Dear readers

Just a few simple ideas this time.  Thank you to whoever is tweeting this site as the views go rocketing up.  I haven’t ventured on to Twitter yet but it might happen soon.

Extreme battleships

How about an 8×8 grid with two people playing against two other people at the same time using the same board?  It sounds mental but it can work.  You need a very competitive class, very clear instructions and a certain arrangement of desks.

Differentiated Quiz Quiz Trade with mini-whiteboards

Get students to write a question on their whiteboard and the start of the answer on the back of the whiteboard.  Students must ask and answer a question before swapping whiteboards.  I tried this with ¿Qué estudias? and ¿Qué vas a estudiar?  Students had “estudio” or “voy a estudiar” on the other side so when the person was answering, they had help with their answer.  Went down well with a low ability group.

Extreme holiday consequences

A fair amount of pre-teaching of verbs needed here.  Give students a long piece of paper, tell them to put their name at the bottom (this throws them a bit).  Then lead them through the following insisting that they fold over and pass the paper on each time.  At the end return it to the original person.  Writing and reading task in one 🙂

• Somewhere you went
• who you went with
• how you got there
• el primer día + 2 activities
• Opinion
• el Segundo día+ 2 activities
• Opinion
• el ultimo día + 2 activites
• Volví en + transport

You can adapt this to your heart’s content.  This could work with what you do at the weekend, what you plan to do at the weekend.  It could be done with school.  Very flexible activity that allows for a high degree of creativity and teaches some useful phrases at the same time.

30 second summary

A great plenary activity that allows you to check on the learning of a class or even better an individual.  You know how some students do not give much away by their facial expressions, set the class the task of summarising the content of the lesson or explaining a grammar point in 30 seconds.,  Go over and listen to that particular student.

Youtube

There is a lot of dross out there but if you find something good, make it part of your practice.  I am not a massive fan of songs given that my ability to sing is …well.. “limited” would be putting it kindly.  The school insurance probably does not cover the resultant broken glass.

Particularly enjoyed using these two recently:

We exploited them by listening, gap fills, finding phrases, and then trying to sing it.  If you have VLC media player you can slow the play speed (0.85 is good)