Here is a lesson that I found to work well with a 9 year old and a 10 year old:

The objective: to learn some new foods and review the food vocab we learned the previous day

the plan:
1. Teach new foods with cards made from grocery ads, index cards, glue, and tape. Have students name the foods on each cards. When they seem pretty familiar with the foods, it’s time to practice…

2. Memory game: this way they can get familiar with the written name of each food, and it was competitive, so they really got into it. Put pile of new vocab face down and give the student 4 cards – they look for 30 seconds and remember – wait 15 seconds and then have them pull out the names of the foods from a stack of index cards with the food names on them. Then the other student takes a turn. Increase the number of items to remember by one every time they are successful. Keeping score apparently made it exciting – these kids are very competitive!

3. Vocab tag: we went outside and took the cards with us (on another day it rained and we did a similar thing indoors). I lined them up on the grass and the students sat down about 10 feet away. I called out the name of a food and they had to race to the cards, select the right food, and then whoever didn’t get it ran after whoever did. I kept score, and the reward was lifesavers.

3. Reviewing older vocab: I gave each kid a list of foods they had to find on a treasure hunt (the cards with pictures were hidden around the school rooms). Each list had completely different foods, so they had to evaluate whether or not a food was one of the ones on their list when they found the card. They had to do it as fast as possible, and seemed to really enjoy it.

Note: before I left home I made a lot of laminated cards with pictures of food, clothes, people, places, animals, and household objects. I have used these almost every single day in one way or another. They have been really invaluable, and I’ve made more from catalogues and shopping fliers here. I had to draw some too, which is a pity since I suck at drawing. Anyway, these are a really useful teaching supply.