Arrange the pictures activity

I saw this activity in a book a while back but hadn’t gotten around to preparing anything for it until this week. I’ll use it after the small holiday the students have next week. The basic idea is for the students to arrange a group of pictures taken from a cartoon or other source that have been cut into separate pictures. The instructions are as follows:

1. Make 2 copies of the same cartoon or picture set.
2. Cut one set into separate pictures and keep the other as a model.

From this point there are two different ways you can proceed.

Variation 1 (pairs)

1. Sit the pairs back to back.
2. Give a complete picture/cartoon to one student and the cut up pictures to the other. The idea is for the second student not to see the completed picture.
3. The first student describes the pictures in sequence and the second tried to build the picture by placing the parts in order. The second student can ask questions for clarification to help with the construction.
4. After the second student has completed the picture the students can discuss the story and what’s happening in the pictures.

Variation 2 (pairs/groups)

This variation only needs one set of pictures from the picture strip. Cut strip into individual picture and give one picture to each group/pair. If their are more pictures than groups/pairs then the teacher can safeguard these. Each group/pair tried to guess what the story’s about by studying the picture given to them. The group should write down their ideas. They then change pictures with the other groups and they look at this new picture and try to imagine the story based on it and the previous picture, again writing down their ideas. They keep swapping until all of the pictures have been viewed. By now, the groups should all have some idea of the story and each one presents what they think the story is about.

Finally the teacher presents the pictures in order and tells the story, including pictures not given to groups. To spice up a little the teacher can keep the final one hidden to see what the students guess the ending is before showing it.

I really liked the idea of this activity and my advanced/MEC students are all very creative and I’ll try to fit this in their schedules. For the conversation classes this one will definitely be in their schedule too. Sometimes I like trying out these conversation activities with my smaller groups first so i can see what needs changing and how the timing works for each part of the activity.

Classroom 2.0

I have been a member of Classroom 2.0 for a while now. It’s a website dedicated to teachers who are looking for other teachers using Web 2.0 stuff to pass on information and share new ideas. I like this site a lot. I always discover something interesting in it that gives me a lot of ideas for things to do with my students. I have been thinking about using WordPress with a few ideas I got from the Classroom20 forum to create a kinds of podcast site for one of my newest English students. My main class with him usually consists of the two of us reading a book together, first I read and then he reads so that he can listen to my pronunciation so he can correct this. The second class he has in the week is with my wife, Roberta. This class is mainly because my Brazilian Portuguese sucks and they cover all kinds of things that we don’t include in the class with me. I am toying with the idea of creating some podcasts of short stories for him to listen to, either online or to download, as well as some questions about the podcast story to see how much he understood. I have downloaded a program to use to create the mp3s, I decided on Audacity. It’s not a big download and is easy for me to use without any complicated setups, etc. I think it will be a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll expand this to use with my other students later I’m going to look again for a site to host the mp3 archives. I tried a couple but wasn’t too impressed with them hahaha!! I’ll have a look during the week to see what I can find.