Action Chant (20 minutes)

Students do the actions while saying the sentences.
Actions are clap, jump, duck and cross.(when students do this action they cross their arms together.)

For this game to work you will need some drum sticks to produce a beat for slow/medium/fast reading of the sentences.

Start with listen and repeat followed by getting students to practice doing words and actions slowly. Once you have done this you can speed up the chant.

Finally you can either
A) Get one team to do the actions and the rest of the class to chant.
B) Divide the chant between teams, so team 1 does A part team b does B part.

I have gotten the class to choose the best student from each team and then the class chants and the best students act (for sweets).

I never used round 4(the nasty nasty round) but I did use the tongue twister round as a filler at the end of the class.

If you modify this chant you should make sure that actions are given to major words in the sentence such as "sleeping" over giving actions given to minor words such as "are" etc. (thanks to the Co teacher for this advice). Because the students will focus on saying the words with the actions attached.

I should also note that I took this game from a 6th grade activity and it has undergone significant modification. (Thanks to my Co teacher who gave the good suggestions).

I have used this game with 6th grade as well and should work ok with 3rd grade (I have played a similar game with my mixed 3rd/4th grade after school English Class).

Check out Genki English.

http://genkienglish.net/doing.htm

They have a nice range of ideas for this topic.

This is a great unit to play the 'Memory Game'.  I start off by introducing a large number of activities the students can use to answer the question, "What are you doing?"  Then I have them stand in a big half circle around the classroom.  All the students together ask "What are you doing?"  Then starting at one end a student saying "I'm (action)-ing."  and acts it out.  Ask the question again, then the next student says and acts out the first activity and adds another activity.  Every time they break the chain we start over with the next kid in line.  They love miming the action. 

I made a powerpoint ot help explain how to play the game.  I added little animations to show them being acted out. I used myself as an example for the third person.  The kids really love it if you play with them (make sure to go last!)

This is a modified Mario ppt bomb game I made for 8.1 or 8.2.

Hi all,

The kids might like this video.  You can ask them "What is he doing?" or "What is it doing?" after they have a good laugh.  Good for motivation and teaching the present continuous.

Thanks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4X8PIMs344