Expanding sentences

I saw this activity in a twitter posting yesterday and liked this one a lot. It had many different ways of doing this activity posted on the web page. The one I liked the most was the one below posted by Ali asghar Mazinanian, Shahrood, from Iran:

Ask one of the students to choose a name/word in English. Write the word on the board. Once the student has chosen a word, as another student to give a word beginning with the last letter of the first chosen word. For example:

First word=David     Second word=door

Continue asking the students in sequence to think of words and writing them on the board until you have around ten. This way, you get a good mix of words for thew students to use in the second part.

Now, ask the students to create a sentence using all ten of the words. You can allow them some creative license, and encourage them to add any necessary vocabulary to make their sentences intelligible. You could give a prize for the best one.

I liked this idea a lot but thought I’d do this activity in a slightly different way. Getting some sheets of card and either cutting them into strips or asking the local paper store to cut them into strips for me with their guillotine. Then Instead of giving the students the ten words to create a sentence, I’ll give them a sentence to start with and write each word on a separate strip of paper, using them to recreate my sentence on the board. Then its just a matter of putting the students in groups/pairs and asking them to add words and punctuation to the sentence to change it, but still keeping it so that it can be understood. I got the idea for this after seeing the Telescopic Text site.

In our city there are many printing stores and paper stores that make printed flyers, etc. They always have offcuts and I am sure that they will give them away or sell them cheaply as they usually just throw them in the trash. Then instead of cutting up large sheets of card, I can just use these instead

Chinese checkers vocabulary game

I saw a nice variation of the Chinese checkers game in the Interchange ideas book and thought that this would go down really well with all of my groups at Wizard. Although the book allows photocopies and they provide a blank model to just write vocabulary in, the model is geared towards using the phonetic alphabet and so I decided to create my own blank model based on the source from the book. This way I can pass the copy to any of the other teacher who would like to use it in their classes too   I like the idea of this game because it reduces the amount of TTT against STT to almost zero, apart from when the students need a bit of help. Students love competition and a bit of friendly rivalry will go down well too   The main idea for the game came from a book called ‘Pronunciation Game’, written by Mark Hancock, published by CUP. The Interchange 3 activity was based loosely around the activity from the book but for vocabulary instead. The idea is that the students work their way around the board according to their dice throws and using the vocabulary from the board game in sentences to win points by writing their initials or team name over the won hexagons. With three teams this activity wouldn’t use up too much classroom time and could be used as a different kind of review or just a filler. In the last week, I tried out quite a few different activities and they all went over well. Hopefully this one will down well with the students too

Internet problems…

I’ve been having some problems with my internet provider here in the city. Well more than a little, it hardly works. It took me a couple of days to finally get into WordPress. We’ll call them this afternoon to tell them to get their arses out here to solve the problem.

This week I took on a new private student who more or less learned English by himself and now wants to have someone to practice with. He needs to practice reading and listening to so he usually brings texts with him and we work on them together, alternating between him and I taking turns to read the text and my correcting his pronunciation. I’m going to make some podcasts for him to use as well, At the moment I’m looking for a good place to host the mp3 files and them I’ll link to them in another WordPress blog that I’ll create just to use with him, well with only him just for now. I’ve been checking out Odeo and also Podomatic to see how their service is. I’ll probably search around a few teachers forums to see what they are using as well.