Lessons from nothing

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Here are some activities using strips of paper!

1. Dialogue build: Writing/Reading Put students into pairs and give each pair six strips of blank paper. Tell them to write a short dialogue to recycle any new lexis or language. Explain that they should write each line of dialogue on a separate strip of paper. Give students time to think of a dialogue and write the six lines of their dialogue on their strips of paper. Monitor and check for accuracy. When students have finished, tell them to mix their strips of paper and exchange them with another pair of students. Explain they should read the strips of paper and try to put the dialogue in the correct order. When students have completed the reordering activity, tell them to practice the dialogue with their partner, focusing on any difficult pronunciation. Tell students to continue to exchange their strips of paper with their classmates until each pair has reordered and practiced each of the dialogues.

2. Sentence Hot Seat!

Students often have trouble with sentence formation often forgetting the auxiliary verbs this is a great activity to drum the correct form into their heads! Put the students into teams . Hand out 6 slips of paper to each group and ask them to write a sentence on each slip of paper using the target language e.g. present continuous.

She is playing tennis at the moment These are then passed to another group. One person picks up a sentence and elicits the answer from their group without using the words on the piece of paper. The first team to finish is the winner!

3. Important dates in your life Teacher writes three dates that are important to them on the board. Teacher asks students to ask them questions to guess why they are important. The students then write three important dates in their life on three different pieces of paper.

These are then put in chronological order with the rest of the class. A coin is used as a dice. When we land on a persons date the class must ask questions to find out why this date is important.

4. Party time: Speaking/Vocabulary Brainstorm adjectives of character (shy, generous, etc) and write as many as students can think of on the board. Then tell each student to choose one of the adjectives of character from the board. Explain to students that they are all at a party, and that they must mingle and chat to each other in the role of their character adjective. Explain that they must pretend to have that character, but that they must never say what the adjective is.

Have students write the name of each student in the class on a piece of paper. Tell them to start mingling, and explain that they should try to speak to everyone and identify the character adjective they are representing. When they think they know what adjective the person they are speaking to is trying to express, they should write it next to their name and move on to speak to someone else. At the end of the game, tell students to sit down and then call out the name of each person in the class and ask students to say the adjective they thought that person was trying to represent.

5. Reported Speech Adjectives Start off by repeating the step above. Ask students to choose three of these adjectives and write them on three slips of paper. They then give the adjective to someone in the class and tell them why they are givingthis adjective to them. e.g.

SQUARE Steve you are so square because you always come in early to do your lesson plans.

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Ideas adapted from onestopenglish.com

6. If… Writing/Speaking Give students two or three strips of paper each and tell them to write the beginning part of a second conditional sentence on each strip. Write a few examples on the board to give them some ideas, such as ‘If I was a bird…’, ‘If I went to Rome…’ Make sure students only write the beginning part of the sentence. When they have finished collect all the strips of paper and mix them. Put students into small groups and divide the strips of paper between each group. Place the strips of paper face down on the desk in front of the students. Tell students to take turns choosing a strip of paper, turning it over and reading what it says. Explain they must finish the sentence. Demonstrate this activity by using the examples on the board: ‘If I was a bird… I’d fly around the world’ ‘If I went to Rome I’d visit the Vatican Museum.’ When students have finished tell groups to swap their strips of paper and continue the activity. You may wish to monitor and make notes of any errors students make. At the end, read out the incorrect sentences and have the class listen and correct any mistakes they hear.

7. DIY Jumbled sentence Ask students to choose a nice long sentence from one of their grammar exercises in the coursebook or workbook. Tell them to take a piece of paper and rip it up into as many pieces as there are words in the sentence. They then write one word on each piece of paper. Tell them to mix up the pieces of paper on their desk. They then move over one place so that they are sitting in another student’s chair in front of a new jumbled sentence. Tell them they have a time limit (30 seconds or 1 minute) to put the pieces of paper in the correct order and make the sentence. When they finish, they can check with the student who made the sentence if they are correct. GOOD FOR: structures with several elements (e.g. going to, perfect continuous tenses, conditionals), questions and negatives, adjective and adverb placement in sentences.

Variation: To make it extra difficult, ask each student when making the sentence to add another piece of paper with an extra word that doesn’t fit into the sentence. The other student has to reorder the sentence and spot the “intruder” word.

8. Find the other half Tell students they need two small pieces of paper. Ask students in groups or alone to write a two line dialogue using the target structure. They can take something from the course book if they like, or invent it themselves. They must write one part of the dialogue on one bit of paper and the other part of the dialogue on the other. Circulate and check a few to make sure that they are correct. Collect all the papers and redistribute them. Ss must find the other half of their dialogue.

You can do this with longer sentences too. GOOD FOR: almost any grammar (for dialogues, this in fact is more about coherence), longer structures like conditionals for sentences.

Variation: This can be done at the end of the week using a new piece of vocabulary and the definition.

9. Messenger This is similar to an internet char room but in class what you need to do is divide the class into pairs and give each pair a blank piece of paper. Explain that they have six minutes to have a conversation with each other, but that they cannot say anything. They must do this in writing. One learner writes a message on the piece of paper and hands it to the other learner. The other learner writes a response and hands it back to the first learner. This kind of situation be a weird to students at first, as they might not know what to say. But once the paper has passed back and forth two or three times you might find it hard to stop them writing!

Variation: You can give your learners more guidance by supplying them with a role play situation each, e.g. You are a doctor. Explain to your patient that she (or he!) is pregnant.

10. Presentations On the top of an A3 students write a topic that they are interested in e.g. for the Turkish students….Ataturk, Istanbul!

Next other students walk around and write questions they want answering on the topic. Students then write a mini presentation using answering the questions. When they are ready, have students come to the front of the class to give their presentation. Give each student up to five points for each of the following categories: Level of interest, Eye contact, Fluency, Grammatical accuracy, Range of vocabulary, Pronunciation. Finally, give your feedback to each student on their performance before announcing the winner.

11. Pie Chart This can be about the students favorite things, their weekend etc. Students draw a pie chart (the bigger the section the more important) about things in their life. Students then mingle and ask questions to other students about each others pie-charts.

12.. Your Ideas

GROUP A Look at these two different ideas. Choose one and then teach the idea to the other groups.

Idea one • Read the class a very short poem or joke (there are some examples in Uncovering Grammar, task Sheet 5); working in pairs or small groups the students try to reconstruct the story from memory – you may need to read it more than once.

• Choose a student to write the text on to the board, with the help of the rest of the class.

Read the text one more time, and make any necessary changes to the text on the board.

• Then ask the class to suggest a word, or a sequence of up to three words, that could be removed from the text; the student at the board rubs the words out. Continue doing this until there is only one word left on the board. (This “Disappearing story” idea comes from Mario Rinvolucri).

Idea two • The teacher writes up the first letter of six to ten theme-related words that have come up in previous lessons (e.g. a____, c_____, etc. ), and reads out definitions, e.g. “The space at the top of a house where you keep old things” (attic); “The part of as room that is above your head” (ceiling): students complete as many of the words as they can, check in pairs, and then the teacher checks with the whole class.

• They use as many of the completed words as possible to write a short text, e.g. a description of a house.

They write four or five “comprehension questions” for their texts, then exchange them with another student, who reads the text and writes the answers to the comprehension questions, which their partner then checks.

Look at the ideas below. Choose one idea and then present it to the class.

Group B Idea one Soap opera drama: Speaking Choose a famous soap opera that all your students know. Tell them to list six of the most famous characters, and have them explain to you the personality and profile of each one. Then divide the class into groups of six and tell each student to choose a different character. Explain they must prepare a scene from the next episode of the soap opera! Tell them that the scene should include all the characters, and give them time to prepare their ideas. When students are ready, have each group come to the front of the class and perform their role play. For each role play award up to five points for each of the following categories: Level of interest, Level of acting, Accuracy of language, Pronunciation. The winner is the group with the most points.

Idea two Onomatopoeia Either write up (on the board) or read out a few words that are onomatopoeic e.g. Buzz, Fizz, Wow! Thud, Grrrr, Psst! etc.

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Ask the students to think of what is ‘happening’ for each word i.e. Buzz = a doorbell ringing.

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After they have written down their ideas get them to discuss these in groups (or as a class).

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As an extension activity you can ask the students to

Group C Look at the ideas below. Choose one idea that you like and present it to the class.

Idea one Message in a bottle On the board draw a simple picture of the sea with a bottle floating (top above the waves). Ask the students what it is and elicit, or explain, the idea of a ‘message in a bottle’ (i.e. someone is shipwrecked and sends a message asking for help). Then, on the board write up the following: Hel Ia S D C Y Explain that this is all that remains of the message. The students should work in pairs, or small groups, and complete (write) the message.

Idea Two A question of punctuation This activity also requires a board, but other than that it’s the usual pen and paper.

Write up a short text (this can be from a course book) on the board but leave out punctuation, capital letters etc. Then ask your students to take turns coming up and correcting the text.

If you want you can add a competitive edge by dividing the class into two groups and writing up the same text twice. The groups then race each other correcting the text.

Group D Look at the ideas below. Choose one that you like. Now you are going to present this idea to the other groups.

Idea One Detective work. As in the previous activity, display some personal items (such as a cinema ticket, a bus pass, a CD, someone’s business card, a magnifying glass…), checking the names of each one. This time ask learners, working in pairs or small groups, to make deductions about your life, personality, and so on, based on these items. You can provide them with sentence frames which they can use to generate as many sentences as possible. For example: You must + verb … You probably + verb… You might + verb … You obviously + verb… Ask groups to report their sentences, giving reasons, and then tell them whether their deductions were correct or not.

They can then go on to do the same activity in pairs or small groups, followed by a class report stage.

Idea Two Lost property Ask each learner to contribute an item by (secretly) placing it in a box or bag that you pass round. Then, tell the them that the classroom is a “lost property office”. Demonstrate by first taking the role of the “office assistant” yourself and inviting individuals to come up and “claim” their item. To do this they have to describe it accurately, as well as answer questions such as What’s it made of? Has it got your name on it? What do you use it for? How long have you had it? etc. When they have given sufficient information (you can set a minimum of, say, ten facts about the object), you can select the item and give it back to them. Then ask other students to take turns as the “office assistant” and “customer”, until all the items have been returned to their owners.

It’s your turn Choose 3 students (volunteers) to sit at the front of the class. The rest of the students think of questions to ask the three (these can be based on the theme of the lesson). One student asks a question to the 3 volunteers. The first volunteer starts the answer to the question by saying on word. Then the second volunteer adds the next word, the third the next and then back to the first volunteer to add the next word in the sentence/answer. This continues until they finish the sentence. The teacher (or another student) can record the answer to look at later. Note: It is important that the volunteers only say one word per turn. At low levels they may wish to help each other, at higher levels the fun is when you make the next volunteer add more (i.e. by using link words like and, but, however etc).

GOOD FOR: word order, linking devices, verb agreements.

All the words Ask the students to write down three English words (these can be their favourite words, words they recently learnt, words they think are useful, words from today’s lesson etc). Now ask the students to put their pens down and to stand up. They should then walk around the room (if this is not possible ask them to work in small seated groups) and exchange their words. They must not say any other words than their three + the ones they hear from other students (i.e. The first person they speak to tells them three words, they now have 6. The second person tells them 6 they now have12 etc). After a few minutes ask the students to sit down and write down all the words they have ‘collected’. On the board add a few ‘grammatical’ words such as and, the, a, he, she, have, has, do, does, am, are, is, etc. Tell the students they must now write as many sentences as they can but only using the words they have written down + the words on the board.

GOOD FOR: word order and sentence structure. Can be adapted to be good for any area of grammar by focussing the choice of words in the initial stage.

1. Speech bubbles: Speaking For lower level students, choose a picture in their course book (or magazines - choose famous stars) that has several people in and have them think about what each person is saying. This could be as simple as What’s your name? or How are you? but encourage students to be as creative as they can. Give them time to think of their ideas, then tell them to write what they think each person is saying in a speech bubble on the picture. Finally, put students into groups to practice the conversations they have made.

1. Describe the picture: Speaking Chose an interesting photograph or illustration from your course book and put students into pairs to describe what they can see. You might want students to concentrate on using a target structure you have recently covered. For example, an elementary class might review the present continuous by saying what each person in a picture is doing. She is sitting on a chair/He is speaking on the phone, etc.

You could turn this into a game by putting students into groups of three or four and having one student ask a question (e.g. What is she doing?/Who is speaking on the phone? etc.) while the other students compete to be the first to answer. Students gets one point for each correct answer.

The winner is the person at the end of the game with the most points.

Alternatively, choose a picture that allows them to recycle the vocabulary they have covered in the class, such as clothes, adjectives appearance and character, etc. He looks shy, I think she’s very intelligent.

1. Link the pictures: Speaking Tell students to turn to a page in their coursebooks that has several pictures and to try to think of a situation to connect all the pictures. Tell them to build up a story with as much detail as they can. Then tell each group that they must prepare a role play of their story to the class. Give them time to decide their roles and what each of them says, then tell them to perform their role play.