Activity of the week - Paraphrase Pairs

ZNO Teachers!

Here is a simple way to make reading activities more fun, and a nice way to get students paraphrasing. Of course, that's a skill which is essential for tackling the writing, reading and listening parts of ZNO.

Many modern books aimed at helping students with ZNO, such as 'Focus' or 'Wider World' include reading tasks such as Matching, Multiple Choice and Gap Fills. These reflect the exam tasks the students will tackle in their exams.

Paraphrase Pairs

Instead of asking the students to do the multiple choice individually. We can put the students in pairs and give one student the questions and the other student the text.
The student with the questions must find out the answers without looking at the text themself. The students must work together to decide what the answers are, without showing each other the questions or text.

However...

Neither of the students are allowed to read directly from their paper!

They must summarise and paraphrase the questions and relavent parts of the text to each other. This will encourage them to think of synonyms and alternative ways of expressing ideas, skills which will come in handy when taking those all-important ZNO papers.

Have fun!

Activity of the week-- Banana!

Hi Guys,

A very quick and simple game to practice vocabulary!

Ask the students to choose a word that they learnt in that lesson, and to write a sentence using that word in context. For example, if the topic was 'reporting verbs', they might choose the word 'avoid' and the sentence might be as below.

"I always avoid watching films that are very romantic"

The student then erases the original word from the sentence.

"I always  ------  watching films that are very romantic"

The student then writes the word 'banana' instead of the original word.

"I always banana watching films that are very romantic".

Ask the students to read their sentences to one another, asking their partner to guess the original word. Students can then mingle around the room practising their sentences.

Excellent for ZNO exam skills!

Works particularly well with:

Gerund and infinitive

Phrasal verbs

Collocations

Have fun!

Another Competition Coming Soon....

After our recent Focus and Wider World competitions, a lot of you have been asking when our next contest will take place.  Here's Michael Hudson with a special preview....

The Christmas lights are going up, the leaves are coming down and we're almost at the end of Pearson's 20th anniversary year in Ukraine.  It's been a landmark 12 months for us all.  In April, over 1,000 people saw Vaughan Jones, Ania Kolbuszewska and Marek Jedryka speak in three different cities, while more than 500 teachers attended last month's two-day English Forum conference held at the Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics.  Personally, I've spent much of this year travelling the length and breadth of the country, doing seminars, workshops, demonstration lessons and PTE examining in - deep breath! - Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lviv, Lutsk, Shatsk, Cherkasy, Kropyvnytskiy, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Ivano Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Drohobych, Zaporizhia and Khmelnitskiy. 

We were almost as busy with our competitions.  Several lucky teachers got the chance to have coffee with Focus author Vaughan Jones when he visited Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv. From May to October, hundreds of students from all over Ukraine joined the wider world by writing to tell us about their hometowns.  I know Tom and I are both really looking forward to meeting the winning year 6 students from Vinnytsia's Gymnasium Number 1 in person sometime soon!

Our final competition of 2017 had to be something really special.  Thanks to our partners at Alekom Tour, it really, really is.  How special?  Well, if you're a student in a year 8, 9, 10 or 11 class at one of our Pearson Partner Schools, you'll soon have the chance to win a two-week study trip here:

Visas?  Free
Flights?  Free
English classes?  Free
Afternoon and evening activities?  Free
Food?  Free
Accommodation? Free
Excursions to places like London, Oxford and Buckingham Palace?  Free

Want to know more?  Keep watching this space....

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!