The Milkman’s Cow

CBSE, English, Grade – IV, Unit - VI

Kindness works better than anger

K. Padmini

ENGAGE
Activity 1
A video story, “Too much Noise” on sensitivity to other animals, was projected in class. The children were very excited because they were seeing the animated projection of a story for the first time. Children listened to the story with rapt attention and watched the visuals with interest. At the end of the story, I asked them what the story was all about. One student said that it was about sound, another said that the hero of the story got angry because of too much sound. Another child said that because of too much noise the man put on head phones on himself and on his cows he put headphones for his family members as well. Though the audio of the story was very low, children were able to relate to the visual sequence and come up with a complete story. Beginning the lesson with a video helped to get their enthusiasm levels high.
EXPLORE
Activity 1
I gave the children names of animals (cat, hen, parrot and goat) and asked them to discuss in pairs what they knew about the animal. They were given five minutes to discuss about the animal. After the discussion, the students talked about the animals and said two sentences about the animal in English. I helped them the first time and subsequently the students themselves spoke in English. A student who had the ‘hen’ flash card said,
“Hen gives us eggs, it helps us like a clock.” I asked whether it was the hen or cock that sounds louder in the morning to which everybody answered that it was the cock.

Activity 2
I then gave the children a picture story. They were divided into 2 groups and had to observe the picture and narrate a story on their own. This was an activity that held their attention. Lots of peer interaction went on among the children. The children were engaged in this with utmost concentration. The picture story was child friendly and they could relate to it. The children could interact and come up with an imaginative story line. Stories according to me are an interesting medium for language learning. A story lends itself to mastering a lot of language skills. I could ask them a lot of questions and their interest was kindled. Very soon they picked up the language.

EXPLAIN
Activity 1
I read out the lesson with correct pronunciation, intonation and pause and made the students to follow the reading and colour the difficult words. Students were very eager to colour and read the difficult words. While they were doing this activity, I went around and observed the number of words coloured. When I pointed out that the number of coloured words was less than the words uncoloured they were happy that they knew so many words in English.

Activity 2
 
I made  t h e  s t u d e n t s  f o r m g r o u p s  and made them find the meaning of the following words using the dictionary. Like, mood, refuse, pray, wrestler Students discussed the meaning groups. Students were interested in finding the meaning using dictionary.

Activity 3
I gave students some story strips and asked them to arrange them in the chronological order. Students arranged the strips correctly and understood the story. This was the 1st in the series of activities for developing independent reading. The children then read the story with relative ease, as they were familiar with the words they had looked up in the dictionary.
Stage 2:
I divided the children into groups and gave story strips without numbers. The children had to look at the pictures, arrange the strips in an order and give the story in their own words. The scaffolding was done in stages. This made the children feel at ease with the lesson.

Elaborate
Guided book activity:
I gave flash cards to each andevery student and asked them to paste the cards under the correct tense. Students pasted the cards correctly and learnt the present and past tense of a few words. I divided the students into groups and gave each group a paragraph. Students discussed in the group and underlined the words in simple past tense and wrote them on the blackboard. I also gave some sentences and pictures related to the

sentence to two groups in the class. The students discussed and matched the pictures with the sentences. The last picture of the story should be completed by the students. The students came out with different pictures and the best one was selected and drawn. They were asked to give a suitable title to the story. They came up withmany different titles. The best title was selected for the story. Students enjoyed this activity very much because of the story and were happy to give their own title to the story.
Evaluate: I gave worksheets to the students. The students can be evaluated by the way they filled the worksheet. Students understanding ability and eagerness towards the lesson are evaluated throughout the class.