My comedy routine on adverbs

A common thread in English teaching textbooks is that instead of sticking to grammar, they want to teach within themes.  The prior theme was birds. Today, there was a whole section on throwing clay pots. I see the use of bird vocabulary, but seriously, with all there is to learn in a one's second language, do I really want to waste 2 weeks on ceramics vocabulary!  Then, to top it off, all of a sudden the students are asked to use adverbs to describe the actions.  Mind you, there has not been a single mention of adverbs before this, so I have to spend hours designing adverbs lessons all by myself.  One of the adverbs was "gradually".  How in the world do you teach "gradually" to a third grader, let alone, one who is learning English.  If you have any ideas, post them here.  Anyway, I ended up just demonstrating these adverbs: quickly, angrily, gracefully etc., by drinking out of my water bottle in each of those styles.  An example: for angrily, I threw my bottle on the floor and stomped on it after taking my drink.  Those kids were laughing their heads off and when I offered them the chance to demonstrate the adverbs, they jumped at it. By the way, they never did learn gradually because in order to demo that, I would have had to make them stare at me for half and hour as I drank the whole bottle.