Season 3 Episode 2: Alphabet
We started with a bit of Ray Charles:
Some of the facts you can use with students:
The Alphabet Song and how it came about
The 27th letter of the alphabet
The letters that didn’t make the alphabet
Photos of letters:
Out of all 26 letters in the alphabet, which one is your favourite?
Pangrams
Lipograms
Lipograms on Mary had a little lamb
The Jokes (which Lindsay loved :-))
There are many websites for jokes, this one contains a lot.
End of pod Activity:
As your commute is coming to an end, here’s another idea that you can use in class. We’ve already mentioned quite a few activities during the episode but here’s one of our all time favourites – the alphabet board race
Go into class and ask the students to tell you the alphabet, as they do write up each letter on the board. Leave enough space next to each letter for words to be added later.
Divide the class into teams and get them to stand in lines in front of the board, give each team something with which to write on the board.
Tell them you will give them a topic (perhaps one they covered recently in a lesson) and they have to write one word for the topic for each letter of the alphabet, after they have written one word they give the writing implement to the person next in line and so on. The team can add words in any order. Set a time limit for the game.
At the end of the game the teams assess how they did, discarding any wrong answers and wrongly spelled ones. The team with the most correct answers is the winner.
If you don’t want to play this as board race, you can ask students to work in small groups in their notebooks. Make sure they write down the alphabet before they start.
Youtube clips we used:
Why the English Alphabet is stupid