Claudie's Class, 2/26 and 3/5

Ciao! Mi Chiamo Alex. Hello! My name is Alex. This semester I started teaching Italian in Claudie's Kindergarten class along with my classmates Nick, Brennan, and Alex.

We got off to a great start in our first couple of classes! As soon as we arrived all the kids were so excited to have us there. Kids at this age get distracted easily, but they gave us their full attention, eager to have us reveal the mysteries of Italian. We started off the class in a circle doing Ring Around the Rosy. Then, we transitioned to the Italian version: Giro Giro Tondo. It goes like this:

Giro Giro Tondo, Casca il mondo. Casca la terra. Tutti giù per terra! Here's a YouTube link, if you are curious what that sounds like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlznluvNvec&feature=related. The kids loved it and someone suggested we do it a million times! Lucky for them Giro Giro Tondo is how we open and close every lesson. At this point they're even singing it themselves!

After GGT, we split up into smaller groups to teach the kids how to introduce themselves. As suggested by the opening, "Ciao, mi chiamo ___" means "Hello, my name is ____." Following the introductions, we got back into a big group and did a number exercise with the kids to teach them the numbers 1-10 in Italian. We held up visual numbers cut out of poster board as we went through each number and as a physical response we had them clap a number of times that corresponded to each number. With every new number we included the previous numbers, so that through repetition they could commit the new information to memory. Some of the kids were shy about speaking up, but eventually everyone was participating! In the end we closed with Giro Giro Tondo. If you'd like to hear the numbers one through ten and see how they are written, you might find this website helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccD5MT_TXl0

Alex, Brennan, Nick, and I were so excited to go back a second time, but we were also worried about whether the kids would have remembered anything. We did an afternoon greeting exercise with the introductions from last week and they did great! A couple of kids got mixed up, but after a bit of laughter they were able to correct themselves and move on with no problem. Then we reviewed the numbers and they remembered! Through our visual posterboard numbers, we introduced the colors to the kids. The colors and pronunciation can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccD5MT_TXl0 (this includes a few more than we introduced).

To reinforce the colors and assess the kids' knowledge of the colors we split up into our groups and played "I Spy." At first I picked out things in the room of various colors and would say "I spy something rosso (red), for example. Eventually they were the spies and were able to recall colors correctly. It was great to see them take ownership of the game in that way. After a bit of I Spy we reconvened in the bigger group to further test the kids' knowledge of colors. We played a game in a circle in which one of us called out that whoever was wearing something of a certain color needed to switch places. Although there was sometimes a bit of a traffic jam, or confusion about where to go, people knew when their color was being called. As always, we closed with Giro Giro Tondo! We're so excited for next time, in which our new topic will be animals!

A presto (talk to you soon!),

Alex, Brennan, Nick, and Alex