Recently, I posted a tweet late at night that garnered a little interest. It was all about simple activities that are not time consuming to create but that have maximum impact for my students. it got me thinking about other similar activities that are part and parcel of my classroom teaching.
In the past I have spent so much time planning lessons, creating what I thought were innovative activities, spending hours looking for that perfect resource that I know I once created and I think I could be accused of losing sight of the goal. For me, it is not about innovation, it is about the goal. So, now I start with this:
"What do I want my students to achieve by the end of the lesson?"
I understand now, it is not about a funky activity, it is about what I can do to maximise impact for my students and that can often be achieved with really simple tasks. For the students the fun is in the learning and the sense of achievement.
The activities listed here can be undertaken as speaking or writing tasks, however, the list it not limited to those skills. it depends on so many factors and what you, as the teacher who knows your class best, would like to achieve. Similarly, although I have suggested when I would tackle the activities, they can really be used at various points in your lesson - I will leave that up to you.
Retrieval Practice
I think these activities are great as retrieval practice activities and are particularly useful if you are having to move between classes. Simply write a few words on the board and get your lesson, letting your students do the work while you get your coat off, log on, get your books out and get cracking.
Just a minute - Provide some key words, such as family, technology or house and home and then give your students a minute (or less, if needs be) and let them talk on the topic. They can, of course, write out their answers. Students take it in turn to speak.
How many words? - This is similar to just a minute. As the teacher you provide a few words, such as environment, extreme sports or indeed, any topic that fits in with your specification and see how much key vocabulary your students can remember. This is an activity that could have many stages, first individually, then in pairs, in groups, speaking or writing. It can be taken a step further as the students could pair off against each other and play a game of key vocab table tennis. The winner is the pair who have the last item of vocabulary.
Connect Four - I don't think this needs much explaining. Write up four key words and get your students to create sentences that use each of the four words in some way or other. The words do not have to be used in order. The beauty of this is the element of creativity that it gives to the students and the way in which they are pushed to link their sentences with a conjunction.
I consider these activities to be great for retrieval practice, but equally I see them playing a part at the end of a section of work as a way to review recent learning.
Student Practice
The following activities work well with chunks and sentences that have been recently covered. They are great activities to enable students to rehearse what they have seen and put into practice key vocabulary, grammatical points or structures that they have been learning.
The sentence can be in English or in the Target Language. If you are rushing between classes and do not have time to write your sentence you could get your students to provide their own sentence using a sentence builder or other recent work as a starting point.
Question Time
Take a short phrase such as je mange du chocolat and ask your students to write as many questions as they can that would lead to that answer. So for example, for the phrase I have provided here, I would expect my students to think of a range of questions such as: Qu'est-ce que tu aimes manger?, Que manges-tu normalement pour le goûter? Que manges-tu pendant la récré? Qu'est-ce qu'il faut manger pour rester en forme? Of course, this last question would result in a longer answer than je mange du chocolat but this phrase could certainly form part of the answer. Just provide a phrase and see where they go with it.
What's the ending? - WWWW
Provide a short phrase such as je joue au tennis and then with the framework of
What/How, When, Who With and Why your students should be able to develop the phrase into one that becomes more sophisticated by virtue of the questions words to which they will need to respond. And, let's face it, we are all about complex structures and this task fulfils that need.
Create a Sentence
From the previous activity, you can go one step further and provide a key word such as la technologie and then watch as sentences evolve as your students get creating. Provide the framework of WWWW to start with and then eventually take this away. It will be important to remind students that the word order can change.
Spot the Error
Give
students a text – one they already have perhaps in their text book or one you have used in class. You then read it out and change or
take out a few words. I have a confession here, as I
might not even write out the text I am going to read. I know what they have been learning and where I need them to focus their attention. Their
task is to highlight the words that do not match with the original and then
write in what I say.
There
are so many ways you can go with this, for example, you can focus on particular error types such as tenses, conjunctions, a particular grammar point - it will really depend on what you have been focusing on in class.
Confusing Sentences
Take a non-sense
sentence and students have to make it make sense in any way they can. So j'utilise les réseaux sociaux parce que je n'aime pas la technologie clearly does not make sense and is just the sort of sentence that students can easily focus on and correct.
Describe a picture
I don’t
think this needs much explanation. Simply , have
a picture ready to display and give students the opportunity to respond orally
or on paper to what they see. Sur la
photo, on peut voir…. And so on. Of
course, this does not have to be only a speaking/writing activity, there is
room here, too, for a listening activity.
The teacher reads out what they see in the picture but add some
errors, Hey presto, you have a listening
activity that calls for focused listening.
You can repeat this many times and change a couple of things each time
as a type of narrow listening task - but one that was quick to prepare.
Reading Task
This is such an easy activity to set up but one that reaps dividends for the students and gets them working on vocabulary and topic areas that have been a key part of your recent learning.
Equally, you can easily differentiate on this task in the following ways:
-
students can feedback in English or French
- allow
more able students to write fewer key words so that they have to rely on memory
more to ‘rebuild’ their paragraph when they feedback oral.
Finally, as a Follow on activity, get your students to write out their paragraph.
Wagoll & Waboll
Last but
by no means least, there is modelling. Rosenshine* suggests that modelling provides
great cognitive support for students.
Step by step demonstration puts the spotlight on the learning process, it enables our students to see how the teacher thinks and how we make decisions about what to write, how to link our
work, how we make decisions about what structures to use and so on. It also highlights to our students that our work is not immediately perfect and illustrates how we review our work, going back and editing and refining our words. It demonstrates that
the perfect response does not come at first attempt for us either and I think this is a beneficial lesson for our students to have.
I hope that you have found some useful ideas here - please let me know if you have.
References
Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know by Barak Rosenshine.
Extra Reading
Lean Lesson Planning: A practical approach to doing less and achieving more in the classroom by Peps McCrea
Here's a few more where they came from:
1. Take a paragraph, one you have created or one from a book. Partner A does a resume in English of the paragraph. Partner B takes notes in English or French, depending on their confidence. Partner B then tries to rebuild the paragraph. Then swap roles.
2. Take a sentence, again, one you have create or one from a book.
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