A Warm-up Activity for Lesson 5 "Every Day Is a New Opportunity"

 



In today's class, to build or activate Class 209 students' schema for the baseball part in the reading of Lesson 5 "Every Day Is a New Opportunity," I invited Sao-chen (王少宸) to give a talk on the MLB. Since the purpose was not to teach English but to help the students to have a clearer idea about the MLB, I allowed Sao-chen to talk in Chinese. He did a marvelous job, introducing the MLB, the Division Series, Wild Card, the ALCS, NLCS, and the World Series. He even told two interesting stories about Babe Ruth. Everyone in the class learned a lot from him.

 After that, I gave students a handout to check their understanding of the MLB system. In fact, the handout had two sides, one for the MLB system and the other for some baseball terms.

Baseball terms and MLB.doc

Pressed for time, we could only go over the MLB system today. The students were asked to fill in the blanks of a short passage which was adapted from the MLB article at Wikipedia, based on Sao-chen's report and the diagram above the passage. They did this individually first, and then were given four minutes to discuss their answers in groups. Later, each group had to write their group answers on the blackboard. The group which got all the seven answers correct earned 5 points.

Without the schema, the students would have found the mission impossible. However, with the schemal built/activated, 5 groups out 7 got the 5 points. Thank you, Sao-chen.

Then we moved on to the first few paragraphs of the reading.

Now that the students have a clear idea about the MLB system, we can go over the reading part of the lesson smoothly.