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Tribal Democracy
Finger Games
Get your Students to tell you a story
Tribal Democracy
Caroline Hislop, Hillschool, Italy
www.hillschool.it
Let the tribe rule!
Objective:
To obtain spontaneous and valid feedback on a particular lesson/series of lessons/course.
Time:
Anything from 15 mins onwards. As much time as the students need/want
Timetable fit:
Generally at the end of a course or term, but can be used after a series of lessons or whenever the teacher feels the need to sound the class, as part of a pre-planning phase.
Level:
Any level. A beginners class can do this exercise in their own tongue, providing the class is monolingual and the teacher shares their language.
Preparation:
Ideally, students should be sitting around a table or have their seats arranged in a circle, facing inwards. In the case of a large class, several circles can be formed. Each student has a sheet of A4 paper and a pen/pencil
Procedure:
1. T asks SS to write one thing that they enjoyed / liked / didn't like / hated / found difficult / would like to repeat etc. on the sheet of paper. The setting up of this activity can vary according to the level - Elementary classes could benefit from some stem sentences on the board for support; Advanced classes may even like to express their opinion in metaphor!
Tribal Democracy
2. As the SS finish writing, they fold their sheet of paper and put it into the middle of the circle or table. They then take up someone else's piece of paper, read what has been written and add a comment on it, by agreeing or disagreeing or giving another opinion. Invite your SS to be as frank as they wish and as creative as possible.
3. The SS continue to write comments, put them into the centre and read and comment on new ones until the sheets of paper are full, or until their enthusiasm is exhausted.
4. At the end of the activity, T collects all the A4s to put up on the walls around the classroom for all to share.
Comments:
" Differing to the traditional feedback questionnaires I used to hand out to my SS at the end of a course, this kind of feedback is much more spontaneous and open-ended, in so much as it comes directly from the heart. SS don't have to stick to fixed outlines and feel frustrated because what they want to say doesn't fall into any of the categories or questions printed.
" SS are usually less inhibited as what they write remains more or less anonymous - and, they are writing/chatting to their peers and not their teacher.
" This activity can be as versatile as you want - with my business classes, I do this under the form of a 'tribal' SWOT analysis!
" I prefer doing any kind of Tribal Writing at the beginning of a lesson, or at least in the first half, so that I don't have to stop the writing because of the bell! This obviously requires flexibility of timetable.
" Language focus: revising likes/dislikes; Past Simple; expressing opinions; agreeing/disagreeing
Acknowledgements:
I got this idea from my ex-DELTA tutor Hugh Cory as a creative writing activity, which he called Brain Writing. I mentioned using it for course feedback during a Helbling Seminar in Prato, Italy and Herbert Puchta re-baptised it as 'Tribal Writing'
Finger Games
Tatiana Kistanova is from Moscov, Russia
tkistochka@rambler.ru
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Backround
An old exercise
Finger game 1
Finger game 2
Backround
I have been a private teacher for more than ten years, and I usually teach kids at home. My groups consist of pupils of different ages, brothers and sisters, best friends and neighbours.
When you teach young learners, a lot of unexpected difficulties may occur, often resulting from our own wrong assumptions. Sometimes we find out that seven- or eight-year-old kids are cannot do simple things such as doing sums or telling the time. So, if you teach kids properly, they acquire linguistic experience and their general competence is enhanced significantly as well.
An old exercise.
To begin with, show three or four fingers to the kids, and ask: ”How many fingers?”.
Let the pupils answer, then repeat it several times.
Keep adding and subtracting, always demonstrating the calculations on your fingers.
Then you sing a song:
Hold up one, and hold up one,
Together you have two.
And like we said before,
Like we said before
When you’re adding things together
You will always get more!
Then you go on singing “hold up one and hold up two”, and so on.
When the idea is clear to them, the kids may continue playing in pairs.
Finger game 2
“Ten little candles on a chocolate cake”
You show ten fingers, wait for the pupils to follow you. Also you keep repeating the phrase : “Ten little candles on a chocolate cake”.
Then you “blow out” one candle, bending one finger, and you say: ”Nine little candles on a chocolate cake”. Encourage the kids to repeat after you. Then kids take it in turns to “blow” the candles, and you end up with “No candles on a chocolate cake”.
If the whole procedure seems too slow or monotonous, you may blow more candles at one time.
This activity can be used as a warm up in a lesson on food, taste, likes and dislikes.
This activity is especially enjoyable when it’s somebody’s birthday!
Get your Students to tell you a story
John Morgan and Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims Language Courses
People coming to language classes are full of stories, the personal stories they tell and re-tell in the mother tongue, jokes they know, stories they have read, stories their grandmother told them, stories read to them in childhood, newspaper "faits divers" stories that have stuck in their memories, the extraordinary filmed stories of the dreams created each night but often not remembered. I could go on, but I won't!
In this article I'd like to suggest a few single techniques that help people find these inner texts and manifest them to each other in the foreign language:
1. Family photos
Bring a set of 60-80 family photos to class. They should span as long a time range as possible and they should not feature you. 60-80 will be adequate for a typical VHS class size of 15-20 students.
Spread the photos on a table and invite the students to pick a photo or photos that bring/s back a memory, story or scene of their own.
Ask them to work in threes and fours and tell the scene/story evoked by the picture.
You need family snapshots for this activity. The "bad" photography, the curious formalism and the attempts to break away from it make these photographs one of the major, mass art forms of 20th century Europe. Such snapshots have a particular intimacy and power to move. In an odd way, yours are mine and vice-versa. This exercise gives an intense feeling of continental unity, to me, at any rate.
2. Fire
Most people have a fire story of one sort or another. Such stories are often dramatic and to some degree share similar vocabulary requirements, so that, though the students are telling their own stories, the words they are groping for will be needed by other tellers too.
Bring a fire prevention poster to class, showing a fire or the devastation after a fire. Display your picture and leave time for the students to look at it in silence.
Tell a fire story from your own experience.
Ask the students to bring to mind fire stories of their own or of their families - ask them to prepare to tell the stories by mumbling them quietly under their breath. Some people do this best with their eyes shut.
Group the students in fours or fives to tell and listen to the fire stories. Go round listening and supplying words - write the words up on the board as they come up.
After the telling ask the students to do a vocabulary re-using exercise round the words on the board that have come from their story-telling needs and successes.
3. Time Travel Mirror
Ask a student who likes drawing to come and draw a large, beautiful mirror on the board or over-head projector. Ask the other students to copy it down, using a whole page to do so.
Tell them their mirrors are time-travel mirrors in which they can see a scene from the past - ask them to draw the scene.
Have the learners work in pairs explaining their drawings and telling the story attached to the scene.
remember that when testing this technique a student called Marco, from Florence, drew a dramatic scene in front of the goalposts. This was the moment of his first goal for his town's professional under-18 team. This led him on to tell the story of his collar-bone injury that invalided him out of professional football and condemned him to tedious book-keeping, as he saw it.
The oral texts the students produce in this exercise are as varied as the learners themselves. It's the sort of exercise that reminds the EFL teacher that she may be helping elementary learners of English, but in no sense elementary people. It's a distinction that can get blurred, especially in fiercely direct method classes.
If you find the technique above a bit too personal for the way your class hangs together at the moment perhaps the Rip van Winkelish exercise below might suit them:
4. Incomplete Comprehension
Give the students the questions below and ask them to work in pairs and decide on the story they see lying behind the questions.
Then ask each person to tell their story to some one from another pair.
Questions
1. Where was the giant ___________?
2. What was the boy doing to it?
3. How did the man help the________?
4. What did the_________ offer to do for the man?
5. How did the man get there?
6. What sort of place was it deep below the sea?
7. What are mermaids?
8. Why did he want to go back to the land?
9. What was he given as a farewell present?
10. Where did the _________ take him back to?
11. What was his village like now?
12. He opened it - what came out?
13. Why was his face different?
Please check the The Methodology and Language for Primary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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