Ok, long story short, I had to do a pile of lessons on colours and shapes for winter
gyampeu. But they had to mesh with a changing schedule at one school, and another colleagues lessons at another. The result was I got fed up with concrete lesson planning and instead just prepared a tonne of stuff so I could change the plan on the fly as new information came to me (and some example lesson plans to hand in). These are the results.
The Excel spreadsheet is a list of colour and shape activities. Columns on the right state:
*Topic: (C)olour, (S)hapes
*Appropriate age ranges: (3-4, and 5-6)
So you don't give the students something too kiddy, or too conceptually complex.
*Skills each activity utilises: (L)istening, (S)peaking, (R)eading, (W)riting.
Hopefully that'd help with plonking them in a series of lessons in some semblance of logical progression.
Personally, for the 3-4s, I found the fishing was the biggest hit, with the subtle-as-a-sledgehammer environmental message about overfishing going extremely well as it introduced a surprise at the end of the game, but not one for which they hadn't received (obtuse) warning. Some boys actually tried to make the red ones die out to see what'd happen.
Prepwork was a bit OTT (mostly actually trying to simply get the resources ordered and explaining why fishing wire was not a good idea), but my primary primary school's felt set (125 fish) with wooden/lace rods (6) will last a lifetime and handle classes of any size.
For the 5-6s, the MYO Colours was a surprise hit: telling the students that by 12 noon they'd know 100 new words and it'll be easy broke minds. If you've ever learnt a foreign language you'll understand the desire to know areas within the language where it is aceptable and possible to build meaningful vocabulary on your own. Being able to grab something new out of your rear end yet have it understood entirely by a native speaker is a big confidence boost.
For an interesting discussion (and you'll have to excuse a potentially sexist joke here), xkcd's Randall Monroe actually does a tonne of work on perception of colours on digital displays, and aside from his more serious studies, the images on this piece here can elicit a few laughs (blog text contains profanity, so copy anything desired off in advance):
http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/The Zip file below contains everything else attached to this post except the Excel spreadsheet for ease of download.
Edit: Also, my apologies for not getting this up sooner, like, before everyone finished their Winter
gyampeu. I was lazy. But, there's always regular classes, end year time filler classes and Summer
gyampeu, eh?
