Activities That Can Be Used For Any Grammar Point Speech

        Good afternoon.  The title of this professional development session is “Activities That Can Be Used For Any Grammar Point”.  

        Most of these activities I discovered when I first started teaching Young Learners a couple years ago.  In the General English Program classes I could get away with being a little bit lazy and not preparing much, but I discovered in the Young Learner program I needed to have a lot of games and activities ready to go in order to keep the class from disintegrating.  Over the past year or so, I’ve discovered that there are certain old-stand-by activities that I found were fairly reliable, and that I kept coming back to again and again whenever I needed to put some sort of game or activity into the lesson.  So I thought I’d do a PD where I would quickly run through my most reliable activities, and share them with anyone who’s interested in sharing ideas.

        Now, some of you in this room have been teaching longer than I have, and probably have more ideas and better ideas than I do, so instead of having me talking the whole time, we’re going to do this as a workshop.  My goal is to run through all my activities as quickly as I can, and then we’ll turn the rest of the time over to you to share your own ideas, and hopefully at the end of this session we’ll all come out of here with a long list of new ideas.  So if I’m still talking after 20 minutes, somebody kick me, okay?

        And by the way, this isn’t only for Young Learner classes either.  Many of these can work just as well with older students.  Some of these ideas are probably better than others, but the idea for today is to brainstorm as many ideas as possible, and then everyone can just take what they like, and ignore whatever they don’t like.

        I’ve given you a handout so you don’t have to take notes.  I’ll also put up on the front screen some of my own examples of each activity, partly to provide an example in case my explanation isn’t clear, and partly just to illustrate how some of these activities can be adopted to a wide range of grammar points.  I put a copy of this document in the server, so you can follow along with me on your own computer screen if you want.  A lot of these worksheets I made up could be better, to be honest.  The pressure sometimes of having to come up with a new activity for each class can sometimes produce some rushed jobs, and for some of these it might be obvious that near the end I was struggling to think of example sentences.  But hopefully they’ll give you a sense of how the idea could work, if someone more competent had been writing the worksheet.

        Okay, first of all, Find Someone Who.  In the interest of trying to create a thorough list, I’ve included some of the very obvious ones, so just bear with me here, we’ll go through it quickly.  

        Most people already use this as a first day of class ice-breaker, but don’t forget you can also use it for individual grammar points.

        As “Find Someone Who” is traditionally designed, it’s supposed to be an indirect question that the learner has to transform into a direct question.  My Young Learners were not doing this well.  No matter how many times we practiced transforming the question, the majority of the class was still reading directly off the worksheet once the game started.  Maybe that was my failure as a teacher, but I started redesigning the activity as “Find Someone Who Can Say Yes,” with the question form already written.  They were still getting practice reading the question even if they were no longer getting practice making the question.

        Another variation you can do is to have the students make their own questions.  

        Or, something similar to “Find Someone Who” is a classroom survey activity, where they have to go around the room and ask certain questions to a certain amount of people.

        Human Bingo is also similar to “Find Someone Who”, but in this case the answers are arranged on a bingo grid, and they have to get find people who can answer yes in five blocks in a row.

        You can use Human Bingo for yes and no questions, but you can also use it for same and different questions.  Here the students fill in the gaps to make sentences that are true for them, and then they have to walk around the room and compare their answers with their classmates.  If their classmate has the same answer as them, they write S in the box.  If their classmate has a different answer to them, they write D in the box.  The goal is to get either five Ss or five Ds in a row.  In this example here, they are completing sentences with may and going to, and then comparing their answers with their classmates.

        Next is Hangman.  I call it “Hangman”, but actually in this version nobody actually gets hung.  Two teams are just competing to solve the puzzle first.  It’s probably more similar to Wheel of Fortune than Hangman, but I still call it Hangman.  

        It’s similar to Hangman, but instead of guessing a word, the teams are trying to guess a whole sentence.  You write the blanks on the board, the students try to guess the letters.  They get one point for each time the letter appears.  For example, if they guess E, and E appears 6 times in the sentence, they get 6 points.  If they can guess the whole sentence correctly, they get 10 points, but I put in a 10 point penalty for guessing the sentence incorrectly to discourage reckless guesses.  

        Some classes get into this, and some classes don’t, but if you have a class that really gets into it, it can be a lot of fun.  And when they really want to win, they have a lot of motivation to try to figure out the patterns in the target language.  If you do 4 or 5 sentences, they usually have a very good idea of the form of the target language by the end.  And of course I try to have fun with this by trying to think of the most ridiculous, humorous illustrations of the target language that I can.  

        Next is around the room memory game.  I think different people have different names for this one, but basically the first person says a sentence using the target language, and then the next person has to remember the first person’s sentence, plus add their own, and every additional person has to add one more sentence so the number of sentences you have to remember just gets bigger and bigger.  

        Next is “Guess Your Partner’s Answers”.  Students have to fill out a worksheet making statements that are true for them using the target language.  Then they try to predict their partner’s answers.  Ideally they would check their answers by asking their partner, so they would get some speaking practice in at the end.  Here’s an example using things they can or can’t do now, and things they could or couldn’t do five years ago.  

        Next is Dictation.  This is another obvious one that I think everyone knows about already, so I don’t want to spend too much time on it.  The teacher reads out sentences, the student writes down the sentences, and they get one point for each correct sentence.  You could have them do this individually, or in groups.  You could also have a running dictation, where the sentences are posted up somewhere around the room or outside the room.  The students are put into pairs.  One partner goes to look at the sentence, and must remember it in order to dictate it to the partner sitting down, who writes it.  The partner who looks at the sentence can’t write anything, and the partner who writes can not look

        Or you can do telephone dictation.  For this activity the students are arranged in rows.  You put the sentences up at the front of the room.  The person in the first row looks at sentences, and then must say these sentences to the person behind them, who passes them onto the next person behind them, et cetera.  The student in the back of the row has to write the sentences down.

        Next is scrambled sentences.  You write out sentences on a table grid like this, print it out, cut up all the car, mix them up, and the students have to arrange the cards back into sentences.  They glue the sentences onto a blank grid in groups.  They get one point for each correct sentence.  I use this activity for young learners only.  They seem to really like the tactile element of gluing the words onto the paper.  Although I won't lie, this activity is pretty preparation heavy.  It sometimes takes a long time to cut out all the cards.  The words are arranged on my paper in the order I originally envision these sentences, but of course I give points to any correct sentence.  Sometimes they come up with a lot of sentences I wasn't even expecting

        Next, find your partner.  This is another classic game everyone already knows, so I won't spend a lot of time explaining it.  I'm not sure if you can do this with every grammar point, but you can do this with a lot of grammar points.  Sometimes you divide a sentence in half, and sometimes you have complimentary matching sentences, like active and passive, et cetera. The students each get a card and they have to find someone with a matching card.  For some grammar points you can get away with dividing the sentence into three parts.

        Next, Memory Game.  Some people call this concentration.  This is the classic card game we all played as kids, but it has sentence halves or matching sentences on it.  Basically any grammar point that you can use for "Find Your Partner" you can also use for Memory.

        You can give the students cards, and have them play in small groups.  Or you can play as a whole class, and put a number grid on the board where each number can correspond to one card.  Or some sort of combination of cards and board work, for example the students draw cards from a pile, and have to try to match their cards with the grid on the board

        Next, brainstorming.  Put the students into groups, and give each group some sort of sentence or maybe a picture.  They have to write as many sentences as they can using the target language within a time limit.  Then at the end whichever group has the most sentences is the winner.  Although you probably want to check the sentences first to make sure all of them are correct before you award points.

        Next is something I call "Hot Potato Sentences".  There's probably a better name for this actually, but this is the name I've been using.  The students are given some sort of prompt, and they go around the room.  Each student says a different sentence responding, in the target language.  If a student cannot think of a new sentence, or repeats a previously mentioned sentence, they are out.  Or they lose a point.  Or they have to sit in the middle.  Or something bad happens.  This can be played as a whole class or in small groups--I usually set it up by playing as a whole class first, and then move into small groups.

        Next is "Guess My Sentence".  The students have a card with a sentence on it.  They have to get the other people in their group to guess the sentence.  There are two ways you can do this.  One way is that all the mystery sentences themselves are in the target language.  The other way is that the mystery sentence has some sort of situation on it, and the students have to describe it using the target language.

        This next one, Karuta, is a game I picked up in Japan.  Anyone taught English in Japan before?  The students are in small groups, and they spread out all the cards in the group.  The teacher reads a prompt, and the students have to grab whichever card matches the prompt.  The student  who grabs the card first gets to keep that card.  At the end, the student with the most cards is the winner.  Sometimes with younger learners, they just start grabbing everything at random, so you may have to introduce penalties for students who grab wrong cards, like losing a point, or missing a turn.

        Okay, next is a sorting activity.  The students are given a list of sentences, and they have to sort them into categories.  This obviously only works when you have two or more types of sentences you can contrast with each other.

        Next is the classic two truths and a lie game.  I think this is another game everyone knows already, right?  You have to come up with 3 sentences, two of which a are true and one of which is a lie.  People try to guess which of the three sentences is a lie.  

        You can use this game to practice certain grammar points as well.

        Now, the beauty of this game is that it can in theory be done without any preparation at all, but for the younger learners, and some other classes, I find making a sheet full of prompts will help to keep them focused.  For higher levels you can probably do this without any prep.

        I've also used this for contrasting things I will do with things I might do, so you can adopt it to other grammar points perhaps.

        Next is the grammar auction.  Again, this is a classic one, so we won't spend much time on this.  Students are given a list of sentences containing the target language.  Some of the sentences are correct, some of them are not.  I think according to the name "Grammar Auction", you're supposed to auction off the correct sentences, but I usually find that takes way to long, so I just have them bet on whether they think the sentences are correct or not.

        Okay, next is a scrambled story.  For this activity, you write up a story, or some sort of dialogue, containing the target language.  Then cut the story up into pieces, and put the students into small groups, and see if they can put the story back together.

        I've included several of my own examples here.  As with all of my stuff, the execution is probably a bit flawed.  These aren't great stories.  But just take these as an example of the idea, and imagine if these stories had been written by someone else who was a better writer.

        It's a little bit prep heavy the first time to make up a story, but then of course it's a one time investment, and you can re-use the story every time you re-teach the grammar point.

        The board game is another popular one.  We've got loads of these in the teacher's resource room already, but if you can't find one for the grammar point you're doing, you can create your own.

        There are two ways to do this.  Either each square on the board contains a speaking prompt using the target language, or it contains a command.  The students roll the dice and travel around the board.  I've included my own examples once again.  And once again, some of the prompts here aren't all that great, but use it as an example of the idea.  All of these examples here were made with my old template, but Chris recently gave me a new template which I plan to use from here on out.

        Songs.  Songs are great.  I'm pretty sure most of us do this already, but I'll just mention it here.  If you can find a song that uses the grammar point you're teaching, it's a great supplement to use in the lesson.  I've been finding that the Internet is a great help for this.  There seems to be a lot of TESOL songsheets already made up on the Internet.  So, for example, if you Google "song using the present perfect" or something, you'll find a lot of material that other TESOL teachers have already created.

        Okay, and last but not least is crossword puzzles.  I use these all the time in my classes  Perhaps I use them too much.  I'll often debate with my young learners whether crosswords are a fun activity or just a worksheet.  I think they're kind of fun, but my young learners think they're just another boring worksheet.

        Anyway, there are lots of sites on the Internet that allow you to make your own crosswords.  I tend to use: http://www.armoredpenguin.com/crossword/ .  I don't know if there's a better one out there or not, but this was just the first site I found when I was doing a Google search, and I've come back to it ever since.  I like it because it allows you to save the crossword as a PDF file, so you can save it into your computer and build up a collect of crossword puzzles in your own files.

        Okay, so those are all of my ideas.  Let's hear what everyone else has.