I have got a small pre-teens group this year and I'm finding very difficult to engage them in class. They want to play games all the time and don't like writing, so when I saw them working and enjoying this project, I couldn't believe my eyes!
Step 1 – Restaurant selection What
KIND OF RESTAURANT is it going to be? A Chinese restaurant? A Mexican
restaurant? An English restaurant?
Now
you need a NAME and a LOGO for it so that people remember it.
Step 2 – Create your own menu.
Your
menu must include:
oStarters
oMain
courses
oSide
dishes
oDrinks
oDesserts
-Brainstorm
different dishes that you are going to include in your menu.
-Include
a short description of what each meal is (e.g. FISH AND CHIPS – an English meal
made from fried potatoes and fish).
-Include
the price in pounds or dollars.
Step 3 – Create a radio ad.
Now that you have created your own menu, it’s time to
advertise your restaurant to encourage customers to come in and enjoy a
delicious meal there.
Step 4 – Dining Out. Create a short dialogue and act out a conversation in the restaurant. Two of you will be the customers and one will be the waiter or waitress.
After such a long time without posting anything in the blog... I'm back! Did you miss me? I hope so. After very busy months full of exciting things to do, this blog post had been left behind in a folder somewhere. This was a lesson I and my students enjoyed a lot since it was about food, restaurants and cooking. Thinking on new ways for my students to learn new vocabulary, and not just that, but also remember it and put it into practice, I came up with this simple idea - EFL Chefs - A New Cookery Show. I asked them to think of a dish or dessert that they enjoy cooking, the ingredients they would need to cook that dish or dessert and imagine they are teaching others to cook that recipe in a new TV programme. This was the result. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
In most subjects and in any grade level, teachers and, therefore, students are expected to use a textbook as a resource in their classes. However, we have to bear in mind that although those textbooks are produced by experts, experienced teachers and teacher trainers, they are created to be used by teachers who work in different teaching contexts, in different countries and with students who are in the same class, but whose level is not exactly the same. Therefore we need some things that the book doesn't provide: CREATIVITY to adapt the textbook in order to address our students' learning needs. SELECTION CRITERION to choose just those activities which can be useful, meaningful and suit your students' needs. SUPPLEMENT the textbook with other kinds of activities which could work for our students and can help them develop their speaking skills and fluency. ADAPT the activities so that they are interesting, motivating and meaningful for our students. This is an example of an activity I adapted from the coursebook for one of my one-to-one classes with my 9 years old student. I was supposed to create a short theatre play with a group of students, but it was just her and me in the classroom. So, I decided that she could create a very short piece on her own including some of the new vocabulary and other expressions she had learn during the school year. She wrote the script and then we recorded it. This is the result. I hope you like it! The search (Part 1) by inmaav on GoAnimate
Christmas is just around the corner! No matter what religion or place in the world you live, Christmas is a celebration all children and teenagers love and cannot be ignored.
practice past simple and past continuous in context.
express opinions about the best and worst Christmas presents using expressions such as I think, in my opinion, from my point of view, among others.
CULTURE: learn about Christmas traditions in other countries around the world.
WRITING: for students to develop their creativity and plan the writing of a poem.
READING: for students to develop strategies to understand general and specific information about different Christmas traditions around the world in order to carry out specific tasks.
VIEWING: extract specific and global information from a Christmas commercial to perform required tasks.
TASK 1: WARM-UP ACTIVITIES.
Chat about Christmas and traditions. Ask your students what kinds of activities they usually do, what special dishes they eat, what is their opinion about the over-commercialisation of Christmas and so on.
Display the wordle with Christmas vocabulary on the overhead projector and ask students to place them into the correct category FEELINGS/ACTIONS, THINGS, FOOD. Discuss how they relate to Christmas.
TASK 2: WRITING AN ACROSTIC POEM
Ask your students to write their own acrostic poems using a Christmas word.
If you have many students in your classes, it would be a great idea to ask them to create a class poems book using GoogleDocsand publish the document in the class blog. Students vote on which is the most original poem.
TASK 3: READING COMPREHENSION: Where in the world?
Pre-reading: ask students to predict a series of facts related to the celebration of Christmas in different countries.
Post-reading: once they have read the text, they confirm their predictions.
If there are students from different countries in your class, ask students to write five questions to know about how their partners celebrate Christmas in their countries.
TASK 4: VIDEO ACTIVITY: John Lewis Christmas Advert 2011 - This is a wonderful advert I discovered in Pilar's blog some weeks ago. I think it is great, not for listening but for developing their viewing and oral skills. There is not speech in the advert, just scenes which are part of the child's story.
Pre-viewing: create a series of screen shots using Vidinotes and ask students to predict what the story is about.
While-viewing: check that they have understood the ad with a series of questions about the video. The activity is corrected orally.
Why was the boy so nervous?
What was he really waiting for?
What activities did he do to kill time?
How did his parents feel?
What is the slogan for the advert?
Post-viewing: ask students what was the worst gift they ever received. Then in small groups (3-4 students) they read the description of some unusual Christmas presents and put them in order from the best to the worst explaining the reasons for the order they have chosen.
Posters have always been considered a valuable resource to stimulate students' creativity as well as an opportunity for teachers to know what students' have learnt. Do you remember when we created posters using a cardboard, crayons, coloured pencils, pictures taken from magazines, and so on?
Much time has passed since then and with the revolution of technology we have "discovered" many useful tools which can make learning more engaging for our students. Don't our students spend most of their free time at their PCs? So, why not combine the effectiveness of web 2.0 tools to give them more autonomy to create their own projects in which they will be the speakers, the writers, the editors, and the introduction of interesting topics our students are interested in?
If you are curious to find out how technology tools can enhance your teaching and involve your students in their English learning process, you should use Glogster Edu:
It allows teachers and students to create digital posters.
It is free.
It is safe.
You can add pictures and graphics from the Internet or from your own computer.
It is possible to add videos from the Internet or from your own computer.
You can record your own voice, so it is perfect to record an interview, a speech, a recitation of a poem or a song.
You can write your own texts to express yourself.So, Glogster Edu is wonderful for creative projects but also for reflections on cultural and social topics.
I honestly think this is one of the easiest tools I have worked with and the possibilities to incorporate it in the English class are endless. In addition to this, as Glogster Edu was created with an educational purpose in mind, it ensures that all the content students view is appropriate. You can supervise our students' projects as well and both you and your students can comment on each other's glogs, print them and embed the glog in your classroom blog or wiki.
This is a Glogster I created myself as an example for 1º Bachillerato students' project at the end of a didactic unit dealing with Rudyard Kipling, conditional sentences and the situation of people living in developing countries. The purpose of this project was that students wrote their own poems based on Rudyard Kipling's poem If and recorded them, and wrote a short biography of Rudyard Kipling.
