When deciding on body vocabulary to teach, I highly recommend first teaching the body parts from the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” There are no extra words in this song, it is pure vocabulary and the students really love it if you speed it up each time! Make sure you clarify that “toes” means toes, not feet. Even after pointing and counting off all five toes, when I asked my students the Spanish word for “toe,” they emphatically shouted “!pie!” (foot!). I had to explain that toes were “dedos de pie,” not feet. We also had one student who told us that “kneesandtoes” was one body part, so explain “and” since it is used in both parts of the song.
After this have the students create a paper doll and write the body parts they already know on their doll and teach new vocabulary:
- "hand" and "foot"
- "right" and "left"
Providing that your students already know colors, now you have all the vocabulary you need to play Twister! The teacher should call out instructions the first time so that students can get used to hearing the words, then eventually let the students take over. We also wrote
"<------left, right-------->"
on the board to help during game play.
"The Hokey Pokey" song is good practice with right and left, and combines all the body parts learned so far. We did the following verses: "put your (right hand, left hand, right foot, left foot, head, body) in." Our students really enjoyed it because they already knew the song in Spanish.
It's really easy to transition from body parts to clothing. We used the paper dolls the students labeled while learning their body parts, and added clothing! It depends on the grade you are teaching, but we went ahead and cut out all the clothing ahead of time. We showed them a piece of real clothing (which we brought to be used in a later game), wrote the word on the board, had them repeat it numerous times, then passed out the paper equivalent and had them write the name on it. We chose the following vocabulary: shirt, pants, shoes, jacket, and hat. We also taught "dress" for the upcoming game. The kids really liked their dolls and played with them all week:
The last activity we did with clothing was a relay race. We had two piles of clothing at one end of the classroom, each consisting of a t-shirt, jacket, jeans, sundress, pair of tennis shoes, and a baseball hat.We reviewed the vocabulary by holding up the items, but the students were already familiar since we had taught using this same clothing. We then split the students into two teams and made two lines at the other end of the classroom. The teacher then says an article of clothing, and the first person in each line runs to their pile of clothing and holds up the item. The team that does this first gets a point, etc. After playing through the entire class this way, the second time around we blindfolded the student and had them kneel in front of the pile and find the clothing based on touch. This was a fun variation and the kids enjoyed cheering on their teammates.
What are your ideas for teaching body parts or clothing in English? What has worked well for you?
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