Buy, sell, and tell

This is a whole language lesson for Speech Language Pathologists that incorporates food vocabulary, basic concepts of matching, color, and number, as well as the pragmatic skill of turn taking for language-delayed kindergarten students.

A lesson plan for grade K English Language Arts

By Karen Ring

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Learning outcomes

Students will learn:

• food vocabulary
• turn-taking during oral dialogue
• the basic concepts of “matching”, “color” and “number”

The vocabulary chosen could easily be altered to include additional categories such as: animals, toys, school items, clothing, shapes, etc.

Teacher planning

Time required for lesson

1 hour

Materials/resources

• Play food items (or items of a different target vocabulary group such as plastic animals, etc.)
• Different colored plastic chips (colors chosen may be tailored to the needs of individual students)
• Index cards with varied numbers of colored dots to match the colors of the plastic chips (It is best to keep the number of dots to 3 or less initially.)

Pre-activities

• Discuss the idea that we have to know the names of foods in order to tell a “store keeper” what we would like to buy.
• Explain that to buy anything you have to see how much it costs and if you have enough money to buy it.
• Show the students food items they will be able to purchase, the colored chips they will be using as money, and a pretend price card (the index cards with colored dots).

Activities

1. Introduce the activity by explaining that each student may choose a handful of “money” colored chips.
2. Have the items to be “sold” displayed on the table at which the children are sitting and put a price card in front of each item randomly.
3. Explain that the teacher will be the grocer (the store person who sells food), and that the students will be the customers (the people who come to the store to buy the food).
4. Model possible carrier phrases a student could use to ask for an item: “I would like to buy some ______”, or “Do you have any ______?”
5. Then proceed by allowing the first child to engage the teacher in a dialogue of asking for a particular food, and explain that either you don’t have any _____ for sell or that the tomatoes will cost them “2 blues and 1 red,” for example.
6. After each transaction, it will be the next student’s turn.
7. Encourage verbal reasoning and group problem solving when problems occur, such as the grocer doesn’t have that item or the customer doesn’t have the correct money.
8. Continue this process until all items have been purchased.
9. If no one in the group knows the name of a particular food item, the teacher will name the item and allow the next customer to buy it if he/she can remember the item name.
10. Students must match the correct number and color of the chips indicated on the price card in order to purchase an item.

Assessment

• During the activity, keep track of correct and incorrect naming of target items, understanding and use of basic language concepts, and the student’s ability to orally explain solutions to problems.
• Record performance of the above areas for each student as appropriate to their IEP goals and performance criteria.

Supplemental information

Comments

If the student’s maturity level does not allow for the pragmatics of turn-taking and the problem of “shouting out” answers for another person occurs, the teacher may have the student lose his/her turn at the offense, reduce the group size so that turns come faster, or change the activity to involve only one student at a time.