Vocabulary Lesson of the Week

This week my my co-teacher and I taught our 5th grade students how to recognize plural and singular words using clothing items. We started out by having picture cards for each item of clothing, this helped activating schema and making input comprehensible from the previous lesson (individual clothing items). We set up a chart where all the clothes were in the singular and plural sections. We asked the Ss what the difference was between all the words. Ss finally said (after eliciting) it was because the -s was at the end of the words. We explained that the -s will usually create 'more than one things'. We repeated the words with the students and created an activity with the pictures on the board to focus on the new rule. The students had to change the clothing items into both singular and plural forms. We had the students work individually and check in pairs to figure out how to change the words. This is something that I have been trying to have my students do more and more. I usually wouldn't have them work in pairs, instead I would just ask the students to raise their hands and ask a question like "who knows how to spell the word in singular/plural?" This didn't help promote any type of productive discourse and certainly didn't help the quiet/shy students in my class. Overall, I think I have to keep trying and letting the students have a chance to speak and figure things out by themselves first, then engage them appropriately.