Activities of the Week- 5 Activities for small groups

Hi Guys,

Here is the view from our new Dinternal office in Chernyachovskogo Street, Odessa.

As you can see, we have a lot of snow in Odessa at the moment and this can only mean one thing for English teachers.... smaller groups!

We all have experienced that lesson, where we have planned activities for 15+ students only to arrive in the classroom to find that the majority of the class have decided not to risk the deadly perils of snow or wind. leaving us with a group of three or four people when we had expected many more.

Never fear.. help is at hand!

Here are 5 low-prep activities for dealing with small groups:

Grand-prix

Materials: Board, Magnets or paper with sticky-tape or blu-tac

Procedure:

Draw a racetrack like the one above on the board.

Using board magnets or blue-tac, the students will race each other round the track. The winner is the first one to reach the end.

The students/teams answer questions in order to move forward. The questions can be prepared by the students to make the activity even more student-centred and, of course, cut down on your valuable preparation time.

Idea:

• Put different letters on different squares to represent different types of questions. eg  V+ vocabulary   G+ grammar

The Tower Game

Materials:  Building blocks such as  Lego or dominoes or Jenga

  

This is a fun game that works in a similar way to 'Grand-Prix'. 


Students in small teams answer questions on a set topic. As in the previous game, getting students to create their own questions can be fun and motivating and great for recycling.

If the group answers the question correctly they are awarded 10 seconds to build their tower.

The team with the highest tower at the end of the game is the winner.

The towers can fall at any time making the game more fun, less predictable and also more even if there are weaker and stronger teams.

How We Roll

A great activity to generate discussion and use target language in small groups.

Materials: a pair of dice

Procedure: 

Choose  6 discussion topics (e.g. sport) and number them 1-6 on the board

The teacher chooses six structures (eg  present perfect/linking words) and also labels them 1-6.

The first student rolls the dice and the number indicates which topic must speak about.

The second roll indicates which structure the student must include in their discussion.

 The teacher can impose time restrictions or just let the discussion flow.

Word Grab

This activity is great fun and really helps students with listening for detail.

Materials: listening material and some slips with the words or phrases from the dialogue.

Procedure:  

Choose a listening track or even a reading text which can be read out by the teacher.

Choose relevant words or phrases from the text and write them on large slips.

Spread these slips out on the table.

The students then listen to the audio (or the reading from the teacher) and when they hear one of the words on the table they have to try and grab it before the other students.

At the end of the dialogue the student with the most slips is the winner.

Word grab can be used to practice listening for detail and also anticipating information, as well as a novel way of introducing new vocabulary.

Grammatical chairs

Another great activity I practised with JJ Wilson in Kiev!

The simple activity involves students sitting in a circle on chairs. 

The teacher asks a 'Have you ever'  question (questions with other forms work too)  and any student who answers 'yes' has to stand up and change their seat. The person asking the question (in this case the teacher) will try to sit down and claim a seat and the person left standing must ask the next question.

Students who moved then give more information and generate interesting stories and discussions.

A really enjoyable game to practice speaking skills and keep those potentially challenging small-group lessons fun and dynamic.

Have fun!

TeachingwithTom meets....

On Saturday February 10th I had the pleasure of seeing JJ Wilson live in Kyiv. Here in Ukraine JJ is best known as one of the authors of Speakout and Total English.  He wrote his first Pearson title, Language to Go, when he was just 28 years old and was also authored one of my favourite methodology books,  How to Teach Listening.   During the presentation he gave lots of practical tips on how to improve listening skills in general and provided some advice for Ukrainian teachers and students on how to pass the new listening part of ZNO.

If you follow our Facebook pages, you'll know that JJ is also a poet, fiction writer and ex-rugby international, playing for England Under-19s in rugby union and Scotland in rugby league.  After his event, I spoke to JJ about writing, English teaching and, of course, rugby too.

Thanks very much to JJ Wilson for his time and energy.  If you were at any of his three events, I'm sure you enjoyed them just as much as I did.

Lessons from JJ Wilson

Who saw JJ Wilson's fantastic events in Kyiv this week?  I was there on Saturday to get lots of ideas about teaching listening and even got to see the National Presidential Orchestra of Ukraine live on stage.  It was great to see so many teachers there, including several I know from Odessa, Mykolaiv and Kherson.  If you couldn't make it in person, you can watch his presentation from Monday on the Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics YouTube channel.


I was very pleased to see JJ live because I really enjoy teaching from his books. There are loads of great lessons in Speakout but one of my favourites is on the topic of six word stories.  What did you think of JJ's presentation?  Could you describe it in just six words?

Mine would be:  Learnt lots of lovely listening lessons!

If you like or follow Dinternal Education's Facebook page, you'll have the chance to win a small prize personally signed by JJ Wilson tomorrow.  The only thing you have to do is write six words.

Good luck!

Working with Wordlists: Vocabulary Cards

You might remember Michael Hudson's webinar from December on ways of using the fantastic wordlist resources in Focus and Wider World.  As promised, here he is with a follow up post on another activity you can use to get the most out of wordlists.  

If you missed the webinar, you can see it on our Dinternal Education YouTube channel. 

Hello everyone, and a big thanks to Tom for letting me write on the blog again!  Just before the Christmas and New Year holidays, I went through 13 activities for using wordlists to help your students learn and retain vocabulary.  Today I'd like to show you a routine I've developed with students in different countries around the world based on using vocabulary cards in class.

If you watched the webinar, you might remember I mentioned some of my golden rules for teaching, including the advice to never do something yourself that your students can do for you while learning English at the same time.  One way of putting this into practice is to ask your students to start making their own vocabulary cards.

As teachers, we all know how important it is to make sure students are recording new vocabulary in a way that is meaningful and memorable for them.  We also know the importance of recycling new language.  That's why wordlists are such a fantastic resource.   After you've done some work on wordlists, you could start your next lesson with a quick review game such as Brainstorm 3 or Stop the Bus.  You could include categories like words ending in -ly, types of fruit, furtniture, etc or words that can go before 'city'

Do some whole class feedback on the vocabulary after the game is finished and use this to elicit some parts of speech. Depending on the level of your students, use some or all of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, exclamations and articles.   It's also useful to elicit or pre-teach the distinction between a word and a chunk (two or more words which go together, like New Year holidays or put something into practice) here.

You'll need to model the task using a word or phrase that you have recently studied, using the following information on the board.

Word or chunk        ______   ____________

Meaning                   A seminar done on the internet

Example sentence   I watched Michael doing ___  _______ last month. 

Translation              ________________       

Ask students to fill in the gaps (each line is one word).   If you've been reading carefully, you should know that the chunk I'm looking for is a webinar.   The translation of this word is easy, of course, but that's not always the case.  That's why I usually take out translation and add the category 'A good way to remember this'.   Sometimes this might be a simple translation but it could also be a real-life example, for instance.

Now divide your class into teams with two or three students in each.  Give each team three vocabulary cards (you can see an example on the left) and ask them to follow your example.  Remind them to choose words or chunks they've already studied in the lessons and not to write the word or chunk itself!


When the students have finished doing this, give the word cards to another team and ask them to try to complete the cards.  In doing this activity, your students have actually prepared and done their own vocabulary test.  Because it comes from their classmates and not the teachers, they won't all realise this, of course!

At the end of the activity, I collect all the cards and keep them in a drawer or a box.  If you make this a regular routine, your students will soon have prepared a lot of easy review materials for you to use in class.  That means next time you want to try any of the wordlist games I mention in the webinar, you won't need to think of the vocabulary to be tested as your students can select it from the cards and run the whole activity themselves.