A lesson about Picture stories

Lesson outline

This week, the students had to prepare for their speaking test. My co-teacher and I decided to give them six pictures and let them try to tell a story based on them within a 2-minute period.

The students were to practise this in my speaking class the week before their test. My co-teacher had supplied me with picture stories taken from the NEAT examination (Level 2) and it was then up to me to plan the lesson. I had to consider how best to prepare them for such a speaking test. It was a difficult task because each picture story can have so many variations and supplying them with suitable linking words, vocabulary etc. would not be easy.

In the end, I split the class into groups and gave them the first picture story on a worksheet. I decided that they should be encouraged to write down two vocabulary words for each picture during the one-minute preparation time that they had. In addition, I told them to share their vocabulary words with their group members and then finally, I presented them with my own chosen words. This procedure should have generated enough vocabulary words for each picture to at least give the students a good starting point.

The students then had to take turns telling their stories to each other. While listening to each story, the other group members were given the task of writing down ONE great expression that they heard from each member of the group. I thought this would give the listeners a focus and that they could learn from each other in the process. Upon listening to each group members' story, the students were then encouraged to share their 'great expressions' and were shown my own contribution as well. The students were also told to use at least two sentences per picture when telling their story and not to skip any of the pictures. On one occasion, I asked one of them to tell their story to the whole class and got the others to listen for some great expressions. This was a good exercise to do spontaneously, although a little time consuming.

Finally, the students were to finish off the lesson with a practice test scenario. Three students would take on the role of judge and one would tell the story. The students were to be given a set of criteria and the three judges would then split the criteria among themselves. For example:

In reality, it turned out that the students did not have enough time to do this and were only able to complete 3 out of the 4 picture story sets given to them.

A lesson about Traditional Korean Fairy Tales

Lesson outline

This week, with my co-teacher, the students were reading about a famous Korean novel Toji, which translates into 'The Land'. In my speaking class, I decided to continue the theme of Korean stories and wanted them to retell some traditional Korean fairy tales in English.

I chose three fairy tales that they were familiar with:

 


I made three groups and then let one person from each group choose a coloured hat that contained six pictures from one of the fairy tales. The groups then had to order the pictures to tell the story correctly and afterwards we checked their solutions together.

It was then time for each group to designate which person would play which character and to come up with a script. I would be recording their final performances using an audio recorder and judging them according to the following criteria:

A prize was offered for the best performance in each of the three fairy tales. This provided a little extrinsic motivation and as well as this, I asked them to think of some intrinsic motivating factors. They suggested (with a little encouragement) - wanting to share their culture and history with a foreigner, wanting to read the stories to their children when they were older, having some fun, learning some specific vocabulary related to the stories and just generally practising their English.

The groups were then given around fifteen minutes to prepare and practise their performance. I encouraged them not to write a script but to just jump-in and try to speak about it from memory. In my experience, writing a script always consumes too much of their time and not enough is then spent on producing effective speech.

Finally, I gave them the audio recorder, sent them to a quiet room and left them to it. The results were varied but the students by-and-large, were very creative adding sound effects, narration and altering their voices to suit the character they were playing.

A lesson about HALLOWEEN

Lesson outline

This year, my students were lucky enough to have class on Halloween day

- which made it all the more special.

I was teaching with my co-teacher Miss Lee and we wanted to achieve two things:

a) Provide the students with some background knowledge about Halloween

b) Let them experience some of the more traditional Halloween games

In Miss Lee’s class, the students read about Halloween and the origin of the

Jack-o'-lantern. The students then decorated their own pumpkin balloons and hung them in the English classroom. We helped adorn the English classroom and wore costumes too!

In our speaking class, we played Halloween Taboo with the students in order to get them to speak. The students were split into four teams and one member from each team (in turn) would explain a word to the rest of the class. If the team members belonging to the person doing the explaining answered correctly, they would get 2 points - a different team answering correctly would only get 1 point. This game was played at the beginning of the class and each person had only 30 seconds to explain their given word. If they successfully explained it within the given time limit and someone guessed correctly, then their team would be awarded some bonus points. 

Finally, the last activity was based upon the traditional Halloween game of Apple Bobbing. I showed them a ppt slide of the game and introduced its origins. I then broke the news that we couldn't actually play it because of the mess the water would make and that apples were too expensive at this time of year. Instead we decided to do our own alternative version ^_^

Cookie Bobbing

A lesson about POVERTY

Lesson outline

The students were studying a chapter from their textbook entitled: "Hunger and Poverty Worldwide". I decided for my speaking lesson to get them to talk about two things:

a) What will they do to fight poverty?
b) Why they will do it

My initial idea was to give people (and my students) a voice, a place to share and see other people's ideas about how to fight poverty. I thought if people uploaded a short video explaining what they were doing and why, it could be a way to raise money and that this could then be turned into KIVA loans.

I introduced the KIVA website to the students and showed them that I had personally donated $25 to someone through this website. I told them that I needed their help in making more loans and that I wanted to create a website (see image above) which allowed people to share with others (through a short video) - what they were doing to fight poverty and why they were doing it.

I asked my students to make a short video clip, which would show as high school students, what they could realistically do now to help in the fight against poverty. They first brainstormed some ideas and then set about writing down what they would say and do. It ended up being a two-lesson project but eventually the students produced their videos in pairs and came up with some good ideas.

After shooting their video clip, I made them make a wall display (see below) and choose a KIVA person or group that they would like to make a $25 loan to.

Since this lesson, I have found the following website http://freerice.com , which I plan to use with my students as a 5 minute starter to each lesson. I have created groups for each of my classes and hope to inject some competitive spirit into my lessons through this fun game.