Making the Classroom Alive

Beata Wojciechowska, Poland

Beata Wojciechowska is a teacher at Comprehensive School Number 1 in Łódź and British Centre – language school. She is interested in creative approach to teaching teenagers and adults. E-mail: beatawoj@wp.pl

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Introduction
Sample activities
Conclusion
References

Introduction

I remember my first days as a teacher. I blindly trusted teacher’s books and school curriculums. I was always prepared and I methodically followed the material that a given coursebook included. I tried really hard but nevertheless I soon noticed that some of my students were not as convinced of the importance of all the issues the book covered as I was. I started looking at that matter from the students’ perspective and I suddenly realized that doing all the exercises (one after another) from the book was predictable for the students and therefore boring. I started tailoring my books – omitting some things and including others, changing the tasks and making them more fun and letting my students show me how I should teach them because what is funny and involving for some people, can be dull or silly for others. Below I am presenting my top activities which have made my teaching more vivid both for me and for the people whom I have been teaching. These activities come from various conferences, workshops, books I have read and lessons’ observations. Enjoy ! :)

Sample activities

1. Polish /English dictation – the teacher dictates a short text in English and students write it down in Polish (or different native language). Then they compare their versions in pairs and translate it back into English.
2. Challenge / Middle / Easy dictation – the teacher lets students decide in which group they would like to be. Members of the easy group have to write down eight adjectives or nouns or verbs); members of the middle group have to answer the questions the teacher had earlier written on the board and members of the challenge group have to write down a full text. Students feel in control of the situation because they can make a decision as far as the difficulty of the exercise goes.
3. Conversation in the picture – the teacher brings to class a picture showing a large group of people. Students’ task is to invent a conversation between particular people from the photo. Students can decide about the topic or the teacher can choose one related to the grammar or vocabulary that have been recently studied.
4. A word cloud – the teacher writes a word cloud on the board and asks students to predict what kind of story could include the given vocabulary. Students can work in pairs and write their own stories. Later the teacher can show the real version of the story or it can just be an independent activity. The teacher can organize a literature contest and to make the task more demanding, the teacher can ask students to write the mini saga version (exactly fifty words)
5. Guessing questions – the teacher writes answers on the board and students try to guess what the question was. It is a good exercises if you want to practice question formation and can be applied to any grammatical material. An example can be – Answer: Pink Question: What colour are your pyjamas?
6. Second conditional quotes – the teacher writes the beginnings of some famous quotes in second conditional and students try to finish them ( a funny way to practise second conditional). Then the teacher gives out the endings of the quotes and the photos of the famous people who said those words and students try to match full quotes to the people in the pictures.
7. Adverbs – the teacher asks each student to think of an adverb; students do not say which adverb they have thought of. The teacher names an activity and the students mime how this activity is done with their adverb. The group and the teacher try to guess what kind of adverb it is.
8. Cheering corrections – the teacher involves the group into correcting each other. For example, one student’s task is to say a chain of first conditional sentences – If the weather is good, I’ll go for a walk. ; If I go for a walk, … - if the sentence is correct the group applaud or say yeah or do some other earlier agreed positive thing. If
the sentence is wrong the group say boo or show sad faces, etc. The teacher’s task is to monitor their reactions and help them recognize the correct and incorrect versions.
9. Miming narrations – miming is commonly used in the classroom but to make it funnier and more involving we can ask students to mime narrations. For example, miming activity You are eating spaghetti is relatively easy but if you want to make it more demanding ask a student to mime You are preparing for a date

Conclusion

I hope that some of the above described activities will be a novelty to at least some of you and I hope that your students will enjoy them.

References

Rinvolucri, M. 2002, Humanising Your Coursebook, Delta Publishing.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology & Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.