Conversation class – Survivors

The conversation class today was about Survivors and travel. I was going to use the CCAA conversation book for the class today but I’m a little tired of using it so I switched to a book I got from SBS called ‘Teamworking’ and found a nice activity about survivors of a crash on a desert island. The length of time for the activity was about an hour so I only needed to create an intro that would last about 15 minutes to fill the time slot completely. I found a nice ranking game in Penny Ur’s ‘Discussions that work’ book that fitted in just nicely.

Intro - Write a list of methods of transport on the whiteboard: ship/yacht/plane/bus/car/truck/helicopter/ hovercraft. The students have to rank the methods according to a certain criteria. The book gives the following that can be used: speedy/comfortable/heavy/noisy/expensive and useful. After to get the students to discuss why they chose the methods according to their lists.

Main activity – This came from the SBS books photocopiable pages. There were three pages that had to be copied, with enough for as many pairs or groups in the class. One page contains the first page that the students see as well as some questions for group discussion that can be cut up according to the level of the conversation group. The second two pages contain task cards that need to be cut up, there are 32 altogether. These the teacher gives out as the students ask for them. The activity has a lead in exercise to warm up the students and then they move onto the first card which explains that they have been marooned on a desert island and asks them to choose three items from a list to take on their adventure with them. From the first card they then ask for other cards depending what their choices are. Some choices will result in different things happening, such as people dying, etc. This continues until either everyone has died or they are rescued. After the group discussions are handed out to see what choices were made and how they could have chosen to do things differently.

The photocopy book comes with full teachers instructions as well as a maze map so the teacher can follow along with the students and at the same time see all the possible choices that the students can make. After cutting everything up, I glued some small envelopes into my planning book so that I wouldn’t lose and task cards and could use them again next semester.

1st conversation class – ‘Love’

Man, I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to get online to post anything. The first conversation class was Sat afternoon last week, the main topic was love. At CCAA they have conversation material but it only provides enough activity for 20 mins at the most so to pad it out a little I added some extra stuff. Luckily whenever SBS have a sale or book promotions Roberta and I go there so we have quite a few of the very expensive books they sell and I dug through a few of those to find some thing for conversation class. One nice activity for the start of the class was a personality quiz about romance that I ran through with the students, it wasn’t supposed to be a serious quiz and started the class with a laugh. The main CCAA conversation material was next, for most of the students this was the first time they had even heard the school had material for this and we worked first in pairs and then as a group discussion to find out what the students thought of love and how people thought love and relationships should be. The final part was a ranking game about the qualities of a husband or wife. As luck would have it, the groups just turned out to be adults in one group and teens in the other (there weren’t a lot of students for the first class because the message didn’t get out early enough the classes were starting hahaha!). This meant that after they had finished ranking the qualities from the most to least important we got to see how things were viewed differently by teenagers and adults. The qualities the groups were asked to rank were as following: tolerant, considerate, faithful, affectionate to husband/wife, affectionate to children, hard working, tidy, home-loving, good-looking, rich, thrifty, good lover, and well-educated. It wasn’t surprising that the two groups had very different ideas about what qualities a partner should have, the top five qualities for the teens were

1. good lover
2. affectionate to partner
3. faithful
4. home-loving
5. affectionate to children

The top five qualities for the adults were

1. tolerant
2. faithful
3. well-educated
4. home-loving
5. good lover

This worked out quiet well as it resulted in a discussion of how different the lists were for both groups and why they though the lists were so different Now I just have to think of what topic for this weeks class..

Haiku

I’ve been a bit lax in posting recently, I was busy setting up some stuff for mine and Roberta’s groups in Quizlet ready for the coming mid-term exams. This week i decided to try out Haiku with my TN9 group. I have done this activity with a previous MEC1 group and it went really well. I got this activity from a team work book I picked up in SBS and it only requires a few photocopies and cut outs to prepare. It went quite well although on the day of the class one set of photocopies went missing and I couldn’t find them I like this Haiku activity as the students get to think not only of words but also syllables in order to create their poem to form a kind of photograph for the other students to try to guess. We had some fun with this and an interesting discussion arose about whether the amount of syllables changed if you spoke faster or slower hahahaha!! I have no idea where this idea came up from. If I get the time, I’ll do this activity with my MEC4 group too. I think they’ll also enjoy this activity a lot too. I like trying out different stuff in the class if i can find the time, its nice to have a break from the regular class methodology.

I found an interesting website called eslprintables the other day and joined up for it. The idea of the site is simple and also great. You send in worksheets you’ve created to share with the members of the site and then you get to share the worksheets already hosted on the site. You score points for each time someone downloads your sheet and these points determine how many downloads you can make. A nice idea and a nice site too