In modern foreign language teaching process cards are MUST USE! Why?

1. You can see words clearly written on a piece of paper and easier focus on the word structure and spelling
2. Cards are small and convenient to take with you wherever you go (I’ve had some students who took cards with them everywhere and learned the new words in a bus on their way to the school)
3. You can analyze and understand the grammar easier with the cards, organizing them into groups depending on their gender, number, case and etc.
4. You can make cards with different endings and see how the words change by putting the endings on top, just the same way as our A1 students did today.

We worked on the Prepositional case and these are the steps we followed:

1. The students received a set of cards, including masculine nouns (проект, фильм, актёр, друг), pronouns (мой, твой, этот, тот) and adjectives (хороший, интересный, талантливый,…). They had to make phrases in which there had to be one noun, one pronoun and two adjectives, for example: Этот хороший талантливый актёр. After that we discussed possible endings of masculine nouns and adjectives in Nominative case.
2. We’ve done exactly the same thing with neuter and feminine nouns, pronouns and adjectives.
3. Then the students received 12 verbs or verb+noun combinations (думать, рассказывать, забыть, вспоминать, прочитать статью) and prepositions “о/об”. They had to match the verbs and phrases they’ve done before, like: ДУМАТЬ ОБ ЭТОТ ХОРОШИЙ ТАЛАНТЛИВЫЙ АКТЁР. But they asked me immediately: “Shouldn’t we change the endings of the pronouns, adjectives and nouns?”. Of course!
4. And this is what we’ve done at the end! The students got the cards with nouns’, pronouns’ and adjectives’ endings in Prepositional case: -е / -и (for nouns), -ом /ем(-ём) (for masculine and neuter pronouns and adjectives), -ой / -ей (for feminine pronouns and adjectives). They had to put the endings cards on the words to change them from Nominative to Prepositional case. In the photo on top is what we’ve got at the end.

The task was hard and time consuming, but this is a great way to visualize the grammar, to literally create it, see how it works. Would YOU like to try?

http://enjoyrussian.com/russian-language/