Career Change: Teaching Idioms and Memoirs!

I thought I would share a couple of lesson which worked really, really well this past week:  Idioms and Memoirs!  

First up: Idioms.  Because 99% of my students are either ELLs or FLEPs, their grasp of the English language is far from perfect.  Idioms are something that many of my students just don't understand.  After all, why would someone from the Dominican Republic, Senegal, or India be able to comprehend "barking up the wrong tree" or "piece of cake".  Well, my fellow teachers, I give you two words: Idioms Pictionary!  I did this lesson with my Freshman honors class and it worked well.  I started by explaining what idioms are and giving them the definition.  Next, I broke the class into two teams (as it's a class of 7, this is manageable). In this case, I did boys versus girls. Next, I had them play Idioms Pictionary on the whiteboard, in which one person from each team had to draw the literal translation of the idiom while their team tried to guess the idiom. I did this exercise before giving them the list, just to see how well they knew them.  Sad to say, the boys kicked the girls' butts.  Then I had them review a list of common American idioms.  Then in pairs, they read An Idiomatic Story and tried to figure out the meaning of the 10 idioms. Finally, we wrapped it up with an idioms exit slip and another round of Idioms Pictionary. I also gave them an idioms crossword puzzle for homework. All in all, it was a fun class and my students learned a bunch of new idioms. I'm going to try this lesson again this upcoming week with my senior classes, which will not be nearly as manageable because of the class sizes, but it's worth a try.

Next: Memoirs. I was at a loss as to what to do with my Freshman writing class one day and then it hit me: 6-Word Memoirs.  When I was working at my last corporate job in NYC, we did an evening of 6-Word Memoirs and it was a ton of fun.  For those that don't know the background, Hemingway was challenged once to write a 6 word story.  He wrote:  "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn."  One of the few stories that Hemingway wrote that I actually like.  What Smith Magazine did was take it to a personal level and created the 6-Word Memoir site. The trick is to try to write your memoir in 6 words. I've posted quite a few of my own to the website.  Here's the lesson that I did with my Freshman: I asked them if they knew what a memoir was (no, they didn't), so I gave them the definition and explained memoirs. Then I told them that they would be writing their memoirs today but there was a catch, they could only use 6 words.  They all freaked -- saying that it could not be done.  I next showed them a couple of videos released by Smith Mag:  6 Word Memoirs and 6 Word Memoirs by Teens.  I also had a couple of copies of the 6 Word Memoirs for Teens book (I Can't Keep My Own Secrets) for them to get inspiration.  As an exercise, I first broke them up into teams in which they had to create "memoirs" about the high school.  Each team created 4 school-based memoirs, with most being about the limitations of wearing uniforms. They then set to work writing their individual memoirs.  By the end of class, each student had to write 5 different memoirs and the one that they liked best would be posted to the SmithTeens website.  Another stellar  lesson.  (I don't have many being a 1st year teacher, but I was pretty proud of these two lessons.)