After being told to stick to the textbook and to have the students in Form 2 complete the exercises after the lesson on auxiliary verbs, I was frustrated that I wasn’t allowed to explore the topic of auxiliary verbs in my own way. Why should it matter the means or the way that I go about teaching as long as in the end students understand what auxiliary verbs are? I was worried that I would lose the student’s interest and attention (especially Form 2 West, a group of active boys who learn best when they are doing hands on activities) halfway through this lesson. Imagine spending eighty minutes taking notes on identifying primary auxiliary verbs that are used to form the perfect or the progressive aspect. Then, imagine reading through endless example sentences and underlining or filling in the correct tense of the auxiliary verb. I bet you are bored just reading those few sentences.
As a teacher, I understand that not every lesson can be fun and exciting, and sometimes it is absolutely appropriate to take notes and lecture, however, my style of teaching doesn’t allow me to have my students copy endless notes from their textbook without finding someway to liven up a lesson. I believe that if students are exploring new concepts in a fun and exciting way, preferably hands on, they will better understand and remember those concepts. However, I also understand the need to respect the school, its curriculum texts, and the culture, especially since they have so graciously welcomed me in and allowed me to volunteer teach at Mema. The only solution to this dilemma was a compromise.
So today Form 2 boys took notes on auxiliary verbs. They learned that the term auxiliary verb is a fancy-smancy term that is short for helping verb. Students learned that the purpose of the auxiliary verb is to help the main verb in order to give a specific meaning to a sentence. They learned that primary auxiliaries are used: with main verbs to express tense (tense auxiliaries); to show agreement between subject and verbs (singular vs. plural auxiliaries); to form questions (the auxiliary verb goes before the subject); and used in the perfective and progressive aspect (present tense auxiliaries are progressive while past tense auxiliaries are perfect).
After all that intense note-taking and explaining what all that meant. It was time to do some book exercises. Before class, I wrote down all of the sentences from the exercises in the book on sticky notes. I put the sticky notes on the board. Knowing how silly and active the Form 2 boys can get, I introduced to them the game of charades. I had them form groups and each group had to come up to the board, select a sticky note and act out the sentence on it. After the class guessed what was being acted, the group read the sentence to the class and wrote it on the board. As a class we underlined the auxiliary verb in the sentence, changed the auxiliary verb to the correct tense, or filled in the missing auxiliary verb. Students had a blast! We were able to get all the bookwork and exercises from the book done, but we were also able to do it in an exciting and hands on way.
A group selecting a sentence to act out.
Each sticky note has a sentence from their textbook.
This group acted out the sentence:
Kindly do the work for me.
Can you name the auxiliary verb?
This group is acting out the sentence:
The story about the monkeys wearing make-up was a hoax.
If you think regular charades is hard, try acting out a silly sentence like this!
Presenting Form 2 West...they are quite the group of actors.
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