A4 paper, one sheet (for the leaf) and some coloured paper, I have tried both cardboard and regular craft paper and they both worked very well. The smaller caterpillar in the photo was done with the cut-up cover page of the drawing album and it works well, too. Some of my students were using ultra-thin craft paper and it worked, too so I presume cut up colourful pages of glossy magazines could be recycled this way, too.
Glue, scissors, markers and crayons.
This lesson was a part of the series of lessons devoted to spring so among all the other materials that can be used there are: The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the book or the video, the story or the video from Playway to English 3 about 6 Hungry Caterpillars, a video about the life cycle of a butterfly, the garden craft and the butterfly craft. It can also be a part of the Art lessons on the topic of weather and seasons. More about it – soon!
Procedures
Check that we all have all our resources, one by one showing them to the camera and, more often than not, finding the missing bits.
Show the kids the final product. This is not something that I do in every lesson, sometimes this element is left out for the surprise element. This time, however, I wanted the kids to understand exactly what we are doing and why.
Draw the leaf on the A4 paper, colour it green and cut it out. Demonstrate each step to the camera and wait for the kids to complete it before moving on to the next one. During this particular lesson I have also came up with a little chant that we started to sing while colouring and cutting (‘It’s a big, big leaf for a very hungry caterpillar’)
Ask the kids to prepare the strips of the coloured paper, of any colour they want. The paper can be cut sideways (probably the easier option as it involves less cutting) or lengthways (in this case each strip needs to be cut in half). I didn’t tell the kids how wide the strips should be. We have been doing craft online for a few months now and my kids are now able to make such decisions themselves. I assumed that everyone will choose the width themeselves (as wide as they can handle).
We glue the strips into a ring by putting the glue on one end and shaping it into a circle. We glue all the rings first.
Glue all the rings together by applying the glue and attaching the rings and pressing them with two fingers.
Cut out one circle for the face, draw the eyes and the smile, glue the circle onto the caterpillar. If possible, the little antennas can be added, too.
Sit the cateripillar on the leaf, introduce the caterpillars, say hello, use them in a dialogue etc. We sang the song about the garden that we had been practising for a week then.
Here are the caterpillars made by my kids. Courtesy of FunArtKids
Why we love it
It is very easy to make.
It is beautiful and sweet. Whenver I choose and prepare activities for my groups, I always wonder if my kids will simply approve of it, if they just like it. When I showed them the caterpillar, simple as it is, I got this very special ‘Ahh!’ and big smiles.
It can be done in the offline classroom but it is also possible in the online classroom.
It gives the kids some opportunities to make decisions about the creative content, the size of the leaf, the colours for the caterpillar etc.
It can be easily combined with any spring lesson or with any story lesson.
The level of challenge can be adjusted. In the classroom the teacher can prepare the strips of paper or the parents can be asked to pre-cut them if the lesson is taught online. We used five strips / rings but the caterpillar can be made longer or shorter.
There is some potential for the literacy skills development – kids could write the key words on the outside or on the inside of all the strips before glueing them together.
A set of cards with opinions, for example those that have been used with adults or those that have been used with teenagers.
A list of the discourse tricks displayed on the board or on the screen (see below) if the activity is done in pairs OR a set of six thinking hats if you want the students to debate in groups of 3 – 6 people. I have created two versions of these here and here. If you are interested in the orignal thinking hats that this activity was inspired by, you can start here.
Procedures
Pairs: student A expresses an opinion which, in the earlier stages, can be limited to only reading the opinion off the list or cards) whereas student B reacts to it using one of the approaches. Afterwards, they swap roles. It is good to highlight that student B has to use a different approach in every round.
Small groups: student A expresses an opinion (see above) and the other students in the group react in accordance with the hat that they are wearing in this round. Afterwards, they swap roles and the new hats are assigned. In the original activity, in the real classroom, we have been using dice. In the online world these have to be replaced with the wordwall spinner.
Regardless of the format, it is better to play the first few rounds with the whole class and with the active participation of the teacher to show the students that it is in fact easy to switch from one hat to the other and that the hats really help to generate ideas.
Why we like it
The main aim of this kind of an activity is for the students to develop the habit of reacting to what their interlocutors say and to give them a range to tools (or tricks) to contribute and to develop the contributions of other students. Hopefully, with time, my students will be able to participate in a debate and opinion exchange without any support of the spinner or the display.
This activity also encourages the students to listen to what their peers are saying. This has been more useful with the teenagers and juniors who are more likely to space out and start daydreaming in class.
The list of all the tricks can be limited to only the two basic ones (I agree / I disagree) and, later on, when the students are ready, further extended.
The wordwall spinner in the online classroom was a bit time-consuming for my liking but it turned out to be very beneficial for my shy / withdrawn / panicky adult students because it gave them the additional time to think and to assume the new role. Later on, we were able to switch to a simple list which served only as a reminder of all the options out there.
The same goes for the whole class and teacher participation. With some of my adult groups, I had to be involved more in the beginning, to model both the activity itself (to help with the speaker’s block (does it even exist) and, at the same time, to model the ways of getting involved in a debate. Otherwise, they would be just ‘politely’ waiting to be nominated to speak, even at the C1 level.
I have been using these with my adult groups and with my young learners, too, with teens and with juniors, when appropriate.
Work with the vocabulary and structures of the unit, here the weather and the clothes
Introduce or revise all the weather accessories and all the other key words (i.e. umbrella, hat, warm milk etc)
Watch the video, with pauses to ask short questions about the video and the story. These will depend on the level of the children and their ability to produce. In the beginning we often talk about the emotions of the characters and about everything that we can see. As soon as students can use some elements of the Present Continuous or to evaluate the behaviour and the actions of the characters, the conversation really takes off.
We follow-up with a speaking activity. The yes / no quiz is an easy version and it is based on the students comprehension and the listening skills. They listen to the teacher and react with a simple yes or no, but, with time they will be also better able to produce simple sentences. The other activity, the reordering, was created for a more advanced pre-school student and we retold the story together, with the teacher reorganising the cards and helping the student produce the sentence. Sometimes it was a full sentence (‘It is raining”), sometimes, the teacher started a sentence and the student finished (‘Dr Brown Bear it talking…’ ‘to George’)
The activity can be repeated in the following lesson to give the students an opportunity to participate with more confidence and, hopefully, more language produced.
Why we like it
Kids already know and watch Peppa and it is fun to bring her into the English lessons, too.
The episodes are relatively short (around 5 min) and it is an amount of time that will not be a challenge for the students and it can be relatively easily included in a typical lesson for pre-schoolers
Although the language of the cartoon is not graded and it is possible to find the episodes that will be easy to understand also for the very young students who have just started to learn English as the foreign language.
The videos can be shared with parents and watched again at home.
In my classes, we use the videos in the final stages of the unit, as one more source of the target language and of the target langauge in context and to create some opportunities for production.
Usually, I don’t watch the videos twice in the same lesson. It might have been beneficial for the general comprehension but I am not sure about the effectiveness of such an approach. Ten minutes is a large chunk of a lesson with pre-schoolers and I doubt the kids would be still interested and focused. I prefer to pause and to chat getting the kids ready for a more communicative video-watching. In the beginning, our conversations are quite simple, very often limited to calling out the words we can see in the video or discussing ‘Is that a good idea?’, a phrase that we frequently use in our classes anyway but it helps kids reflect on the story and perhaps predict the events to follow.
a group of A2 or A2+ kids preparing for the Cambridge Flyers or the Cambridge KET exam
a set of the storytelling pictures from the exam writing materials
a piece of paper and a pen
Procedure
The teacher displays the visuals on the screen and tells the kids that they will be used to tell a story.
The teacher asks the kids to look at the visuals and decide what their character is going to be called. Everyone writes the name down on their piece of paper.
The teacher tells the kids to write down ten numbers, 1 – 10, and, when everyone is ready, to write ten things that they can see in all the pictures. These can be only nouns or a selection of nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.
The teacher asks the kids to decide what kind of a story they are going to tell: a happy story, a sad story or a scary story. Everyone decides and draws a relevant smiley at the bottom of their list.
The teacher divides the kids into pairs and sends them into breakout rooms to tell their stories. They have to use the name, all ten words and they have to make sure that their story has the mood they have chosen for it.
Back in the common room, the kids give the group a summary of their story (‘It is a story about a boy who…’)
Why we like it
The main aim for me in this particular lesson was to show the kids that even such uninspiring illustrations as the ones we used (and sadly, they were really boring this time) can be a start of a fun storytelling activity and that the final product’s quality depends only on the writers that is us.
We are preparing for a progress test and a mock test and I am hoping that an activity of that kind will get the students ready for the independent work during the test itself. Looking at the visuals and making the list helped the students think of the words that they see and it helped to assure that they will be closer to getting to the required wordcount (35 words). If they have ten on their list already 30% of the way there. It also gave them the time necessary to really look at the pictures and to start thinking of what might be happening.
From the word ‘Go’ the stories became personalised because the character got a name and became six different boys instantly, Fred, Bob, Tom and Vyacheslav among them. (‘Anka, but why Vyacheslav?‘ ‘I am not sure. I looked at him and I just thought he looks like a Vyacheslav‘).
Deciding how the story will end in the beginning also helped to shape it. It was the first time we did it and for that reason I only offered three options: a happy story, a sad story and a scary story but that list can be easily extended. We shared how we were planning to tell the story before we went into the breakout rooms and among our six stories there were three happy stories, one sad story, one scary story (mine) and one ‘ill story’ because one of my students decided that his character is going to catch a cold in the end. Anyway, from the very beginning the kids knew where they were taking their Fred and their Bob. They also knew that their partner’s story will be a bit different so, hopefully, they were more interested in listening to it. There was some variety in the group so I could put them up in a pair whose angle was different.
It can be easily done in the classroom but it works amazingly well in the online classes and this is how it came to be. I wanted to avoid sharing the visuals and wasting time on opening them.
It is easy and it can be a speaking activity in its own right or it can work as a story-writing preparation task as it was in our case. Consequently, a set of three pictures can be used (Flyers and KET writing tasks) or a set of five pictures (Flyers speaking tasks).
As a potential follow-up, the kids can write the story for homework.
Next time (and there will defnitely be another round of this activity), I am going to add a more communicative element that will give them a proper listening task and that will give them an opportunity to interact with their partner’s story such as retelling the story they have heard in the breakout rooms, creating a title for their partner’s story or continuing it (‘The next day…’). I know that choosing the best story is sometimes suggested with this kind of an activity but, to be honest, I am not a fan. Not everything needs to be a competition.
It is actually funny that this particular post makes an appearance as only the third one in the series, although it should definitely be the Number One as I do it with my youngest students and with the lowest levels. That is the Beginning of Discourse.
Ingredients
A set of cards with some opinions or statements. These are some of those that I put together for this exercise: 4 Magic words (used with my A2 primary kids), I can speak (prepared for my A2+ juniors) or just a set of topics (used with my B2 teens and adults).
With my offline groups we also use a dice with a linker assigned to each number (i.e. 1 = but, 2 = because, 3 = for example, 4 = and, 5 = so, 6 = or)
A model sentence for presentation, i.e. It is raining.
Procedure
Presentation starts with the model sentence on the board or on the screen and the teacher introducing different linkers with different follow-up sentences, for instance ‘It is raining…’ ‘…because it is November’, ‘…but I am going to the park’, ‘…so I am not going to the park’, ‘…and it is cold’ and so on, for the kids to understand the meaning of the linkers and the differences between them. Depending on the age, the number of linkers can be limited to the most basic ones i.e. because, and, but. The others will be added later.
Controlled practice: kids try to come up with their onw follow-up ideas, still working with the same model sentence and different linkers. This is done together, as a whole class, for the teacher to be able to monitor closely.
A slightly freer controlled practice activity can go towards students using a selection of other simple sentences.
Freer practice is the first activity that is done in pairs or small groups. If this is an online class, one of the students opens the cards, reads one of the sentences. The other student chooses the linker to use and only then the first student continues the sentence. Afterwards they swap. If this is an offline class, the kids work with pairs and with a pile of cards with these sentences and they use the dice to decide which linker to use. The dice is also an opportunity to award points as the number is not only the linker they should use but also the number of points they get in this round.
Why we like it
It is definitely one of the activities (or topics) that, for me, personally, are the breakthrough and the first step in the transition from the baby English, pre-A and A1 level towards more linguistic freedom and fluency. Instead of ‘I like apples’, we get ‘I like apples because they are yummy’ or ‘I like apples but I don’t like pears’ or, even the simplest ‘I like apples and bananas’.
First of all, it leads to more production since the students are producing two sentences instead of one in the form of a complex sentence and they get more power as regards the profile and the angle of the message. It is not only ‘I like apples’ and it can develop this into ‘I like apples but only fruit. I don’t like the apple pie or the juice’, ‘I like apples so I buy them every week’, ‘I like apples but I didn’t like them when I was a child’ and ‘I like apples but my brother likes watermelon’ taking the entire conversation towards providing details, comparing the present and the past or including other subjects in it.
Naturally, sometimes these basic and more complex linkers are included in the coursebooks and they do include great practice activities. However, I like to introduce it early in the game, when the students are ready, regardless of the curriculum. This set of activities allows for a lot of flexibility and it is easy to use with a variety of levels, age groups and topics.
I have started including all the key words in the name of the activity for the sake of my online kids working in the breakout rooms, only partially supervised. When we practice in the common room, I leave the key words on the side of the screen or in the chat, for the kids to remember. It is a little bit more challenging in the breakout rooms. But, with the key words in the name, the kids can still see it even in the breakout room. The teacher only need to work a bit on developing the habit on remembering about them and on paying attention to them.
The student or the dice making decisions about the linking word to use makes it a bit more challenging but also a bit more fun. It is also a guarantee that a wider range of linkers will be used, rather than ‘but’ or ‘and’ in every single round.
The main sentence can be further extended if we ask students to produce not one but two or three sentences or if the other student is required to comment on what they have heard.
This is one more of those activities that is not ‘a real grammar / vocabulary topic’ that is introduced in the coursebook with all the follow-up activities. It is not. It is closer to an activitiy that helps to broaden the horizons and let the students look in a slightly different way at the language they are producing while speaking. It is not only a set of words that you blurt out because you understand the question that was asked and that you have an opinion you want to share. Instead, you take a moment (a very, very short one), one breath and organise the words that are the come out. One of the activities has already been published here on the blog, about One-minute essays. This is the second one in this mini-series.
Ingredients
A list of sentence adverbs
A story to create a context, any story will do. Once I used the short Alternative Math, once I used the stories of Tom Denniss and Helen Skelton. Once I simply referred to Harry Potter. It can also be any text or any listening that is included in the coursebooks.
Some practice exercises or simply, things to talk about. I normally use either these wordwall cards What would you rather do? or a set of opinions that I use in a variety of different activities.
Procedures
Introduce the idea: I normally use a set of sentences, related to the topic, i.e. Harry went to Hogwarts, Harry grew up in the house of his uncle Vernon, Harry was given the Marauders’ Map. Afterwards we add to these a few different sentence adverbs and we discuss how it changes the meaning of the sentence and how much more of weight they add to the original sentence. ‘Harry grew up in the house of his uncle Vernon’ is just a simple sentence, without any emotional gravity but once we start adding the adverbs, each of these sentence becomes a story, for example ‘Sadly, Harry grew up in the house of his uncle Vernon’ or ‘Fortunately, Harry grew up in the house of his uncle Vernon’ which can lead to a discussion on why Dumbledore made this kind of a decision.
We practise in the same way with all the other model sentences.
Practice activity number 1: a freer discussion, in pairs or in teams, about the context of the story in which students try to make their own sentences, with the sentence adverbs of their choice.
Practice activity number 2: a follow-up exercise. In the What would you rather do in which the students choose their own option, they provide justification for it and do a lot of speaking. However, it is necessary to start their discourse with the sentence adverb of their choice.
Later on, in all the other lessons, the students are encouraged to use these whenever appripriate and, hopefully, in a more natural way.
Why we like it
This whole idea and the series started in my teenage classroom (of course!) but I have also smuggled it into my lessons with adults. Successfully smuggled, it had to be added. It is probably more necessary with the exam classes but it can (and it should) be used in the general English classes.
Regarding the levels, as usual, I am experimenting on my teens who are now in their B2 but I have also been using it with my A2+ onwards students, even with some of my C1 adults who have been struggling with the spoken discourse organisation.
It worked well in class on the day but I have also noticed a long-term impact, like with the other activities of this kind. It has worked as a switch in the way of thinking. And now, when we are starting some other activities, in regular lessons or before the progress tests or exams, it only takes a quick reminder that these tools we already have at our disposal.
It was great to see how the students’ contributions became more beautiful and better organised. It was also great to see the change in their attitude and how, with this little and silly exercise, they becamore more aware of the opportunities that this particular tool gives them. They have become more aware and more powerful speakers. They have become more organised speakers.
6 pieces of paper, A5-size aka 3 pages of A4 cut into halves.
glue
drawing materials: crayons, markers, felt tip pens, coloured pencils
Procedures
Introduce and practise the weather vocabulary as usual. This is not our first year of English so we have been using the extended set of words and phrases. Over the series of lessons we have been describing the weather, miming riddles (and yes, I have come up with the gestures for ‘it’s foggy’ and ‘it’s cloudy’, it is not impossible:-) and we have also watched an episode of Peppa Pig, George catches a cold, because it gives us an opportunity to practise the weather, the clothes, some Present Continous and the feelings. Here you can find the set of wordwall cards that we use for the retelling exercises. As you can see, the weather topic became the opportunity to introduce and to revise a whole range of vocabulary sets and structures and it will be reflected in the Weather Book. We are also using the songs and here are our three favourite ones: How is the weather?, What’s your favourite season? and Put on your shoes.
First it is necessary to make the book itself. We study online so I asked the parents to prepare the materials before the lesson (six pages, glue, markers), in the offline classroom there is the option of making the book first or the teacher preparing the booklets before the lesson, depending on the age of the students.
Making the booklet in class is easy if you follow these few steps: check that everyone has all the necessary materials (‘Have you got the glue? Show me!’), counting all the pieces of paper together etc. Then we draw the line alongside the edge of the paper, page by page and putting the ready pages away. These lines will be help the kids to apply the glue and stick the papers together. The teacher needs to model all the stages and it is absolutely necessary to wait up for the kids, to make sure that everyone is on the same page (no pun intended:-). Afterwards, the teacher shows how to apply the glue (‘Put some glue on the line’) and how to add another page on top, repeating until all pages are glued together into a book (‘Look, we’ve got a book!’)
Kids, together with the teacher, number the pages. The numbers will help the teacher and the kids to navigate the booklet throughout the activity. We also write our names on the front page.
The next step is to start filling the booklet, one topic per lesson. When we are ready, we put the books away until the next lesson. Once there is something in the book, we start the activity with talking about what we already have got.
The topics that we have included so far include: the weather, the emotions (‘It is sunny, I am happy’), the clothes (‘It is sunny, I am wearing a dress’). In the future, I would like to add to it some basic accessories (‘It is sunny, I’ve got my sunglasses’) and some basic Present Continous (‘It is sunny, I am riding a bike’).
Why we like it?
There is a lot of potential for craft as the book activity can be extended over a series of lessons.
The book also allows for personalising the topic of the weather by associating it with emotions, clothes etc.
And, last but not least, it gives us a lot of opportunities for producing the language and, since a large part of the content is revised and repeated over and over again, the kids become a lot more confident at producing it and becoming creative with it, too. After a few lessons, we started to make up silly sentences not matching the weather for the other student(s) to correct the information that they have already heard and have become familiar with.
It can be used with a variety of topics, not only the weather, for example food (with pages devoted to fruit, vegetables, drinks, lunch and desserts) or animals (with pages devoted to big and small animals, animals which can fly, swim, run etc) although so far, I have been using the weather book only as a long-term project, with my 1-1 online student. We made the food book with my online group, as a one-off project. It was also a success.
There is more flexibility as regards the format, too. We made the booklets and starting filling them in in the same lesson because my kids were ready but it is also possible to divide it into two stages: lesson 1: making the book, lesson 2: start filling it in.
The same can be done with all the other lessons. The weather words and the emotions are quite easy to write and adding these in is feasible enough, one lesson (or a ten-minute slot) is going to be enough. The clothes or the accessories might take longer and it can be divided into two lessons to avoid the risk of the activity taking too long and the kids getting bored.
These three activities were brought about by the calendar, this title by the title of a wonderful Christmas (?) book by C.S. Lewis. The lion just found itself.
A square aka ‘The Winter Wonderland’
This is a lovely activity that was found on Instagram by one of my colleagues, Larisa. The original, created by @kardasti.saz was a lot more intricate and a lot more complex, too complex in fact for my online classes.
The activity starts with a square of regular A4 photocopying paper. It is folded diagonally, to create a triangle, twice and opened. The kids are asked to trace one of the lines, from one corner to the other. We then draw the pictures above the line: the trees, the snowman, the presents and, finally, the snowflakes. It is very important to stage the drawing carefully, element by element, modeling and pausing for the kids to follow. This way, even the younger kids will be able to create such drawings.
We trace the line along the fold, from the centre of the square to the corner, on the bottom part of the square. We cut along this line, until we reach the centre point. We put the glue on the top of one of these newly-created triangles and we put the triangles on top of each other and press.
We have done this activity online so I had to limit the materials to the simplest and basic ones but in the classroom or if the kids have it, there is more potential for the cotton snow or 3-D figures in the little yard.
A circleaka the Rocking Santa
Circle is the best shape ever and this activity has be yet another piece of evidence to prove this. I have found it online, on the Noreva Project channel but, again, because we did it online, the instructions and procedures were simplified – only the regular A4 paper, white, which, in case of the triangle, was simply coloured red in class. The parents helped with preparing the materials (a circle and a triangle) but, again, we did everything ourselves and because we went slowly, step by step and line by line, the students could follow and create their own Santa. All the instructions are in the video.
We combined this craft with the song from Super Simple Songs, Santa, where are you? and we used to practise the prepositions (in, on, under) in a guessing game in which students hide Santa somewhere in the room and we keep guessing where it is (Is it on the table? etc).
Some scotch aka the Coolest Christmas Tree There Is
This piece was a present that my niece, Mishka made for me with her mum @_mad_alen_ and I can’t repeat it enough: it is simply amazing. It would be too much to try to pull off in the online classes but it is perfectly feasible with the offline groups. I have certainly done craft that involved the same level of pre-lesson prep work.
What you need is a piece of cardboard, with the cut out shape, a few strips of scotch taped to the back of it, sticky side up and a selection of things to decorate with: sequins, buttons, pompons. I suppose there is some potential for less professional ingredients (crayons or coloured pencils shavings, sand, scraps of coloured paper) or even food (buckwheat, seeds).
The scotch here makes it a bit more manageable (no glue!) and the card can be displayed in the window to let the sun shine through it. Or simply used to check how different sources of light change the picture. And there is an opportunity (and a need) for a health and safety training on not eating craft materials and handling small objects.
Not to mention that Mishka’s Christmas Tree has been elected the Christmas Tree of the Year.
In this post I would like to share a few activities that I came up with for my students that turned to be very effective as regards students’ involvement, the amount of language generated and the opportunities for the target language practice.
All of these are only samples, activities and materials to serve a very specific purpose with a very specific group of students. However, I do believe that they can serve as five case studies that help to create the framework for creation and adaptation of such materials.
#1 You today and you in 2017
This is the activity that we used with my teens, in a freer practice activity focused on comparatives on the B2 level, including simple comparatives, less, as…as and the comparatives quantifiers. The kids were working in pairs, they were answering the question: ‘You today and you in 2017. How different is your life?‘ and they used the wordwall cards to guide them in their discussions.
When I was planning this activity, I prepared 15 cue cards but we barely got through half of them in each pair because the students really wanted to share their experiences and, surprisingly, they did not need any follow-up questions, they were simply talking and talking and talking.
#2 The future us
This activity and the materials were intially created for a group of teens but later I adapted it to the needs of my junior group and to a group of ‘advanced’ primary kids, too in the lessons whose aim was to introduce and to practise ‘will’ and ‘might’ to talk about the future.
Intially, many years ago, when we were still in the classroom I created a handout with all the situations, one per each student in the group because I wanted to do it in the format of a gallery walk. The kids had to move around the room, read the situations and decide who will achieve what. In the end, the students picked up the cards with their names and told of us which of the predictions are most likely to happen in the real life.
Later on this activity had to be adapted to the format of the online classes and I decided to turn it into a simpler speaking activity, again with a set of wordwall cards. The students worked in groups three and they took turns to uncover the cards and to discuss who in the group is most likely to get a new haircut, start wearing glasses, write a book or win an Oscar. They had to justify their answers. During the feedback, we brought back some of their ideas and the students whose names were called out were to comment on these predictions.
Although this is one of the flexible activities (no specific ending, can be stopped at any given point), I abandoned the initially planned timing because the students got really involved into it and I allowed them to go through all the cards. We had a laugh and we produced a lot of language. It is worth mentioning, though, that this activity was done in group that had studied together for a few years and that knew each other very well. This meant that they had enough data in order to be able to make their prediction and, also, there was very little risk that someone will be offended with anyone else’s ideas. Perhaps this kind of an activity would not be a good choice for newly formed groups.
#3 Quiz: How well do we know each other?
I prepared this kind of an activity to practise the target langauge in a personalised way with my primary A1 students and the structure used in this particular game was the combination of ‘How often do you / does X do it?’ and the basic adverbs of frequency (always, often, sometimes, never).
The students were given a set of questions for homework about all the random habits of everyone in the group, such as ‘How often does Sasha play computer games?’. They were supposed to think about them and make their decisions. In class, I was asking the questions and everyone, apart from the student in question was sharing their answers. Afterwards, the student would tell us how often they do it (Sasha: I never play computer games) and sometimes provided some additional information.
#4 Personalised reading
This is a trick (or an activity:-) that I learnt in one of the training sessions about a million years ago (and I do not remember whose it was!) that a text (or a listening task) should be treated in a way that more resembles the real life reading (or listening). That means that we approach the text not to be able to answer all the comprehension questions in the coursebook but to take it very personally. The task is to go through the text, labeling the text with the marks: (+) for all the things that we agree with, (-) for all the things that we do not agree with, (!) for all the things that we find surprising or (?) for all the things that we would like to find out more about and so on and so forth. In the feedback session, students simply compare where they put all the specific marks and discuss why such were their choices. Simple and effective.
There are a few variations of this approach. Students can write their own questions to the text / the listening text and then deal with the text with the focus on these questions. In the feedback session, they share their answers and why they have chosen these particular questions or what their answers would be if the text does not include them, which, actually, is something that happens frequently.
Another way was letting the students decide for themselves which items / parts they want to read and talk about. While we were reading a text on ten different factors to take into consideration while choosing a job (based on Gateway B2, Macmillan). First, the students got only a list and they were asked to choose the five that are most important for them and compare their lists with their friends. Afterwards, they were asked to approach the text, comprising of ten short paragraphs, one per factor, and discuss these. They were instructed to go through all of the items, one by one but they could make decisions as regards the order so that the most important ones were dealt with in the beginning when everyone was at the peak of their focus and involvement. Interestingly enough, some students were choosing to read about the factors that were their priority whereas the others wanted to read more about the factors that they would never take into consideration because they were curious about the other people’s rationale.
#5 The Messy Choir for controlled grammar practice
This is a lovely activity that we are using, with my younger and older kids and sometimes with adults, too. I have already written about it and you can find the original post here.
Today, I would like to share the version of the activity with my B2 teens while we were learning / revising the narrative tenses and the Past Perfect among them. I wanted the students to start using the structure straightaway and in a familiar context. Since the class starts at 18:45, there are plenty of things that everyone would have already done and could talk about.
The boxes with the past participle were appearing one by one and everyone was invited to contribute their sentences, the teacher and the students. Some of the verbs generated more answers, some fewer but, overall, all the students participated and practised the new structured.
We used the same activity in the beginning of a few lessons later on, as a warmer / hello / revision activity.
I hope that you have found something useful here to use with your students or to inspire you to create. I also hope that this post will have its part two. And sooner rather than later!
A set of wordwall cards with the vocabulary such as Christmas words, fruit or animals or the physical cards such as those used here in the unit on farm animals.
Procedures
The teacher introduces and practices vocabulary first and make sure the kids are familiar with them.
The teacher shows the kids different variants, introduce the idea of ‘one’ and ‘many’ or ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘many’.
In the offline classroom, the teacher shuffles the cards, looks at one of them in secret and says: ‘I can see some pens. One pen or many pens?’ with the gestures.
The kids are guessing and after a while the teacher shows everyone the card and asks the question again: ‘One pen or many pens?’. The kids answer and if the card shows ‘many’, they also count how many exactly.
If the game is played online, there is side A of every card that presents the word and side B with the actual visual with the answer. When the kids have shared their guesses, the teacher flips the card and asks the question again.
Why we like it?
It is a simple yet effective activity that helps to practice any vocabulary. We usually use it in the second or third lesson of the new unit.
It is a real game as it includes the element of luck and anyone can guess it as well as the element of logic if you try to remember which cards you have seen (there is only one of each).
The number of items can be adapted ie only a set of five words, with two (one pencil, many pencils) or with three (one pencil, two pencils, many pencils) variants for each word.
We use gestures to clarify the meaning, to support production or, even, to answer, as some kids use words and gestures when they guess. I have used the following gestures: one – the index finger up, two – the index and the middle finger together up, many – all the fingers of one hand, up and moving.
It is not competitive as we never count the points for the correct answers and its pace is so fast that the kids do not have the time to focus on the cards that they got wrong or didn’t guess which also helps them to learn to win and to lose.
It can help practise singluar and plural forms of all the nouns and structures. So far, I have used it to reinforce the knowledge of the vocabulary only, there is some potential for adding structure here, too, for example is / are.
This game can be used to practise the plural form but we have actually learnt and used the singular and plural forms through playing the game. This concept was not introduced separately before.
It works well with individual students as well as with groups as all the kids can guess at the same time before the teacher reveals the card. I have been using it with my pre-primary students but, I suppose, the younger primary would enjoy this activity, too.
The game is open-ended, it does not have any specific number of rounds that have to be played or a definite end. The teacher can stop it at any given point, before the kids get bored.
The physical cards can be easily produced, using the google images and clip art and copying and pasting. To make them more effective, I used to glue them on some coloured paper, in order to make them more durable and to make sure that the kids can’t see through the pictures. It is important that all the cards have the same size and that they have the same colour.
Last but not least, my students really like it and this game has become one of our Bread and Butter set. We play it in every unit, with new vocabulary)
