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Saturday 19 November 2011

#ELTBITES Challenge



Richard Gresswell, the @inglishteacher, has invited the teachers to share their bite-size lesson activities. The activity should be done with minimal resources, just some paper and a pen. Great idea and useful at that!

Here is mine, adaptable to any age.





Spy Adam!

The aim of the activity – to practise describing someone’s daily activities.

1. Divide the students into 3 groups.  Try to put an equal number of students in each group.
Each student in the group has to describe Adam’s (pick whatever name you prefer) activities for a certain period of the day. Tell the first group the time – from 6am till midday, the second group – from midday till 6pm, the 3rd group – from 6pm till midnight. If you wish to include the night, stretch the period.

2. At the beginning of the lesson read an introductory paragraph about Adam. Give Adam’s background, mention some peculiar features, e.g. Adam is afraid of the dark, he is scared of bees, he hates hamsters, he plays the flute, he knows Swahili, etc. Students have to include this feature in their stories. Encourage them to make up funny situations and strange incidents.

3. Remix groups - pick one student from each group and put them together in new groups of three. Students read their stories to the other group members and they decide if they have got a realistic story.

4. At the end of the lesson, the teacher decides which story has been the most coherent or captivating.

Looking forward to new ideas from other teachers and Richard himself.


6 comments:

Richard said...

Hi Baiba

Thanks so much for taking on the challenge and producing a really useful and easy to follow activity. I'll be adding to ELTBITES right away.

Best wishes
Richard

Tyson Seburn said...

Though I found the activity and idea for the challenge very worthwhile, the hashtage #ELTBITES reads to me the same as saying ELT sucks. Haha.

Baiba said...

Tyson, why? Apart from seeing BITES as bites (as in the dog...) I can't find fault with the tag haha.

Ann said...

Hi Barbara,

Really liked the activity and have just posted a link to it on the TeachingEnglish facebook page if you'd like to check there for comments.

Please feel free to post on the page whenever you have anything you'd like to share.

Best,

Ann

Tyson Seburn said...

'bites', in North America, is another way of say 'sucks' or 'blows' or any number of negatively connotated sentiments.

Yves Maris said...

This is aa great post thanks