AimLanguageLearning.com

[schrauwers]

HELLO!

I will be teaching ESL this summer in three blocks of a week each. I will have my Francophone students all day, 5 hours a day. What are anyone's thoughts of using THE THREE LITTLE PIGS and a lot of PDL in one week's time and perhaps doing some activity sheets? They are total beginners.

Is this too short of a time frame? Can I make this work to a certain extent?

[kareno]

Yes, it will work to a certain extent. I have used AIM in a camp-like situation. It was for 2 and a half hours a day for five days. It's important to do a lot of other things to break things up because standard AIM lessons take a lot of concentration on the part of the students. When I did my lessons, the first thing I actually did was to break my morning into 3 parts and to have to "recess" breaks.
How old will your students be and how much AIM experience do you have? These two things will make a big difference in terms of the amount of success you will have.

[schrauwers]

Thank you so much! I have a lot of AIM experience for FSL, none for ESL and I will be doing 'The three little pigs', perhaps 'the cat and the moon'.... The students are grades 3-5 So when you do this in camp, you introduce the plays or you do just PDL?

Do you film their plays at the end?
Do you give any activity sheets?
How do you break up your day, could you perhaps give me some examples. Feel free to send me a PM!

Thank you so much!!!

[kareno]

You may find some info here useful:

http://aimlanguagelearning.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2296&highlight=summer+camp

Here are some other answers to your questions:
introduce the plays or do just PDL? I definitely did introduce a story, although I chose something very simple as I had a total of about 7 hours with my students. Also, I wanted the students to do some writing and so I kept the story itself very short. Your students are younger so you may want to spend more time doing just oral activities.

film their plays? No, we just did not have enough time to do that kind of thing.

give any activity sheets? Yes I did in my situation.

how to break up the day? We played games such as Frappe les mots and Madame Dit. We also sang songs. I tried to be creative with the vocab. For example, after teaching the students a few body parts, we did all of the following activities using this vocab:
-ask them to move in certain ways and then they act it out e.g. Tout le monde frappe les genoux 3 fois.
-Sing "tête, épaules, genoux et pieds"
-write body parts of small pieces of paper and then tape onto a student. Then we had a race with this!
-draw monsters. First everyone draws just the head and I give instructions as to how many eyes and such. Then they draw the neck and fold the paper over so you can just see part of the neck. Then they give the paper to the next person who draws the body. A third child draws the legs.
With these activities all instructions were gestured so there was a lot more vocab happening than just the body parts. My group was actually mixed ability with about half being total beginners. In a situation where everyone is a total beginner it would be different.