This term my junior primary students are learning target structures for Catherina’s snake story. This week we focused on ular (snake). After showing a PowerPoint of pictures of ular’s which included pictures of worms & cicak’s (geckos) all ways to get repetitions of the structure ular, I finished with a few pages of ular’s hiding in environments and asked the students, “Dimana ular? (Where is the snake)  They absolutely loved this although the touch TV screen was challenging!

Afterwards I tried a fantastic TPR game that Bu Anne wrote about recently and it was a big hit. I asked the students to stand up and spread out around the room. We then revised the positions needed for the 3 words in the game. The 3 words this time are: sekolah (school), cicak (gecko) and ular (snake). If I said ular, the students lay on the ground like a snake, if I said sekolah, they stood tall with a roof over their head and if I said cicak, they got down on their hands and knees. It is good to choose 3 words that give you 3 levels of movement and also ensure that the only unfamiliar  word is the target structure and the other 2 are familiar from previous stories.

Once the students were familiar with the game, I added various levels of complexity. Firstly I said just 2 words (ular/cicak) about 3 times each and once they were in a rhythm, I tricked them by repeating the last word! eg ular, cicak, ular, cicak, ular, cicak, cicak! Another way to ramp it up was to say it again without any gestures and finally to really ramp up the listening, use the wrong gestures!! All classes absolutely loved this TPR brainbreak.