A teacher asked me today how to teach prepositions to his class of children learning English. For prepositions it’s good to use real objects and movement.
PRESENT THE PREPOSITIONS
Take a toy Ferrari (or use a pen if you forgot to bring in your toy Ferrari that day) and put it on a book – show the class, saying “the car is on the book”. Now show the car under the book, and next to the book.
Bring up a couple of your best students to front to demonstrate and tell them “put your pen on your book”. Repeat with under and next too. Now do this with the whole class – everyone is listening and placing their items as you say.
GAME TO TEACH PREPOSITIONS
Next play Simon Says: “Simon says put your pen on your book. Put your pen under your book.” You are OUT if you put your pen under your book because Simon did not say so. However you don’t want students to be out of a game, since they will not be learning as well, and they will get bored and probably start messing around, so you make two teams, each team has three lives, when one team has no more lives the other team is the winner – that way everyone plays all the time.
A key element of my classroom games is maxium involvement of all kids, most of the time – you get the best results that way.