Activity of the Week - Vocab Grab!

Hi Everyone,

This week my students have been preparing for exams, so I came up with a fun game to review vocabulary we have studied so far.

Preparation

Chop up some slips of  paper and write down one word or phrase that you want to practice with the students on the each one. Scatter these slips on a table in the centre of the room.

Procedure

The students stand around the table in a circle a few steps back from the slips of paper.
When the teacher shouts 'Go!', the students must rush to the table, find a word they know and return to the outside of the circle.
The students must then provide a correct definition and example of their word.
Any student who fails to grab a slip or provide a correct definition is out of the game and must sit down.
The last remaining student is the winner!

I had a lot of fun with this activity this week. Hope you guys do too!

Activity of the week - Sentence Building Race

  Hi Everyone,

Here is a quick activity to practice sentence formation and collocation. Especially good for helping students with ZNO Use of English. It's easy to prepare and lots of fun!

Materials:
Slips of paper

Procedure:

• Divide the class into teams of 4/5
• Give a slip of paper to one person on each team
• Give them a root word like 'despite'  or 'suggested'
• The first student writes the root word on the paper and passes the paper to the left.  The next student must add a word either before or after the root word  such as  'despite being'. They pass the slip to the next student who adds another word, e.g. 'Despite being rich'. The students keep passing the slip around the table adding one word each until a logical sentence with at least 6 words is formed.
• The fastest team then holds up the slip to win.

Brilliant for practising collocations with prepositions and gerund/infinitive in particular.

Have fun!

Activity of the Week - Audio Prediction

Hi Everyone,

 This week's activity is designed to get students engaged in listening activities.

When using an audio track or reading text in a class, it is important to engage the students first by setting a context. There are three main reasons for this.

1. More Authentic  -  We rarely listen to information in the real world without knowing the context.

2.Less challenging - Knowing the context of the audio will help the learners to understand what they are listening to.

3. More Engaging  -  Giving learners a reason to listen to the audio will help to generate interest. With no context the learners are just listening for the sake of listening. The task will feel like an examination and it's no wonder they might not find it interesting.

So what can we do?

Good text books will always include a pre-listening task to engage the learners before the listening task.

Here is one.

Audio prediction

Before playing the audio track, choose 5-10 key content words from the audio and write them on the board. Ask your learners to then work in small groups to predict what they will hear by creating their own version of the listening script using the key words on the board.

Give the students 5-10 minutes to do this.

The learners then tell their predictions to the other group or to the whole class.  When the students have done this and they are familiar with their own version of events, they listen to the audio track and note down similarities and differences between the real track and their own version.

For extra motivation, points can be given for correct predictions.

This gives the learners a reason to listen as they are eager to learn what the real story was and how accurate their predictions were. 

Have fun!