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.

Yacapaca

I have been looking at a new website called Yacapaca the last couple of days or so. I Had a few little problems figuring out how to get going with the site but once I understood how it worked I really liked the idea and I’ll try to get some exercises into it probably for my Touchstone students. I probably won’t do any for my CCAA groups as I have loads of online stuff already up and running for them and I think my kids would benefit from having more grammar stuff online. It reminds me quite a bit of hot Potatoes, the graphics are very nice and cute too   If your internet is a little slow it can take a while for the exercises to load and this is where I like HP more as the pages seem to load quite quickly from this suite of programs. I’ll try to get some stuff up and running on it in a few days, just really so I can see how it all goes together and then if my students want to try it out, I’ll get them to test it and see what they think

Also this week I will start recording some podcasts for one of our private students using Audacity. He gave me a few texts to read and record for him so he can then read the texts and follow along at home. I am curious to see how he likes this and will see what he tells Roberta after he’s tried it out. Audacity is an excellent free program and well worth getting if you’re a language teacher for sound or voice recordings and editing.

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

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.