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Humor:
Classroom Activity 3
Classroom Activity 7
Spring Cleaning
Level:
Upper Beginner/Intermediate
Goals:
To introduce students to household chore vocabulary
and adverbs of
frequency; to give students experience
in taking part in a survey.
Time required:
40–60 minutes
Optional Materials:
copies of chore chart Background: Many people clean
their entire house at the beginning of spring.
Many household chores listed in this activity can be
part of the spring cleaning process.
Procedures:
1. Use the following list as the vocabulary for this activity:
(Household
Chores,wash the dishes, hang the laundry,
dust the furniture, make the
bed, water the plants,
iron the clothes, sweep the floor.)
Introduce the vocabulary with students.
Start by eliciting a list of chores that students do around
the house.
Check comprehension of
the vocabulary
you plan to work with (use the list of chores provided
or
other terms you would like to include) by showing or
drawing pictures
of the nouns and using gestures to
convey the meanings of the verb
.
2. Write the list of verbs in a column on the board.
Write the list of nouns in another column—out of order,
as in this example: ( make, the furniture, the bed , the
dishes, wash, dust, etc.)
You
should make it clear that the items in the columns are
not in order and tell students that their task is to match the
items correctly.
3. Have students work in pairs to match the verbs and
nouns to create common household chores.
4.
Go over the answers as a class.
Have student volunteers come to the board and draw a line
from the verb to the matching noun. Discuss any
verb that
might make sense with more than one noun
(e.g., wash the clothes). Once the correct answers are on
the board, have students
compare their answers and
correct any mistakes. (make, the furniture, wash, the bed,
the dishes, dust,etc.)
5.
To check comprehension, ask a student to come to the
front of the room. Have the student select one chore
(without telling anyone what it is) and have him or her
act it out.
Have the rest of the class guess what
chore it is. Continue
until you have gone through all the chores or until every
student has had a chance to act out one of the phrases.
(If
your students are familiar with the present progressive,
they can make their guesses in complete sentences—
for example, “She is sweeping the floor.”)
6.Have students rewrite the correct phrases in their
notebooks.
7. Now you can add a grammar element to the activity.
Introduce or review the following adverbs of frequency:
Adverbs of Frequency
(always, often, sometimes, hardly ever, never.)
8. Tell students that the adverbs of frequency :
(always 100%, , often 75%, sometimes 50%,
hardly ever 25%, never 0%.)
9. Write a list of percentages in a column on the board from
largest to smallest. (Remind the class that percentages are
approximate, not
exact.) Write the adverbs of frequency
in another column— out of order, as in this example:
(always100% sometimes, 75% often, 50%, etc.)
10.Students in pairs, match the percentage to the adverb
of frequency.
11.
Go over answers as a class. Have student volunteers
come to the board and draw a line from the percentage to
the matching adverb of frequency.
Once you have the
correct answers on the board, have students compare
the answers they came up with and correct any mistakes.
(always100% sometimes, 75%, often, 50% , etc.)
12.
Now the class is ready to practice using the target
vocabulary in context. Elicit from students how to ask and
answer questions using the
vocabulary and adverbs of
frequency they have just learned.
Here is a suggested pattern:
Q: How often do you _____[chore]_____?
A: I _[adverb of frequency]____[chore]_____.
13. Write the target language on the board to be used as
a reminder. Explain to students that they will use this
language to complete the next activity.
14. Have students, in pairs, practice asking and
answering questions.
15. Draw the chart on the board and have students
copy it into their notebooks. How often?
Chore: (always, often, sometimes, hardly ever, never)
16. Put students in groups of eight (or the number of chores you have on your list). Assign each student in the group one of the eight chores.
17.
Have students ask and answer questions in their
groups and fill in the chart, as in this example,
where Student A has been assigned the chore
“wash the dishes”:
Student A: “How often do you wash the dishes?”
Student B: “I never wash the dishes.”
Student A puts a mark in the “never” row on the chart.]
18. Students continue asking and answering questions
with every person in
the group, putting a mark in the
appropriate row for each response.
Students should
also mark their own response on their chart.
Extension
1.
After students have completed their charts, have all the
students with
the same chore get into a new group. Ask
students to compile the information they have collected
onto one chart. This chart will represent the entire class.
2. Have each group come to the front of the room and
share the results.
Reporting structures they might use
include the following:
• “Ten of us always wash the dishes.”
• “Ten of the students in this class always wash the dishes.”
3.
Create stations around the room for each adverb
of frequency (e.g., always in one corner of the room, often
in another corner). For each chore, ask the class,
“How often do you _________?”
Students go to
the correct station based on how often they
do that chore. Students can look around the room and see
how often their classmates do each chore.
They can also have short discussions in their group,
based on these questions:
