s Thoughts from the Physics Chick: Things I have learned in Primary

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Things I have learned in Primary

1. Kids act up because they're bored

I sympathize with bored, restless kids because I hated primary. It bored me to tears. (Literally. I used to cry on Saturday nights because I had to go to primary the next day. Or maybe it was on Sunday nights because I had to go to school and be bored. I'll have to check.)

So, sometimes the thing is to give them more to do (at an age-appropriate level), not less. And if they can get up and move around, so much the better.

2. Sign language is great

I forgot about using sign language to learn songs because it didn't work well with the first song I tought them in May. (The song was very short and full of proper names, and sign language doesn't help much for those.) Come the end of June, we'd been working on a song all month and the kids still weren't getting it. Then I introduced sign language and we learned almost the entire song in one day.

To do justice to my linguistics training, I should point out that we're not learning actual sign language (whose grammar is entirely different from English). And we're not even doing proper Signed English, because we're not signing all of the grammar words, just the major content words. (You'd think we could just make up actions to go to the words, but it doesn't work as well as the actual ASL signs. I'm not sure what the significance of that is.) It also helps them remember some of the more arcane vocabulary. (I.e., the sign for "abound" looks like "lots and lots.")

1 Comments:

At July 20, 2009 11:43 AM, Blogger Melyngoch said...

Definitely these are principles to apply to my freshlings.

 

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