Ipods and Ipads and all kinds of fun.... oh my....

I spent last night pondering ways to make my students speak English after they leave my classroom. I love homework. I especially love homework when it has more of a purpose than just assigning homework for the sake of having homework. On the other hand, there are days when I do want to assign homework just for the sake of it. I want homework to be the norm and expectation in my class, not something unusual. I think the iPods are going to make it just that.

We are studying adjectives right now. I usually do this in conjunction with some sort of a content-area lesson, but this time I'm just studying adjectives for the sake of studying adjectives. Of course, later on they'll need these words when we are comparing things in science or talking about different countries in social studies, but for now we're just learning some adjectives.

So this morning I had them build a vocabulary notebook of some adjectives I think are most common. We took pictures from a photo dictionary and pasted them into their notebooks, and they wrote the adjectives next to the pictures. Then, we dug through some other magazines to find the words that had not been listed in their dictionaries. Students got to present their photo concepts of young and old and short and tall to the class. We followed that with some practice constructing some sentences orally. "The baby is young. The mother is old." We're not doing comparatives yet. We are just learning the vocabulary.

And then the cool part. I challenged the kids to take their iPod touches somewhere in the room and to videotape themselves making a comparison. They could do any of the vocabulary that we had done in class that morning, and they came up with some good stuff. The keys were to find two things and then orally compare them on the video so that they could be heard clearly saying the sentences. The kids really got a kick out of it.

Homework? Five more comparisons at home tonight. And they have to teach at least two of those words to someone in their family. I'm checking on the video comparison, not on the teaching. But I think it will be good.