Learning Forest Animals
Ask any child what he likes doing at English lessons, the answers would be different: playing games, singing, dancing, coloring the pictures and role playing. This is the basic standard range of activities I use to prepare my lessons for ESL kids.
In February I gave an opened lesson to demonstrate the children’s knowledge, competence and interest in learning English. The aim of the lesson was to review and identify the forest animals and to use vocabulary in a role play. We played games, such as “Walk in a forest. What can you see?” singing the song and naming the animals; we counted the animals and made a brief description of each animal.
The most exciting and the main part of the lesson (both for the children and for the guests) was a story dramatization “Hare’s birthday”. Children were given roles and taught the words in advance to perform the story on the stage. The story dramatization added variety, lots of language production and also a lot of fun. The children demonstrated dialogue speech, the ability to speak using complex sentences. The most valuable thing, the joy of the role play was that the children could act like real actors on the stage, express themselves and open up emotionally.
