More simple Arabic for teachers

Today's rather tricky grammar concentrated on the Past Simple and Past Continuous tenses and the difference between the two. I'm not the world's best grammar teacher primarily because I've not got a clue about all the rules (and much prefer the communicative aspect to learning a language anyway) but the foundations are important and so I try to pick up little hints and tips to make it easier both for me to teach and for them to learn. The picture you see at the top is what's called a 'timeline' where you explain the grammar by referring to the past, present or future (I should really have written "past" on the left and "future" on the right) and the action that's occurring. They seemed to get it but that's something that should never be taken for granted and so I've a few activities planned to reinforce it over the week.

The bottom picture is some Arabic vocabulary I learned connected to a reading exercise we did today. Although I'll never use these words, the students nevertheless appreciate my taking the time to record it, and tend to put more effort into the task as a result. Today's words were 'throw', 'grenade', 'tank' and 'destroy'.

"Ana" means "I am" in Arabic and you can stick any word after it you feel like. Followers of my journal will know my current favourite phrase is Ana-al-rajul-al-ankaboot! ("I am Spider-Man!") but there are obviously a couple of simpler ones to get across basic emotional states to the students. Ana-fur-han means "I'm happy", Ana-moos-teh means "I'm sad" and Ana-jow-ann means "I'm angry". These three simple phrases are very useful in the classroom, or so I thought until this morning when a student looked at me with a particularly quizzical look on her face.

As it turns out, Ana jow-ann actually means "I'm hungry" rather than "I'm angry". Although I can see where the initial confusion arose, it still is a bit embarrassing to learn that whenever students have been acting up, being boisterous and generally needing a bit of a talking to, I've been letting them know just how darn hungry I've been.