This is my Monster

The more I teach English, the more I love it. I spent a long time the other day trying to find teaching exercises and games.....

I found this "Monster Game" and it is golden! I put numbers 1-5 in one bag, and body parts in another bag. The students take turns pulling out one number and one body part and then they have to draw the monster accordingly. After their monsters were all colored, I asked them to write a paragraph introducing their monster.


This is what Emily wrote. "This is my monster. His name is Bob. He is five years old. He is has four ears, three eyes, a nose, three mouths, five arms and three legs."

This was a big step for my students as two of them have never studied English before. Now 10 classes later they can write a a few short sentences! I was so proud. Of course their sentence structure is all a-wack and their spelling is wrong, but they tried hard. They were all giggles every time a new body part was pulled out of the bag. "heee hee! FIVE NOSES!!!"



After the monster game, we played a game with sentence structure. I gave them a group of words written on separate pieces of paper that made a sentence, but they have to put them all together in the right order. For days we have reviewed grammar and sentence structure and using articles (the, a, an) but I saw it really stick today. They raced against each other to see who could put their sentence together first- this was a great way to review all the vocabulary we've learned up to date.

When Scott and I were in Hong Kong we found UNO "Stack-ems"... it's like a Jenga game but you have to play according to UNO rules (complete with a wild, skip, and draw two). I use this as a time-filler if a student is finishing a test or I have to work one-on-one with someone, but it's aslo a good color/number reminder.... plus who doesn't love the shrieks and laughs when the tower finally falls?

Totally unrelated note: I cannot wait to move to a house that actually has cabinets. Looking in the back-ground of this picture I hate all the clutter, but there's no where else to put pots, pans, Tupperware, spices etc. Scott teases me everyday that the house gets rearranged every weekend and he can never find anything.... but with no cabinets I have to keep trying to be creative so I don't go clutter-crazy. *yes, that thing on the counter that looks like a microwave is our oven!*