Musical Chairs
Sezgi Yalin, Cyprus
Sezgi Yalin earned her M.A. in teaching English as a foreign language at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She holds a B.A. in Journalism and English Literature. She worked as an English teacher and teacher trainer in the USA and Poland, and gained additional experience in the field in various countries such as UK, Spain, Egypt, China, Nepal, Tibet, Vietnam and Turkey. She currently works as a CELTA trainer at the English Preparatory School of the Eastern Mediterranean University in North Cyprus. Her research interests are teacher training and creative writing.
e-mail: sezgi.yalin@emu.edu.tr
Menu
Background
How musical chairs activities work
Activity 1
Activity 2
Activity 3
Activity 4
Activity 5
Activity 6
Extension
The following activities were created with the idea that learners need energizers at certain points in the lesson or toward the end of the day to keep them on their toes and encourage them to remain active participants by moving them out of their chairs or by making them move their arms, for example to throw a small ball or a small soft object or to pass around a box filled with language-related items. Moving around is, of course, ideal for kinesthetic learners and fun for those with musical intelligence when the movement is accompanied by music. The same energizers can be used to move learners away from mechanical oral exercises through which, for example, they are asked to make one sentence or more using new structures or words after they have been introduced for the first time. When these exercises are made more attractive by asking learners to do them moving around to music, they become more fun and support the notion that learning can and should be fun.
- A circle of chairs (or more for big classes) is formed with the back of the chairs facing the center of the circle. The number of chairs needs to be one fewer than the total number of learners in each circle.( If the chairs are not mobile, learners are instead asked to pass a ball around until the music stops playing (see step 5 below).
- All the learners are asked to sit. The teacher is the only person standing at the beginning of the activity to serve as a model.
- A pile of photos/pictures or words are placed close to the circle(s). These images depict new words or functions that have been introduced earlier during the lesson.
- Learners have to stand up when an energetic song or other piece of music starts playing and to move around the chairs as if they were playing musical chairs.
- When the music stops, learners move quickly to sit in a chair. The one left standing is asked to pick a card from the pile (or the teacher might supply the learner with a word) and make a sentence using the word/concept/function. The same learner might be also asked to extend the information in that sentence by making another sentence.
- The rest of the learners are encouraged to point out if there are any inaccuracies in the sentence or if the target word is not appropriately used.
- Steps 4-6 are repeated until all the cards in the pile have been used.
This activity is ideal to use after learners have worked on a particular song e.g. learned new words and discussed the meaning of the song or some of the lyrics.
- Set up as in steps 1 and 2 in Activity 1.
- Learners are given a particular word or phrase in the song and asked to sit as soon as they hear it.
- The learner left standing has to use that word or phrase to start a story. The story is continued by each of the other learners. The last learner in the circle has to finalize the story.
- Steps 2 and 3 are repeated until all the words/phrases the teacher wants students to focus on are covered.
To make the activity more challenging, learners might be asked to start the continuation of the story by using the last letter of the last sentence given by the previous learner. They might be even asked to sing the line created and not necessarily read it aloud. Alternatively, the learner standing can create a story of about five lines on his/her own by starting the story with the target word or phrase.
This activity can be used after one of the conditionals has been introduced.
- Set up as in steps 1 and 2 in Activity 1.
- Each time the music is stopped, the learner standing is asked to start a sentence with an if-clause. The same learner chooses someone else in the circle to finish his/her clause. The other learners help/peer correct, if necessary.
- Step 3 is repeated until a sufficient number of learners has had a chance to start or finish a conditional sentence.
This activity is a competition, and therefore works better with two or more circles.
- Set up as in steps 1 and 2 in Activity 1.
- The names of four categories are put on top of columns on the board, e.g., animals, food, professions, countries.
- Every time the music is stopped, the learners left standing in each circle are given the first letter of a word to think of for one of the categories. The learner works with peers in his/her circle and is timed by the teacher.
- The learner from each group is then asked to go to the board and writes his/her group’s answer in the right column. The chalk could be color-coded.
- Steps 3 and 4 are repeated. At the end of the activity, each correctly spelled word is awarded one point. No points are given for those words in the wrong category. The group with the highest number of points is the winner.
To be used after learners have been shown structures used to give advice (You’d better … / You ought to … / If I were you, I’d … / You should … / It’s worth trying to … / It’s a good idea to … / You might find it useful to … / Why don’t you … / Remember to …, etc.)
- Set up as in steps 1 and 2 in Activity 1.
- Every time the music is stopped, the learner left standing is shown a situation on OHP that would require him/her to ask for advice from a learner s/he chooses from the circle, e.g. “I want to make a good impression on a first date. What’s your suggestion?”
- The learner give his/her peer some advice using one of the structures introduced earlier in, e.g., “You might find it useful to buy flowers for your date.”
- The other learners offer support or edit both the request and the piece of advice. To make this activity even more fun, the person asking for advice could state the situation with a certain facial expression and voice modulation. The example in step 2 can be said with a nervous tone of voice and a slightly nervous facial expression. The learner giving advice should sound confident and reassuring in the way s/he responds to the learner seeking advice.
- Steps 2 to 4 are repeated until a sufficient number of students has had a chance to use target structures in a meaningful and appropriate way.
(might be easier to run it in big groups while learners are sitting)
- Set up as in steps 1 and 2 in Activity 1.
- While the music is playing, a box full of pictures/objects/words is passed around. The learner left holding the box when the music stops takes an item from the box, shows it to the other learners and uses it to start a story. S/he can alternatively create a sentence about the object. Instead of a box containing pictures/words, pieces of paper with these pictures/words on can be wrapped around each other, and the learner left holding this ‘ball’ would ‘peel off’ a layer to discover the next picture/word.
- The procedure in step 2 is repeated till a story is created. The last learner has to finalize the story.
- The teacher may want to write down the sentences to later give the story to the learners so that they may have a chance to edit/develop it.
These activities can be used with very many different language structures and words.
At the end of each activity, learners can be asked to remember and write some of the
sentences created by the other learners or to come up with new ones, perhaps even a short
text on a topic chosen by the learner him/herself.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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