Believe me, they don’t have to be boring. In fact, just the opposite.
I know some teachers consider translation activities a thing of the past and that, arguably, they should be banned from our classes. I don’t completely agree.
If I am honest with you, I can’t say that I like giving students a whole paragraph to translate, but a one-sentence translation exercise can help consolidate and reinforce grammar and vocabulary.
And it doesn’t need to be boring. In fact, it can be a lot of fun. How?
Easy. Let’s combine a seemingly boring traditional exercise with an online fun tool and let’s turn it into a competition.
Preparation:
• Decide on few sentences you want students to translate. I’d suggest 6-8 sentences. If you like exploring tools, my favourite for this kind of activities is Playbuzz flip cards.
• Slips of paper
How to go about it:
1. Pair learners and give them as many slips of paper as sentences you want them to translate.
2. Write the first sentence on the board and ask students to translate into English. If you use the online tool I mentioned above, just show the first card. (See mine below)
3. Depending on the length or difficulty of the sentence to be translated, set a time limit.
4. Once the pair have their sentence, ask them to write it on the slip of paper big enough for you to see from a distance.
5. When the time is up, ask the pair to hold it up and quickly go through all the translated sentences awarding 1 point to the pair who has the correct translation.
6. The winner is the pair who get the most points.
Note: Be strict with spelling mistakes or any other tiny mistakes. Students love it when you are strict and don’t give away the points easily.
Follow-up: Revise again all the sentences, but this time orally.
If you have following me for a while, then you know how much I love stepping aside from the course book and surprising students with activities that might add a spark to my classes.
Things like flip cards or wheels of fortune are constant guests in my classes. But for this activity, I have decided to invite an old friend I haven’t used for some time. Don’t ask me why. I still love him very much. Word clouds have a lot of potential when teaching languages and they are very easy to use. For this activity, I have used wordart.com.
Aim: to practise the order of adjectives before a noun (attributive position) in a writing competition.
Time: 5 minutes
Level: B2 students
Time: 10 minutes
Preparation: Go to wordart.com or any other word cloud generators and just type the words you want to see in the cloud. In my case, I typed five or six nouns and five adjectives relating to opinion, size, age, temperature, shape, colour, material and origin.
How to go about it:
1. Revise. You might want to revise the order of adjectives before the noun before doing the activity.
Although not all grammarians agree on the order of the adjectives and the rules for adjective order are quite complicated, it is necessary to give them some kind of order they can stick to. I always use this sentence to help them remember.
Important points:
Don’t overuse adjectives. While having two adjectives before a noun sounds natural, more than three would have the opposite effect.
Purpose adjectives go just before the noun: riding boots (boots for riding), sleeping bags (bags for sleeping).
Numbers go before adjectives: three huge houses.
2. Competition
Ask students to form pairs and either display the word cloud on the board or photocopy it.
Underline the nouns in the word cloud
Tell students they have two minutes to come up with the longest description for the any of the nouns in the word cloud.
The winners are the students who have managed to write the most adjectives before the noun.
Rules:
The adjectives before the noun must be placed in the correct order. Have the class check it while the students read their sentence.
It has to have sense, ie “a narrow boy” would be incorrect.
About two weeks ago, to celebrate Halloween, I decided to set up a contest where my students could try their hands at writing a paranormal story. The task was to write a story beginning with:
I don't believe in paranormal, but one day...
I want to thank my students for making the contest a resounding success as 58 students wrote 58 great stories. Thank you very much for your effort. Your contribution was vital to the success of the contest.Now, it’s time to choose a winner!
I have selected these 4 stories. Please, read them and help me pick a winner. After reading the four stories, you can vote. Please, vote only once!
Thanks for voting. Now, here’s the winner of the contest, Remedios Gámez. Thank you very much for your story “Hide-and-Seek”
Fall has finally hit!This is Halloween’s week and it seems the weather has finally chilled out and stopped being silly. The truth is that I don’t see myself telling scary stories in class while the sun outside is shining bright. It just wouldn’t do! Telling scary stories requires a dark, grey, gloomy day; one cannot be telling scary stories and thinking about going to the beach.
Level: B2
Aim:
to introduce and revise vocabulary used to talk about paranormal or unnatural phenomena
to give students’ some listening and speaking practice.
to develop students’ writing skills
STEP 1. INTRODUCTION
Write Paranormal on the whiteboard. Ask students if they know what it means (if necessary, explain that a paranormal activity is not scientifically explainable), and ask them if they believe in paranormal phenomena.
STEP 2. LISTENING COMPREHENSION. A PARANORMAL STORY.
Ask students if they know what a Ouija board is and ask them whether they, or anybody they know, have ever played with a Ouija board. I have a real experience to share with them but in case you don’t, there are plenty of terrifying stories online you might want to share with your students (just to build the right kind of atmosphere).
Play the first 0:53 seconds of the video and ask students to predict what will happen next. Listen to their predictions and then, play the rest of the story.
Play the video a second time and ask the following questions:
True or False? Justify your answer
The narrator and his brother had just bought a Ouija board
The narrator’s brother was willing to play with the board
The first time, the narrator’s brother moved the planchette.
Answer the following questions in your own words:
Why did they decide to play a second time?
What is the ideal environment for a Ouija board?
Why did the narrator leave the room?
Why did he run back to the room and what did he see?
STEP 3. SPEAKING
Before asking students to discuss the questions you might want to pre-teach or revise some vocabulary.
To set the mood: gloomy, desolate, haunted, abandoned, scary, spooky, frightening, creepy and supernatural
To say how you feel: horrified, terrified, petrified, panic-stricken, trembling, paralysed, shuddering
To talk about “people”: a ghost ( a ghostly figure), an apparition, a shadow, an entity, an (evil) spirit, a hallucination, a medium, a UFO.
Ask students to work in groups and answer the following questions.
Do you believe in ghosts? If not, how do you explain people’s claims to have seen them?
Have you experienced the feeling of déjà vu? How do you explain this strange feeling?
Telepathy is communication directly from one mind to another. Is it possible to communicate this way?
Sometimes, the police use psychics to help them. What do you think about this?
Do you believe in hypnosis? What happens when a person is hypnotized?
Can people predict the future? Have you ever had a feeling about the future that turned out to be true?
Have you ever visited a fortune teller?
What do you think about UFO sightings?
Are you a superstitious person? What things are you superstitious about?
STEP 4. WRITING CONTEST. I DON’T BELIEVE IN PARANORMAL, BUT….
I love telling stories, don’t you? Well, the heading in this Step 4 needs no explanation. A contest. A contest which will give me the opportunity to revise narrative tenses and connectors to help students sequence their ideas.
I’m going to use this excellent post from Thought.Co
A good contest, deserves a nice poster. Here it is.
Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world- Nelson Mandela
I’m so excited. Truly. I am. It’s been months since the last time I taught a class full of students. I know it’s going to be hard but I’m really willing to get back in the swing of things. I’m also preparing material for my workshops, and I have a bunch of work to catch up on, but I’m anyway feeling really motivated. So, it seems I am off to a good start.
This isa lesson for upper- intermediate students (B2) about education. In this post, you will find
Some vocabulary you might need to revise/learn when discussing this subject.
A small challenge with some confusing terms related to education
A video about 6 problems of our education system
Speaking practice: questions to discuss
A written assignment
The warm-up. Setting the context
I don’t think there is a better way to introduce a topic than by showing students a picture that will probably spark interest and hook students into the lesson. That’s the aim of the picture below.
Show the picture and listen to student’ reactions. Probably, the first one would be “Me, neither”, but let’s dig in for more profound reactions.
Tell students to get into pairs and think of three reasons why this boy wouldn’t want to go to school. Allow them 2 or 3 minutes and the write their suggestions on the board and discuss them.
Ask students: Can you relate to the boy in this picture? What can you remember about your kindergarten? In your opinion, what’s the ideal age to start school?
The vocabulary
Ask students to work in pairs. Write on the board the word “education” and ask students to brainstorm vocabulary related to the topic. Encourage them to mind map to help them revise vocabulary related to this thematic area. Allow them some minutes and get feedback from the whole class. I gave handout 1 to my intermediate students last year, so this year (B2), I will probably need to revise and add the terms in handout 2 explaining difficult vocabulary.
The challenge.Did you know?
In this part of the lesson, students are presented with some confusing terms.
Ask them to work in pairs and discuss the questions posed in the flip cards. Award 1 point to the student who has guessed the right answer. Flash Card Deck created by Cristina Cabal with GoConqr Speaking. The questions.
Ask students, in pairs or small groups, to answer the following questions about education, where they will revise some of the vocabulary learned in the previous step. Encourage the use of new vocabulary.
You can get the PDF with the questions here, but isn’t it more appealing to use the Spark below.
Listening. The video: 6 problems with our school system.
Methodology: collaborative retelling
It is a longish video. It lasts almost 6 minutes so I’d suggest breaking it up and asking students to work on different parts of the video. In the video, 6 problems with our education system are mentioned.
This activity will be set as homework.
Introduction. In class, play the first 34 seconds of the video and tell students to give you a summary. They will probably say that the video shows how our system of education has become obsolete and is not preparing children for the real world. Ask them whether they agree with this idea.
2. Homework.
Explain that everybody will need to listen to the introduction again (first 34 sec) which summarizes the content of the video.
Tell students the video talks about 6 problems our current education system is facing nowadays.
Form groups of six students and tell them that, in the next lesson, they will be working in groups of six and each of them will share what they have learned about their assigned problem and their opinion on whether this is a real problem in their country providing examples, if possible.Alternatively, you can form groups of 3 students and assign each student two problems.
Assign tasks to the different students in the group
Student 1: Industrial Age values 0:35-1:26
Student 2: Lack of autonomy 1:26-2:18
Student 3: Inauthentic learning 2:18-3:12
Student 4: No room for passion 3:12-4:15
Student 5: Differences in how we learn 4:15-4:40
Student 6: Lecturing 4:40-5:56
Writing. An opinion essay.
Write an opinion essay on the following:
Our current system of education is now outdated and ineffective.
Here’s a nice post I wrote last year which might help you.
