Units

Students are asked to communicate using a bank of nouns - and nothing else.

Goals

• Communicate with a partner using only nouns.
• Discuss what can and can't be easily expressed using only nouns.
• Determine which other types of words are useful for expressing complex ideas.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that this activity will involve you trying to express progressively more complicated concepts and actions to a partner using only these words, your own body language and imagination.

Objective

To explore the meaning of simple, everyday nouns and how they relate to your experience of the world.

Things like a chair, a fork, a dog, a horse, a house, a kennel, a girl, a nurse, a boy and a policeman are something that we can see and touch. They exist in reality and are observable. The names for them are concrete nouns. Other nouns refer to things which we cannot see or touch like happiness or time. Such nouns are abstract nouns.

Goals

• To understand how prepositions construct meaning in a non-fiction text.
• For students to apply this to their own writing.

What and how do prepositions mean?

Begin by showing your class a list of prepositions (or - even better - ask them to generate the list themselves). Display the list on the board, and ask: what do prepositions do and how do they do it? The discussion should arrive at the following conclusions: