Activity of the week - Grammar investigation!

A nice game to help students focus on common errors and improve accuracy. It's easy to set up and is also a lot of fun!

Materials
Just some paper!

Procedure
Tell the students about a crime that occurred the night before the lesson - a robbery at the school, for example. 

Explain that all the students are suspects, and they must investiagate to find the 3 culprits.
Give all the students a slip of paper.   You need to have written 'thief' or 'murderer' on three of them to signify the people who committed the specific crime. . Make sure the students don't  give the game away by revealing what is on their paper.  If it has nothing written on it, they are innocent.

The students then imagine what they were doing  last night and use the target language to explain it. The culprits must lie of course!

Target language which suits this activity includes:

Narrative tenses
Gerund and infinitive
Passives
3rd conditional

The culprits must intentionally include a small grammar mistake in their story. Something they think will be hard to recognise.

When the students have completed this task. They interview each other in pairs, listening for mistakes. The innocent students must identify the culprits by listening for the grammar errors. The culprits must avoid detection by trying to slip their errors in unnoticed.

At the end, the students work in pairs and try to identify all 3 culprits according to the particular mistake they used.


This game is great to encourage students to pay attention to common errors and accuracy.

Have fun!

Activity of the week - Brainstorm 3

This week's activity is a fun alternative or addition to 'Concept Checking Questions.'
Its very simple and requires no preparation!

• Divide the class into small groups of 3 or 4.
• The teacher calls out  CCQs using the target language; the groups have to brainstorm 3 examples. For instance, if the lesson is about adjectives of feeling, you could use '3 things that make people jealous'  or  '3 things that make people annoyed in the cinema'  or '3 things that might make you feel relieved'
• The groups then brainstorm and write down 3 things.The first group to do it holds up their paper and shouts out!
• The teacher then reads the examples and if all the class agree then that team scores a point.

A simple way to concept check and make sure the students have REALLY understood the meaning of words.

Have fun!

Visual scaffolding - helping our students climb to the top

It's difficult to climb without something to hold on to. When students are trying to increase their level of English by producing new language they need something too. This is why Jerome Bruner decided to call his teaching theory 'Scaffolding'.

Scaffolding is a word Bruner used to describe all the assistance teachers give to students in order to help them reach their goal. If you have ever tried to cook a curry with lots of ingredients, you will know that constant reference to the recipe is required. Simply reading once and trying to remember everything isn't enough. This is the same for students trying to put together large chunks of language.

Visual scaffolding

We can help students by providing visual aids to remind them of structures and words as a reference whilst trying to produce longer utterances. Clear, organised whiteboard work can help us do this. Boardwork should be planned carefully to produce a frame the students can use whilst trying to produce the target language.

My terrible doctor's handwriting aside ("like a spider wrote it" was one of my teacher'S comments), here is an example of scaffolding from a recent lesson on family vocabulary and 'have got'. In the production stage of the lesson the students have to ask each other  questions about their families using 'have got'. All the language the students need is there for them to put together and refer to when forming it for the first time.

Learning to fly

After giving the students plenty of time to practice with 'Scaffolding' a nice technique is to remove it once the students feel more comfortable and let them repeat the activity. This time using only memory and experience. Being able to do this will give the students a real sense of achievement.

Focus on Scaffolding

"Focus" has taken the idea of Scaffolding a step further by adding the 'Word store'.  The word store is a booklet attatched at the back (one page for each unit) with exercises for students to complete and store the relevent vocabulary for that unit. The Word Store can be opened at the same time as the lesson page to create a three page spread. So for every lesson in that unit, the Word Store will be right there providing the perfect scaffolding to help students recycle that all-important vocabulary.

No more excuses for forgetting words or not using them!

Providing students with Scaffolding increases confidence and therefore motivation. Let's help our learners climb as high as they possibly can!

Tom

Activity of the week - Silent Auction

Hello Guys!

This week's activity is a controlled practice in the form of a silent auction.
It needs very little preparation time and is lots of fun.

Materials  -  Pieces of paper with sentences on.  Blu-tac or Sellotape to stick to walls. 

Preparation 
-  Write 10 sentences using the target language. 3 or 4 of these will have mistakes, while the
   rest should be correct. 
 -Make the sentences big and easy to read, and number them 1-10.
- Stick the sentences up around the room.

Procedure
- After teaching the target language, put the class into small groups or pairs.
- Give each group a piece of paper.
- Ask them to write '1000' at the top and 1-10 down the side.
- Explain to the class that they all have $1000 to spend, and the winning team is the one who can buy the most CORRECT sentences.
- The students move around the room deciding if the sentences are right or wrong.
if they think the sentence is wrong, they put 0 next to the corresponding number. If they think it is right they can try to buy it by writing an amount they want to spend next to that number (making sure not to let other groups see what they have written).
- It is important that the cumulative amount they write down does not exceed 1000.
- After 10 minutes ask the students to sit down and give them an extra minute to decide where to place their money.
- Hold up each sentence in turn and ask how much each group placed on it. it it's wrong, they lose their money. If it's right, the team that wrote the highest amount down for that number wins the sentence.
- The team with the most at the end is the winner!

Ideal for
Perfect tenses
Used to/would
conditionals
reported speech

Variation
Have the teams write the sentences.

Have fun!

Hello from my Hometown: Join the Wider World

All of us at Dinternal Book and Pearson are really excited about our brand new course for lower-secondary students, Wider World.  To celebrate its launch here in Ukraine, we're also beginning a new competition which will run until October 13th 2017

As part of the competition, we've made a video that you can use with your students in class.  Robert Hartigan, Michael Hudson and I talk about our hometowns in Britain and Ireland and mention the best and worst things about living there.  For example, I talk about the famous Hull City football club.  We've  made a worksheet that you can give to your students, which you can download here along with the competition rules.  To help your students with language for sharing opinions about their hometown, we've also produced a great classroom poster full of useful expressions from Wider World which we'll be giving out to schools.

 

I hope you and your students enjoy using the materials and learning about the places we're from.  Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions using the comment box below.  I'm sure the competition would also make a great project for those of you who have summer camps with your students and will help introduce your part of this beautiful country to the wider world.  What are the best and worst things about your hometown?  Tell us before the competition closes in October and we could soon be visiting you in person to find out more!

Click here for the competition rules and entry form 

Remember that you need to send us the answers to three things: the video, the listening activity from Wider World and the writing your students do about their hometown.

The poster we've made includes lots of the useful, high-frequency phrases from Wider World, which are great for helping your students sound more natural and fluent when they speak. The book also has video and reading texts based on authentic BBC programmes that answer questions like 'What do the British really eat?', 'Do smartphones make you smarter?' and 'Can school be fun?' If you don't have video facilities in your classroom, you can use them to practise listening work in class and then your students can watch them at home using the extra online homework that comes with both the workbook and MyEnglishLab.

You can see more about the book here.  

Good luck, guys.

Activity of the week -Phrasal verb Bingo!

Before new vocabulary is introduced, it's a good idea for the students to brainstorm which vocabulary connected to that topic they can remember.This is called activating prior knowledge, or schema.

A simple way to do this is by playing bingo.

Materials: A small empty bingo card (a grid of 3 columns and 2 rows)

Procedure:

1. Put the students in small groups
2. Give each group a bingo card (they can easily make their own)
3. Tell the students you are going to talk about how you got to school that day, and they must try to predict which phrasal verbs you are going to use.
4. The students brainstorm and choose 6 phrasal verbs, one for each box on the bingo card
5. Talk about your journey to work using a variety of phrasal verbs.
6. The students listen and tick off the phrasal verbs as they hear them.
7. The first one to tick all 6 or a line shouts BINGO!

A great way to activate schema and also introduce new target language.

Apart from phrasal verbs, other ideas include:

verbs - talk about your daily routine

adjectives - describe your home town

verb tenses  - tell a story

Have fun!

Hello From My Hometown Competition: Closing Soon!

Michael Hudson

With only ONE WEEK left before the closing date in our Wider World competition, here's another guest post from Dinternal's Michael Hudson.  Michael's from the north-east of England but he's now based in our Kyiv office, where he's been reading all your work and judging the monthly prizes since the competition started in May.   The deadline for entries is midnight on October 13th - our marketing team will wait until then before closing the entry form because so many of you have been sending us your work late at night recently.  If you can stay awake, so can we.  The wider world is waiting...  

Hello from my Hometown began on May 1st and ends on another memorable date,  Friday October 13th! Does the mention of Friday and 13th make you feel nervous about suffering from bad luck? Then you might have a problem with

Paraskevidekatriaphobia!!!

Paraskevidekatriaphobia isn't just an incredibly hard word to spell.  It also describes the fear of Friday the 13th.  It was first used in the early 1990s by an American psychotherapist who combined the Greek words paraskevi (Friday) and dekatria (thirteen) with the suffix -phobia.  Apparently, he also claimed that anyone who could pronounce the word would immediately be cured.

But why do so many people consider Friday 13th to be unlucky?  The truth is that  nobody knows for sure. Some people say the superstition dates back to a biblical story or a Viking legend.  Others believe it started on October 13th 1307 when King Philip IV of France ordered the arrest and torture of hundreds of Knights Templars. Whatever the reason, a recent study in the USA estimated that over 17 million people in that country alone are affected by a fear of Friday 13th.  Travel south of the border to Mexico, however, and they'll tell you that it's Tuesday 13th you should really be afraid of....

Our international team at Dinternal Books all know that cultural awareness is a vital skill.   That's why we've decided to offer a very special prize for 13 lucky winners this Friday 13th!  All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is to send in your entry before noon next Friday.  In the afternoon,  I'll pick 13 winners at random from all the entries we've received since May.  So Friday 13th could finally be your lucky day!

The prize will be a copy of Pearson's Culture Close Up DVD for you to use with your students in class. Each DVD includes 10 videos on aspects of culture in Britain and the USA.  The videos come together with ready-made worksheets at A1 and A2+ level and teacher's notes to save you time while you're preparing for class. 

There are five videos using British English and five that use American English.  Each video comes with easier and more challenging voice-overs so you can decide on the level of difficulty for your students.  If you want, you can also play them with subtitles.  The topics include school life in the UK,  music, sport, cities in the USA and festivals, which means you can introduce your students to British and American culture using language they understand and through topics they'll find engaging, relevant and fun.

Even if you don't win, every entry we receive before midnight on Friday 13th will go into the grand prize draw to get some of our native speaker methodologists at your school for one whole day.  If any of your students still haven't conquered their fear of Friday 13th, we can start by helping them to pronounce that word....

Good luck! 
Michael

Activity of the week - Jigsaw Reading

Here is a really simple way to make reading lessons more active!

Active learning is one of the 3 pillars of Competency based language teaching and an essential tool in creating a class environment full of motivated students who are able to do more than just memorise.

Jigsaw reading is a co-operative task that involves dividing up a long text into smaller parts. Students are then divided into groups of 2-4 and are each given a part of the text to read.

The students then feedback to each other on the information in their own text, which encourages discussion and speaking and also helps the students understand the text properly as they have the responsibility to explain it to somebody else.

Comprehension questions can then be done in teams, making it essential for all the group to have the information and therefore motivating the students to read their text and then paraphrase it properly.  

There's an example in this guide for teachers.

Try a jigsaw reading for yourself and let me know how it goes!