In ESL 3 class we continued to focus on grammar, this time on the past tense of words. The activity involved both regular and irregular verbs and the combination of the present tense and past tense of a word exisiting right above and below the other allows for students to spot patterns in verb conjugation. It also opened up a short discussion on candy corn, a staple candy of Halloween, and how it is traditional and often used for decoration, but not many people actually like the candy itself.
After that, we did a Read, Stop, and Write activity. The reading material was non-fiction and about bats. The first paragraph was about the differences between birds and bats, while the second paragaph talked more about bats in general. The first question asked the students to find the ways in which bats and birds differ (so compare and contrast), while paragraph two asked for the students' definitions of nocturnal, based on context clues.
After completing the reading activity, the students watched a National Geographic Kids' video about bats, and learned some new and interesting facts about bats: such as how they are good for pest control and how bats pollinate flowers and plants. Thank you, bats!
To wrap everything up, we did a Halloween Crossword Puzzle, which was good for building up Halloween based vocabulary, and strengthening students abilities in spelling and understanding context clues.