 poster), leave a comment, and I'll send it to you.
I wrote about it in a previous post, but I'll repeat the principle here: A is gray, B is green, and so on. The idea is to remember the vowel of the color - that's the vowel we need to say the letter. R is a star! This activity also teaches rhyme, which is another aspect of language production and sound processing that students with Dyslexia struggle with. You can have the whole class working on creating their own Alphabet Rainbow, which may be more effective than just showing them your own. I found this extremely useful for my students, who already have different names of letters memorized because of French. The most problematic letters are: G/J, K/Q, R, A/E/I, X, and Y. Note that this rainbow is made for the American English. In the British Rainbow Z is RED. |
AuthorMartina Matejaš is a teacher of English and Yoga. She is keen on understanding the mind-body connection as well as cracking the 'code' of thoughts-emotions-behaviour matrix. Archives
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