Story rebuilding activity

While giving class at Wizard, I sometimes get free time in the output classes and where as before I would create large activities to use with my groups, here I need something a little smaller to use. Almost all of the activities I have can be modified to something smaller, but there are also many activities that only require short amounts of time and preparation to work with in class. The story rebuilding activity has been in many books and sites and I like it a lot.

First of all, I needed to find a suitable text, it needs to be long enough to cut into chunks but not so long that it will take all of the available time to just do the reading part. A nice site to find texts is Breakingenglishnews, it has many short current news stories that can be easily modified and also the site provides many activities to go with each text. You only need to cut and paste the ones you want to do, and there are many to choose from   After I had chosen the text, the next part was splitting it into chunks, depending on how many students you have, you might have to make more than one copy of the text chunks and divide the class into two or three groups. I cut my text into six chunks, the size of which you can see below.

The boy, then 14, was repeatedly hit on the head with the 3kg weight. He was left unconscious and rushed to hospital. Students who witnessed the attack said Harvey’s anger seemed to give him extra power.

After dividing the text, I cut the text into strips, on strip containing a chunk of the story. As mentioned above, if you have a lot of students, you’ll need more copies of the strips. Either number or letter each strip and make yourself a copy of the text with an answer key to make it easier for you to keep on top of things once the activity starts.

To use the activity in class, Divide your students into group(s). My classes tend to be small enough to do in group, I average about ten per class. After dividing the students into pairs, etc., give each pair one of the chunks of the text, making sure that they are mixed out of sequence. Ask each pair to look at their chunk and then ask them to read out their chunks in turn. You’ll need to allow time for vocabulary questions, but if you chose a text good for their level this should be down to a minimum. After all of the chunks have been read out, ask the students to tell you what the story is about, the students can ask pairs to read their chunks again if needed. After they have settled on what the story is about, ask them to rebuild the story from the chunks, putting them into their correct sequence. Remind the students that A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 won’t give the correct answer   After they have gotten the correct sequence, read out the text in its correct form. If there is still some free time, you can ask some questions to see how much of the story the students understood or some other activity, such as a homework activity about the text.

You can use the activity I created for my students by downloading the zip file from the link HERE.

Conversation class

I work at two English schools and one of my students has class only on his own with either myself or Roberta. He learned English more or less by himself and mainly our classes consist of conversation classes, one with me and one with my wife. Today he asked if he could give me some texts and if I could record them onto a cd so that he could listen to my voice as he reads along with the text. I like this idea a lot, I’d already toyed with the idea and after the Easter hols I’ll get him to print the texts for me. I already have the program to record the mp3s so I can convert them to an audio cd with Nero. I’m going to use Audacity for this, it’s free and very easy to use. I had a few problems finding how to record in Odeo but a friend of ours uses it a lot and gave me a few pointers. I’ll try both online and with the audio cd too, just because I’d like to try the Web 2.0 side of it as well I have a book of texts and short stories that I’ll record and upload and then use a WordPress site to host them for my students to use. I think it’ll be a lot of fun experimenting with this Although I’m British I speak both British and American English with an accent that seems to float somewhere between the two of them, my students tell me that its easier to understand me sometimes than the Models hahaha!! I’m not sure what my voice sounds like recorded, this should be good for a laugh

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.