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Table of Contents
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America the Beautiful • Picture pairs for seating
One great way to move learners into new seats for pair or group work! Find pictures with accompanying texts (you can have learners write them in previous classes, use descriptions from the Internet, or captions from newspaper pictures). As learners enter the room, hand them a text. They must read the text and find the desk with their matching picture pair before sitting down in the new place. Walla – randomized classroom seating!
Picture reconstruction • Group speaking and memory task
This is a fun activity that gets learners speaking and involves minimal teacher preparation. Select 5-10 pictures to bring to class and show each of them slowly to the class before putting them aside. Reconstruct the first picture as a whole class by eliciting answers to some of the following questions: How many people were there? Where were they? What season was it? What was happening in the picture? What objects were in the picture? Tell learners that their task is to reconstruct the remaining pictures in their small groups in as much detail as possible. When finished, share descriptions as a whole class and ask more questions about details: What color was her dress? What was behind the dog? Finally, show pictures again.
What’s for dinner? • Independent vocabulary discovery task
Allow learners to discover new words or concepts by creating a matching activity with pictures and descriptions. Through the process of reading and finding matches, learners create mental images of and connections to new items (such as American food, in the example). Follow-up activities might recycle the same pictures as cards in games such as Memory or Go Fish!
- Images and other materials and teaching food items used during the seminar: American Food Culture
- Instructional handout
- Follow-up activities from the workshop participants
- put one extra picture or description to find or name or draw
- add pictures of ingredients and students could make a recipe
- make (design) a menu of Bulgarian traditional dishes
- encourage students to extend vocabulary — junk food, health food, cultural research, write a poem (Pablo Neruda)
- cross-cultural exercise
- find the native country dishes that resemble the American dishes and write a recipe cookbook
Home run! • Post-reading comprehension check
Check learner understanding of a text by asking them to visualize what they have read by matching concepts to visuals (in this case, a baseball field). This is also a useful activity for reading about other sports, games, food, processes, and systems.
- Pictures and materials for teaching baseball: Baseball Unit
- Instructional handout
What’s the same? • Finding similarities
Collect a set of pictures with similar themes. Hand one picture to each learner in groups of 5-6. Without showing their pictures, learners must take turns sharing the contents of their pictures (i.e. There is snow in my picture.) with the aim of finding the elements unite the pictures: Irina’s and Tiia’s pictures both have boys with red caps. Madis’s and Ele’s pictures both have lakes or seas. All of our pictures have snow. The activity is a nice speaking activity and can be followed up by sharing or writing.
- Snowman Pictures
- Instructional handout
- Follow-up activities from the workshop participants
- use pictures to describe winter
- picture discussions
- one person describes the picture and the other illustrates. Next, compare.
- Writing tasks: write about, for example, "my winter holidays"
- Write descriptions of the pictures and match them
Advertising slogans • Creative practice
Have piles of magazines sitting at home? This is a great way to use them up and add some zip to your language class. Find several advertisements that have provocative or interesting pictures and clip off the words. Paste the picture on the outside of an envelope and ask learners to create marketing slogans. When they have finished, learners share their creative answers and pictures with each other before opening the envelope to compare with the original slogan.
- Instructional handout
- Follow-up activities from the workshop participants
- With a more advanced group, you can set them to work in two groups and ask them to come up with a whole advertising campaign. It could be set up as a project; you can use Internet resources, etc.
- Cutting out product's name and students guess what the product is (and explain why they think so)
What came first? • A predicting pre-reading exercise
To introduce new vocabulary and draw learners into a piece of reading, use pictures (I’ve used clip art) in an ordering task. Before reading the story or article, ask learners to arrange pictures in the order in which they think they will appear. As the story is read, learners can verify their guesses by reordering or reworking the picture order.
- Images for pre-reading The Enormous Turnip
- Instructional handout
- Follow-up activities from the workshop participants
- practise words on the cards and tell a story
- invent your own story based on the pictures
- group the pictures with common characteristics
- chain story (also known as "unknown story"?)
- practise past simple
- act out the story as a role play in front of the class
Vroom! • Pre-reading activity
Activate pre-existing knowledge or ask students to hypothesize about a text before reading. Match pictures to labels or parts of the article (in this example, cars to gender and description). Read to check and see if your hunches were correct.
She said, he said • Active practice with reported speech
Learners exclaim that practicing reported speech is not particularly exciting. However, this activity will take some of the tedium away with room for creative interpretations. Hand out interesting photos or pictures clipped from magazines. In groups of 3-4, each learner chooses an object or person in the picture (you can dictate these objects, if you would like). The learner writes one sentence that this object would say if it could talk. For example, if we take the picture of coffee and donut here at the left and I choose to impersonate the donut, I write: “Please, whatever you do, don’t dunk me! I hate coffee!” After writing the sentences, learners exchange them and convert them to reported speech: The sugary donut begged me not to dunk her into the steaming cup and exclaimed her dislike for coffee. Groups of learners can share the transformations and collate them to create a story about the picture.
- Instruction cards for reported speech
- Instructional handout
- Follow-up activities from the workshop participants
- describe the picture using the past progressive — "The girl was sitting…"
- baseball vocabulary
- You can extend the activity by pairing people with the pictures again ask what the person or object from the first pictures says to the person or object from the second picture. this way, you practice the transformation of indirect speech into the direct speech.
- write a story or play
- act out a picture
- write a story from the point of view of the character you are in the picture
What’s the difference? • Descriptive speaking practice
Give pairs two similar but not identical pictures. Without revealing their pictures, the pairs describe their pictures and ask questions to determine the differences between the two pictures (you can tell them in advance how many differences there are, if you wish). When they have exhausted all possibilities, they can examine the two pictures together.
- Different Snowman Pictures
- Instructional handout
- Follow-up activities from the workshop participants
- talking about winter
- talking about seasons
- comparing and contrasting
- teach vocabulary about clothes (hat, scarf)
- present continuous tense
- students may then describe what kind of snowman they would make
- write a snowman how-to guide!
- make a story or dialogue
As easy as • Fun grammar practice with comparatives
Collect a number of interesting looking pictures from magazines or your own pictures (alternatively, you can ask learners to collect them). Put them together on one page in a collage. Use these groups of pictures to create comparative statements such as “The music notes are as busy as the computer circuits” or “The ballerina’s skirt is as fluffy as the peacock’s feathers.” Practice comparative and superlative constructions, adjectives, There is/there are, etc.
- Comparison Picture Collage
- Instructional handout
- Follow-up activities from the workshop participants
- Learning prepositions — mix and match
- What is the picture I'm describing?
- Compare natural and artificial things
- Make associations
- Group by topics/similar features as colours, etc.
- Find similarities between pairs of pictures
Who did it? • A guessing game using physical descriptions
A great way to put descriptive vocabulary to use is to play this detective game. Select 10-15 pictures of different people and hang them in a place visible to the entire class; some of the pictures should have similar features to make accurate descriptions a necessary part of the game. Explain that a crime has been committed by one of the people. A detective will give a detailed description of the criminal, and the learners must listen to determine who it is. Demonstrate by being the first detective: “The criminal is tall with blond wavy hair. [pause for guesses] He has blue eyes and a long, straight nose. [pause] He is heavy-set and usually wears yellow work boots. ” Learners scan the pictures to find the corresponding match. The first learner to figure out the match can be the next detective. As an alternative, you can have larger classes work with the pictures in small groups or write descriptions before sharing.
- Who did it example
- Instructional handout
- Follow-up activities from the workshop participants
- You can ask students to decide what crime the person has actually committed, encouraging creativity to practice modals of deduction
- You can ask questions to the criminal (interrogation-style) to practice past simple questions and answers
- Invent a story of how the crime was committed
- Practice comparatives
- Describe people using more adjectives
