What an exciting day of learning at Mema Secondary School! Today, Form 2 boys spent the morning learning about indefinite pronouns. We began our grammar lesson by defining and understanding exactly, what on earth, an indefinite pronoun is. We defined indefinite pronouns as: a pronoun which does not refer to a definite number of things or people. We listed as many indefinite pronouns as we could think of on the board, including: everyone, most, nobody, somebody, all, few, neither, both, plenty, anyone, someone, nobody, etc. After discussing and taking notes on singular and plural indefinite pronouns, we looked back at our list and organized our indefinite pronouns into the two categories.
I was a little worried that my class of forty boys were ready to fall asleep after creating sentences using the list, so I introduced to them a mini-project to recapture their interest and creativity while showing me that they could apply indefinite pronouns to their writing. The mini-project was an art and grammar opportunity. Students were told that they must select a product or a service that they wanted to sell. They were to create an add or a brochure for their business to entice people to buy their product or service. There were no limits on their creativity; however, they had to use at least six indefinite pronoun phrases in their ad. After I had finished the general description of the project I realized that the confused looks on their faces were not going away. So before I could go into anymore detail, I asked them if they had ever seen a tv commercial, a brochure advertising a place, or a newspaper ad selling a product. Only two students raised their hand. When I asked them to raise their hands if they had never seen an ad or a brochure nearly ever student in the class raised their hand. After almost 15 minutes explaining what an ad was, we were ready to begin our brochures.
I walked the boys step-by-step through creating their brochures, even showing them how to fold the paper I had to purchased for this lesson, into three columns so that it opened like a real brochure. I told students to come up with a catchy business name and then I told them that the company name, a slogan, and a picture of the product or service had to go on the cover, followed by the product or service description on the first inside flap. The remaining flaps had to contain six phrases (including two singular indefinite pronouns, two plural indefinite pronouns, and two of types of indefinite pronouns of their choice) that refered to their business, in order to pursuade people to buy what they were selling.
After making sure that the directions were clear, I handed out colored pencils for them to begin work. I was shocked to see that students were still looking at me confused. I asked them what was wrong. A student raised his hand and explained that they have only done work in their exercise books (notebooks) and that they were not sure what I wanted them to do. I explained that I wanted them to take the remaining 45 minutes to work on creating a brochure fin class. There was lots of looking around and laughing before students got down to work. Five minutes later, students were busy writing and designing their brochure. They were even raising their hands to ask questions and to have me look at their work. Students genuinely looked like they were enjoying the activity!
Despite how foreign this activity was to them, the brochures I saw were very creative and fun. Students were hard at work selling their chickens, goats, and cows, as well as, t-shirts, cars, and sausages. Students were having fun, laughing, being creative, and doing an outstanding job at applying indefinite pronouns. Here were a few of the phrases that some students used in their brochures: “Everybody is welcome to buy their chickens from Archer’s Chicken Farm!”, “Plenty of people buy their cars from Motors for You, Inc. Come get yours today!”, and “Nobody is unhappy when they get their eggs from Egg Sellers Coop.” It is amazing what these students can do when given the opportunity to step outside the box in applying what they have learned!
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