Middle School Books (Jumping Kids)

[numberonegood]

There seems to be many different Middle School text books out there.  Mine have kids jumping on the cover for each grade.  Also:
Grade 1: English author is Peter S. Sylvestre and lesson 1 is called "Welcome to my Homepage"
Grade 2: English author is Sharp William Edward and lesson 1 is called "Cathy's School Life"
Grade 3: English author is Sharp William Edward and lesson 1 is called "Everyone Can Play"

If other people have these books, let us know and we can share some ideas.

[misty]

I'm using that book for grade 3.  This will be my first time teaching from a book, and looking at what we have to work with I can honestly say I'm not really looking forward to it.  All the material in the chapters are just so random. 

[numberonegood]

But really, don't you love post-it notes?! (Lesson 3)

[misty]

that outta be a great lesson I just hope that my school has an infinite supply of post-its so I can come up with some form of game

[Janitor]

I played a game once with the post-it by writing vocabulary on them and sticking it to the forehead of the students. They had to run around and try and guess the word without saying it. If their partner guess the right word they took their pot-it. Student with the most post-it won

[waikalani]

I'm using this book also.  I have to make my lesson to cover some of the material in the book, but I don't have to follow activity by activity.  PLEASE let me know if you want to share other lessons as I'm at a loss for some of these topics.

[laurateacher]

These books are dire.  Have you seen the reading passage in everyone can play?  'Jason is a physically and mentally challenged boy.'  I have a couple of  special needs children in some of my classes and the teachers have been using that passage, underlining the word challenged and then pointing to the kids in my class and saying Jason.....ah Korea!

These books are too random to do anything with them in my opinion, I dont think there is anything useful at all.  I was thinking of doing something about friendship and giving friends advice  helping them in certain situations....but thats the brightest brainwave I have had, I have been procrastinating about making my lesson plan all week.  I dont even thik that would fill 45 minutes....

I havent really looked at 2nd grade but again it looks like it is to do with friendship and inviting people to events or giving opinions and advice, so maybe the same as above?  Or maybe I will go in the direction of My mam is coming to Korea, what should she do?  And then give her some cultural dilemmas where the kids have to tell me what she should do.  I dunno, Im just throwing ideas around.  Im stuck, today is Friday, my brain stops functioning as soon as I open the pages of these books.....maybe we should chat on a weekly basis and share ideas?

[numberonegood]

When I saw that story the thought "no good will come from this" crossed my mind.  Fortunately, I won't have to teach that part of the lesson. 

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm only responsible for teaching the "Talk Together" section of each lesson.  I spread out those two pages over two lessons. 

I've attached my first lesson for Grade 3 Lesson 1 "Everyone can play" in case it is helpful to anyone.  Sorry if the lesson plan is unclear but I just write it for myself so it's not detailed.  It's not my greatest lesson but you may be able to get something from it.  Any questions, let me know.

[woman-king]

I'm working through lesson plans for the grade 1 and 2 books...I'm already a little confused at the whole "Welcome to my Webpage" theme, as I don't think most of my students use myspace or Facebook and won't get the concept (could be wrong there).  I'm planning on having them design their own webpages using the topic sentences from the textbook and from me, but since I don't have access to computers for each of them they'll be using paper and doing presentations...that's the best idea I have so far. 

The second grade "school life" theme is a little easier, I'm going to be talking about extracurricular activities and then  use a Jeopardy or "bomb game" template to have them memorize the different activities.

I'm glad I'm not the only one finding this difficult...not only are the chapters not related to each other, the information within the chapters seems  . . . disconnected, as well.  I'm having a hard time putting it together in my brain in a way that's cohesive enough to create some real lessons from it.

[laurateacher]

I have it a little more difficult, I have been told to spend one week on the talking part of the chapter and one week on the listening part.  I decided not to do the introductions because my kids pretty much already know how to do that.......gah, just too difficult!

Your power point looks great though!

[laurateacher]

How are people getting on with these books?  Has anyone reached grade 2, Sping festival chapter yet?  I have to come up with a speaking class for tomorrow, could do with some inspiring groundbreaking ideas........:-s

[numberonegood]

Has anyone noticed that in the first three lessons of the grade 3 book each of the "Talk Together" sections have been about complaining?
Lesson 1: I'm worried about...    Don't worry.
Lesson 2: Bitch, bitch, bitch.   I'm sorry to hear that.
Lesson 3: What's the matter?  Bitch, bitch, bitch.

Can we move past this already?  There's only so many lessons I can make around this topic.

(Yes, I realise I'm complaining about there being too much complaining in the lessons.)


Laurateacher, did you come up with any good ideas for your lesson?  I used these books for grade 1 and 2 last year and I found the grade 2 lessons consistently frustrating.  Grade 1 was much better and I was able to come up with much more interesting lessons.

[numberonegood]

Here is a ppt for Grade 3 - Lesson 3 focusing on the phrases "Let me take a look." and "It will be nice to..." 

I think we are all focusing on different parts of the textbook but hopefully you can use something out of this. 

At the end is the Disappearing Dialog game from RufusW using the dialogues from the text book.

[laurateacher]

I actually find the grade 2 books a lot easier than the grade 3 books.  So the grade 2 spring festivals chapter, the speaking part, I showed them different ways to invite people to something, then the different responses, I had pictures of stuff like the movies, bowling etc, and they had to invite me using the language, I then accepted or rejected the information (my teachers didnt like the fact that I taught them how to accept an invitation as this isnt part of the target language in the text book, but I think they need to know how to say both things, right?) I then had a schedule on powerpoint, which had some busy days and some blank days, I then invited them to something on a chosen day and they had to say yes or no using the target language. I then gave them a blank schedule and asked them to fill in 2 days and go round inviting people in the class to something on their free days and they had to accept or reject.....I only have the powerpoint on my school computer, sorry, otherwise I could put it up on here, maybe I could try tomorrow?

The next class I did I focused on the "have you heard about" and I actually found a great lesson on here that I just downloaded and changed a little....so I asked them about Korean festivals, have you heard about the butterfly festival? etc and they had to reply, I then asked them about festivals from my country (the UK) and showed them video clips, there is a really funny one about cheese rolling to show them which they loved.  I dont normally set them homework, but I made them create a new korean festival for HW in groups of 3 and have them present it to the class the next week, some of their posters and ideas were amazing!

http://waygook.org/index.php/topic,1631.0.html

[dlhopes]

I also have access to this textbook, and I have to agree with other people on this thread; it's woefully disjointed and the lessons have no clear purpose. Fortunately, my co-teachers stick to the book and I only use the topics as a template. However, I'm struggling to see how to make something out of the Grade3 lesson 3 (do you like post-it notes). There's a small section about an invitation to a baseball game so I'm going to do a lesson on invitational language and then maybe something related to inventions and passives (the telephone was invented by A.G.Bell etc), linked to an invitation to a museum. Needless to say, I'm struggling!

[misty]

Luckily I don't really have to use the book.  I just try and pick one of the topics and do my own lesson.  For Grade 3 lesson 3 I did an inventions lesson and got ideas from this post http://waygook.org/index.php/topic,5514.0.html

This book really is terrible and all my co-t's hate teaching it too!

[believeinblue]

Did any of you guys get the interactive CDs with your books? I agree that this book and the CDs put my class to sleep, but I am expected to use the CDs (no powerpoints) and teach each unit over the course of two weeks, basically going from beginning to end.

I am in charge of teaching the activity book. For my grade 1s, I teach all levels (Make Up, Run Up, Jump Up). My grade 2s are sorted by level so lower levels just get Make Up and advanced levels get Jump Up. My grade 3s only get Make Up as the level jumps up quite a bit for the Grade 3 book.

Anyways, I guess my question is: do you guys have the CDs but have decided to not use them?

[laurateacher]

I got the listening tracks given to me on a USB.  I have to teach the listening part and the speaking part, usually for the listening part, I use a bomb game, but you dont have powerpoint, maybe make your own bomb game and have the cards stuck on with blu-tac or something.....

[mycombs]

I teach these jumping kids books as well. Trying to make supplementary lessons to reinforce such disjointed dialogue makes me want to cry. But I have done this for one year, and now I can start recycling!
I would love to see this thread become a sticky, so all of us saddled with this book could share...

[tomburrows]

when were these books published?