Grade 2 Unit 5 "When..."

In this Unit the kids are learning how to express opinions and how to make sentences with if and when clauses. So I was asked to come up with something to practice this grammar. It wasn't so easy. All my ideas looked like worksheets which is something I kind of want to get away from. So I came up with this idea. I'm not completey happy with it because it doesn't require any speaking beyond reading what the teacher has written on the board. On the plus side it looks like it might be fun and lead to a gut level understanding of the causation implied in sentences like:


When the teacher says, "Open your books." you must cry like a baby.


At the begining of class the JTE and I pretended to be upset over the class's behavior. Talking, not listening and what have you. Now the class we tried it in is actually a pretty good class so they knew right away that there was something fishy going on. Still we pretended to be angry and told them that there were going to to be some new rules put into practice. Then we started writing them on the board:

When the teacher is speaking you must be quiet

We wrote this on the board and had the kids practice it backwards and forwards. (We showed them how the clauses could be interposed while retaining the same meaning) As we continued writing the new rules became increasingly strange, as in the first example and the stranger the rules became the more the kids enjoyed reading aloud. After all the rules were on the board we continued class as we usually do but the kids still had to obey the new rules. When I scratched my nose the kids clapped. When the JTE wrote on the board the kids had to call out, "Tooth!"( I don't know what this means but it's some kind of gag that appears on TV) when I put my hands in my pockets everyone had to stand up, turn around and sit back down.

It made for an interesting forty-five minutes.