Teaching Greeting to Children | Greeting Race

This activity is a very quick gap-filler for practicing greetings.

Learning objectives:

Recognize and respond to sound patterns and words. Listen with care. Identify phonemes which are the same as or different from English and other known languages. Speak clearly and confidently

Listen for specific words and phrases. Listen with care. Use physical response to show recognition and understanding of specific words and phrases

Aim: To practice greetings

Vocabulary: Greetings

What to do:

You and the children sit or stand in a circle.

Explain that you have ‘collected’ some TL greetings and they are in your pocket – recap two alternative words for either ‘Hello’ or ‘Goodbye’ (depending if it is the beginning or the end of the lesson).

Turn to the child to your left, shake their hand and say the first word for ‘hello’ (or ‘goodbye’) e.g. bonjour.

Ask the child to pass it to the child on their left with a handshake, and so on all the way round the circle clockwise.

Meanwhile shake hands with the child on your right and say the other TL greeting (e.g. salut) and ask them to pass it on anti-clockwise.

See which greeting ‘arrives’ back in your hand first – when they have both ‘arrived’ put them back in your pocket safely for next time.

Note that the child halfway round the circle at the cross-over point will have the tricky task of passing on both greetings at the same time and must concentrate hard not to get them muddled up!

The activity was taken from:
Drinkwater, Nicola. 2008. Games & activities for primary modern foreign languages. London: Pearson, Longman.