Sunday, March 4, 2012

Rudolph the Red Nosed Ghazala?

It has been a very very very long week with midterms, papers and a hectic work week. I am not on Spring Break! Yay! I just want to thank Amirah and Miran on Twitter for helping me last night to brainstorm ideas for today's lesson plans! Follow them, they're awesome! When students are learning a second or third language, throwing many vocabulary words at them is useless. One new word per day is practical and also reviewing the words you have taken the days before. But since Sunday Schools taken place only once a week, I try to do 1-3 words but focus on one word. Today the students learned the word: Ghamad (close; i.e., close your eyes), Ghaba (forest), and Ghazala (Gazelle, or for simplicity sake, deer).
So I had the students "ghammad" their "Ein" (eyes, which we took last week) imagine they were walking in a forest (ghaba) and they see beautiful animals and come across a ghazala. And I kept going on and on until I told them to open their eyes. I then introduced the letter
غ
 (Ghein)

I had them say it a couple of times and had someone explain to me and the classroom how this letter was different from the letter we took last week (Ein) because of the dot. I passed out paper lunch bags and they all wrote the letter ghein several times. They think of it as a backwards 3 with a dot on the top (hey whatever works, right?).

And this was the activity:


Supplies: (plus popsicle sticks and contraction paper)

This is how mine turned out:

My ghazala got hungry last night and started eating the supplies. :(


The kids' masterpiece:









It was a long day.Let's just say I'm glad the week is over and so it today. What are other words that start with the letter "ghein" that children might enjoy learning about?

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