Gulliver’s Travels

CBSE, English, Grade – V, Unit - 7

A dwarf’s travel to giant world, a fantasy story to kindle
the children’s imagination

K. Adirai

Engage
Activity 1: Making ice-cream using charts, cotton and waste papers.
The lesson had all the elements of excitement and amusement, adventure, imagination and fantasy. To give a flavor of the ‘hugeness’ to the students. I made them create an imaginary ice cream cone using brown paper and used waste paper as fillers and cotton as cream. The icecream making was a huge entertainment andthe children were chattering excitedly. I used this opportunity to talk to them in English about hugeness.

To make them understand and feel what a travel would be like I asked them a few probing questions like: Where all have you been? What all was interesting during the course of your travel? How did you travel? How far did you go? What all did you take on your travel?

Activity 2: Animated video of “Gulliver’s Travels”
I used this video instead of giving a write up to read for the students. This was followed by a discussion about the story to relate it to the lesson. I noticed that the children hadkeenly observed the movie and pointed out the difference between the animated version and the book version. In the animated version Gulliver was huge and in the book version he was small.

Explore
Activity 1: Arranging the sentence strips to complete the story.
The lesson was too long and I felt the children may not be able to read and follow fully. So I decided to break it into chunks and give it as an activity where they could read the smaller sentences. I took 10 sentences from the lesson which captured the entire lesson. I wrote the sentences in strips and asked them to read it.
Known to the unknown: Since the children knew the sight words already they could read the text with ease. Wherever they had doubts they paused and syllabified the word to read with ease. They could read and understand it through context.
To assess whether they have comprehended I shuffled the sentences and asked them to sequence the story and they could do it with ease.

In the next step I told them to colour all the known words after reading the lesson. While they were able to break words like ‘discovered’ into syllables and read and comprehend, they struggled with words like ‘huge’. They read it as ‘hug’ or ‘huggy’ as they knew it. They could not add the ‘e’ and read it as ‘huge’, ‘barren’ was read as ‘bar’ and then ‘ren’ separately. They could not combine the syllables.
In the coloring activity there were some words which were left uncolored as they did not know it. These were words like: bellow, inhabitant, barren, astonishment, crumbled, grab for which I explained the meaning in context.
Explain
Activity 1 : Using realia in class to bring out the qualities of an object (adjectives)
Objects like rose, chalk, cotton, feather, sugar were used for this activity. When I called out to the students showing the object mentioned, they told me about the quality of each object like light feather, sweet sugar, red rose, white chalk and so on. Then I asked them to list other sweet things, and some colored objects in red and white.
Activity 2 : Video on Degrees of comparison h t t p s : / / w w w . y o u t u b e . c o m / watch?v=rogBBoMzVAU - To bring out the degrees of comparison I showed them this video. This was followed by a picture activity where they had to add ‘er’ and ‘est’ using the picture work sheets created.
Evaluate
Activity: Punctuation
There was a portion of the passage where the children had to use punctuation. I found the activity uninteresting. Though it had come in class 3 they were not sure about it. So I wanted to introduce it in a practical manner. For this they had to know how to read a sentence first and understand its meaning. Only then they will be able to punctuate the sentence. So I decided to do it in a practical manner.

Step 1: I made them form groups, I made them form a sentence using the given words cut in chart sheets.
Step 2: They had to arrange the words into sentence and give its meaning. Here I used a lot of gestures to convey the essence of the sentence and this enabled them to find the meaning of the sentences.
Step 3: I had a cut out of punctuation marks:

   ,                       !                 ?

Step 4: I explained the use of a full stop, comma, question mark and exclamation mark.
Step 5: When the children formed a sentence I asked the children holding the placard bearing the punctuation mark to go and stand at the appropriate place.
In this playful way they understood the relevance of punctuation marks. In this lesson I focused mainly on punctuations and adjectives. The videos helped them understand the concept and they could remember it well. The punctuation marks were done in the form of a role play.