Warm-up Lesson on Numbers 1-10

My lesson this week involved teaching an after school class of 1st graders. With this class, I was given the green light to teach any topic of my choice. During first few weeks I taught the students phonics but this lesson moved onto numbers (1-10). I wasn’t sure if the students had prior knowledge of numbers in English. So to make sure that I activated schema, I put a number of different materials in four separate bags. For example, I had a yellow, purple, green and blue bag. The bags had an item inside that corresponded with a number. The yellow bag had two DVDs, the purple bag had 6 dice, the green bag had 5 balls, the blue bag had seven glue sticks, and so forth.

As the warm-up started, I place myself at the front of the classroom with the “mystery bags” visibly lined up. The main goal of the warm-up was to engage the students’ interests by activating schema. The students did not know what was inside in the bag, but they took some guesses, such as candy, pencils and scissors.

I had the students tell me which bag to open to see what was inside. I then pulled out the item(s) and elicited the students to count out loud.

Here’s an example from the lesson:

1. Me: [picked the purple bag and pulled out a glue stick]
2. Ss: Glue! [ in Korean]
3. Me: Yea! Glue.
4. Me: One! [took out one glue stick]
5. Me: Two! [hand motioning students to count with me as I pulled more out]
6. Ss: Three!
7. Ss: Four!
8. Ss: Five!
9. Ss: Six!

After we counted, I drew the items on the board to help build for the main activity.

I knew that I promoted monologic discourse with the students, but that was actually my goal. I had no how much knowledge my students knew about numbers, so I had to be extremely basic and monologic with my discourse. As an intro lesson warm-up I felt that I achieved what I set out to do for this lesson. Next time I could ask the students to guess how many items I will be pulling out to make sure that the students are active.