These Boots Are NOT Made For Walking

I teach in a school in a Northern state, but usually we do not get snow until at least November.  We'll get a dusting around Thanksgiving, for example, but our first serious snowfalls don't start until December or January.

Well, this past Wednesday we actually got a dusting of snow in the middle of October.  As I drove to work, I watched the little bits of snow turn to water when they hit the ground.  It didn't last more than an hour at the most and there wasn't any significant accumulation.

However, you would have thought the world had come to a screeching halt as far as the kids were concerned!

"Mrs. Gumby...snow!", announced a young student as he walked into the school.

"That's the first snow I've ever seen!", said a new student from Bangladesh. Etc., etc., etc.

As I stood just inside the entrance to the school fulfilling my weekly hall duty requirement, I started noticing the footwear on children's feet.  Yes, I started seeing pair after pair of snow boots!  (Hello, people!  It was just a dusting of snow!  There is no reason to send your students to school with snow boots on their feet in October!)

All day long I passed children clomping down the halls.  Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.  I saw pink boots, sparkly boots, Ugg boots, heavy duty boots with snaps, etc.

Sigh.  These boots were NOT made for walking!!  Please leave them at home.

Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

Clothing and ELF Learning Videos

I like using videos when I teach.  With English Language Learners it helps to show students pictures, especially with vocabulary work.  Recently, I discovered ELF Learning.  They have some great videos posted on their ELFTube and also YouTube.

(Additional note on Jan. 11, 2012:  If you want to join the ELF website "community", you need to use a different web browser than Internet Explorer.  I used Google Chrome at home.  Internet Explorer would NOT work for me at home last week nor for Mrs. Pokey at school today. If you don't care about joining the "community",  just access the  ELF videos through YouTube.)

This week, I started a clothing vocabulary unit with my Kindergarten and first grade students.  I created an assessment using photographs from the Internet.  (Google Images is a useful tool for finding appropriate pictures.) Then, I pre-assessed the students' knowledge of 23 clothing words and will post-test them with the same assessment at the end of the unit.

ELF Learning has three very nice videos on Clothing.  Here is the first one.

The first one is a simple flash card type presentation of 24 clothing words. (The only one I didn't use in my assessment was "rain boots".  It seemed redundant to me to talk about "boots" and "rain boots".)  The other two videos use the same vocabulary words but add sentences and phrases.

Clothing flashcards, words are repeated


My Clothes 1 with sentences and phrases


My Clothes 2 with sentences and phrases


Good luck!  My students really are enjoying these videos.  I hope your students do, too.