Hello. For my third post, I choose one of my own experience related with the learning of English in early ages.
When I was in my last practice time, my tutor and I had a problem: “How we can teach children to use the auxiliary verb ‘do’ in negative sentences without making the explanation boring?” and there was where my mind starts to think about a way to explain it without saying the grammar part. We have to take into account that children of 6-7 years didn’t know how to build correctly a sentence (subject + verb + complements) at this time of the course, because this part was later.
Talking to my tutor, she told me that she thinks about creating a character named Mr. Do who needs the negative particle ‘not’ to appear and help them to create the negative sentence. So, starting from this idea, I decided to give our character a “body”, in order to help children with it, because if children see that Mr. Do exists, they pay more attention to our explanation and they also remember what Mr. Do wants to help us.
But all this thoughts could be nothing if Mr. Do doesn’t work in class and teach children how to create the structure of a negative sentence. To know that, we have to apply it in our class, so my tutor called all the children to the “assembly space” and introduce Mr. Do with questions to the children, for example:
- Teacher: Alejandro, do you like apples?
- Alejandro: Yes, I do
- Teacher: Ok, and, Lucia, do you like bananas?
- Lucia: No, I don’t (because children knows how to answer correctly that questions)
- Teacher: Ok, so, to learn how to say that Lucia doesn’t like bananas, we need “Mr. Do”
- Children: Mr. Do???
- Teacher: Yes, Mr. Do is a special guest for saying that we don’t like something. So, he will help us if we give him our ‘not’ of the sentence. For example: I wrote “I like apples”, but, how I can say that “I not like apples”? I need Mr. Do, who helps me if I give him… what Mr. Do needs?
- Children: The no!!!
- Teacher: That’s right! So, he will come to our sentence (I do not like apples) and we write I don’t like apples.
I think this method can work to teach children how to make a negative sentence if they don’t know “conscientiously” how to create a sentence, and, from this experience, I knew that they like the character because they told me “Jaime, will you bring back Mr. Do again?” and I have to answer that I don’t know because Mr. Do is too busy working for other children.
To end the post, I leave you here a question: Do you think this kind of resources will help children to learn better?
Hello Jaime!
I have read the title of your post and I was really curious about this Mr. Do, and I have found it very interesting for several reasons:
First of all, I think that introducing a new character it is something that is going to be really catchy for the students and it is going to help them to not to forget how to put the verb “do” in negative sentences.
Another interesting fact about this is that, this kind of resources, are really simple and easy to create for the teacher. They don`t need any kind of materials just their imagination and creativity.
Moreover, we all have the experience of learning grammar in a really passive and repetitive way, always using examples, doing exercises… but with this simple detail we can do a lesson so much entertained for our students.
If I have to say a “negative” aspect it would be that maybe this resource is not going to work in all the levels of primary, for example with the third cycle, so the teacher must adapt it to make it appropriate to the age and level of the students.
Thanks for sharing, I think I will introduce Mr. Do to my future students.
Hello Jaime!
First of all thank you for shearing this great idea with all of us! I think it is very original to create a new character in the class and as you could see in the practicum it is also very useful. For us as future teacher it is very important have lot of different resources and materials to be able to explain children difficult concepts or ideas that they don’t understand very well and in your post we can see a great example! We can use this idea to teach other things!