E.T.
I’ve been folding origami recently. At first I found it quite tricky, but once I got the knack of it – it’s easy!
This is how I introduced the one-point to my high level student. I wanted to see if he’d recognize his one-point in a natural catch-up type conversation about what we’d both been doing in the week. He did, of course, as a very meticulous student, and with an ah! he flipped open his notebook to and checked the phrase with his index finger and nodded.
Routine
The routine I decided to revise was routine 13 – the meeting. He’d not done this routine since early June – four months ago, so I thought it might challenge his fluency a little. Being in a rather small space it seemed unnecessary to write up the L & R shape on the board, when he could see the book right in front of him. So instead, I covered up the Teacher’s Guide story and we went through it straight from the book. As soon as he saw the routine he straightened his back a little and seemed rather pleased. His sentences and answers to his questions were very determined,his face frowning in concentration. The reason for this special attention is that he’d been waiting for this routine. He’d had a lot of trouble with it last time, and so had been practicing it on his own. I hadn’t taught that lesson, but it was clear that he understood the overall gist of the story – the two person dialog, and that he was aware that it was said in a joking way. What he had trouble with was some of the vocabulary, and had a tendency to make up a version of the story together based on context rather than what the routine actually said. Each of his mistakes were carefully noted in his book, and he seemed pretty pleased about how his study had paid off and how confidently he had moved through “The Meeting” this time.
Item
I wrote the six idioms from Idiom Lesson 4 on the board, and asked him to try and explain and/or use the idiom in a sentence. A fairly fun exercise for most students is looking at idiomatic English phrases. He’d heard of “early bird” before, so we talked about being early birds and catching the worm, which prompted him to start talking about his son’s personality in combination with the idiom “busy bee”. Particular glee was taken in the exact definition of this idiom, a person that works hard AND is cheerful about it, as well as “keep your eye on it”, watch and check CONTINUOUSLY. He thought “birds of a feather” was useful, though he said it wasn’t true for him and his friends, the only thing they had in common is playing golf.
One Point
Continuing on from his conversation about his son who’s not an early bird, we started talking about how much sleep one needs. I’d recently read an article in the paper that teenagers actually need a lot more sleep than previously thought – which is why they sleep so much. I asked him if he’d read the paper last night, and he had, so I asked him what he’d read, and he gave me a form of One Point B 40: Last night, in the paper I read an article about (A).
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