Pre-K Self Portraits! 3/24/2010

Today was a really super day! Our goal for class today was to teach the students some words referring to parts of a person's face: face (faccia), nose (naso), mouth (bocca), eyes (occhi), and ears (orecchie). We divided into two groups this time. One of the groups had a book called The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum. This group read the book together pointing out and trying to use the Italian word when they would see a nose or a mouth within the story. We also enjoyed using this book, but it is an introduction to museums, a theme we hope to develop further this semester. In the other group, we used a doll to illustrate the different parts of a face in Italian. This doll was also pretty special because she spoke Italian if one squeezes her hand! We thought it would be a interesting way for the kids to hear even more Italian. After reading the book or using the doll, the students in both groups were given a chance to make their own faces!

We gave them paper with varying shapes to be used as faces and then we let them each choose the number of noses, mouths, ears, and eyes that they wanted to glue to their paper faces! The kids really enjoyed creating weird faces. I saw one of the faces that the kids drew which had ears in five different places! We then ended the class with a song about the parts of a face set to the tune of Frere Jacques. I hope to you to

see their faces, and maybe even get to here their song!

Pre-K Pizza Italiana 3/3/2010

For this week we introduced them to Italian numbers using their favorite Italian food - pizza! We started out the lesson in small groups by showing our students cards with different numbers of of various things and counting them. (One pineapple, 2 mushrooms, 3 oranges, 4 apples, and so on.) We then practiced a couple of times counting to ten in Italian together. After a bit of practice with the Italian numbers, we started playing our Italian counting game. We divided the students into two small groups. For each round of the game, we asked for a student from each group. We would then say an Italian number and asked them to hold up the correct number of fingers. Whichever student guessed correctly won that round! We also prepared, two large paper pizzas, one for each group. Whichever student won the Italian numbers game could glue toppings onto their group's pizza. For example, when Everett correctly held up three fingers he was able to glue three toppings onto his group's pizza. We then switched the game around by holding up fingers ourselves and asking the students to say how many fingers we were holding up in Italian. In the end, the allure of finishing their own pizza really got them going with their Italian numbers! We finished the lesson by getting together again and singing a numbers song to the melody of Frere Jacques. We hope you get to come by and see some of the pizzas that they made, because they sure do look delicious, at least to us!

A Dopo!

Julia, Giancarlo, Lam

Pre-K The First Days 2/17/10 and 2/24/10

Wow! Our first couple of lessons with the Pre-K class was incredibly fun and working with the kids makes time fly. We started out the first by just asking them whether they knew any words in Italian or any facts about Italy, and they were excited to share words like Ciao and pizza and pasta. (Their faces really lit up when we mentioned pizza.) They were earnestly excited to learn a bit of Italian and really behaved themselves as they were listening to what were saying. Their excitement at learning something new and really made the class riveting for both us and them.

For the first lesson, we made everyone name tags that included the student's name, an Italian adjective and a picture of the adjective. We started our introductions of ourselves by asking each other, "Come ti chiami?" (What is your name?) and then responding, "Mi Chiamo..." (My name is...). We then went on to pass out the name tags by asking each child the same question, "Come ti chiami?" and asking them to respond in Italian. We then split them into three smaller groups to play introductory games with them. We asked each student to think of an action for the a

djective on their name tags so they could act out their adjective. For example, Ruth's adjective was romantica and her action was an air kiss, which she acted out beautifully! We then each acted out their actions and asked them to guess who we were. For Ruth, I would act out the air kiss and then ask the students who I was. They could very quickly guess

that I was acting out Ruth! After acting out an action each time, we would reinforce the introductions we were teaching by asking again, "Come ti chiami?" and asking the students to respond correctly. They really picked up these phrases and their adjectives so quickly that we had a lot of fun playing our introductions game! We ended our first lesson by doing our Italian introductions all again with our actions in a big group together.

For our second lesson, we worked with colors by first introducing the students to the colors using colored dots. Rosso is red, giallo is yellow, verde is green, etc. We then asked them to name some things that were each color, and showed them pictures of differently colored fruits! We then showed them uncolored fruits and asked them to name which color the fruits should have been in Italian. We ended this game by showing them incorrectly colored fruits and asking them to identity what colors the fruits were supposed to be. You should have seen them when we showed them purple bananas and blue strawberries! At the end of this lesson, we gave each child a colored dot and got together in a big group and to sing a song with colors using the tune of "Old McDonald." We asked them to stand up each time they heard the color they had in the song. They really liked singing together and it was a ton of fun hearing them catch on to the song so quickly!

These first two lessons have been pretty spectacular, and the chance to experience how quickly these kids pick up language has been both a pleasure and an awe inspiring experience. We're very excited to continue working with the Pre-K class, and we really think an experience of Italian culture and language with the kids will be a blast!

A Dopo (See you later),

Julia, Giancarlo, Lam

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