Eva Buyuksimkesyan 1st day activity, first week activity, fun activities, lesson ideas, past cont, past simple, small talk, speaking, web.:2:0

When I was on Holiday :)

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Level: Any

Materials: power point, images of holiday places

Target language: Past tenses

Ask students to create a 2-slide powerpoint. On one slide they will upload a photo they have taken from a holiday. On the second slide, they will write a short text describing the picture. They may answer the following questions to write their texts.

▪ where was the photo taken?

▪ Who were you with?

▪ When were you there?

▪ How long did you stay there?

▪ What kind of a place was it?

▪ What were the typical things there (food, music, etc)

▪ Did you enjoy being there?

Then you can combine all the slides and prepare an ‘Our Holiday’ presentation.

Web 2.0 alternatives

  • Upload the pictures on voice thread and ask students to record their voice and describe their photos. Then ask the other students to comment on each photo.
  • Tell your students to create posters using tabblo
  • Create a glogster and upload all the photos students used, record their voices talking about their holidays or if they are ok with video recording, record them while talking about their holidays.

 

 

Eva Buyuksimkesyan presentations, small talk, speaking

Intro Presentations

 

I love the idea of small talks where students present something to their classmates and in a way they learn how to present, how to talk in front of a crowd.

We use a topic based coursebook in that way students focus on a different topic in each unit. This year I told my students that they would prepare a small presentation at the beginning of each lesson.These presentations should be a kind of introduction to the new unit. They chose the units they would present at the beginning of the year. We talked about how to prepare presentations, power points what to include on the slides, how to express themselves, etc.

As you may guess, the first presentations were not very sucessful. Lots of copying and pasting with beautiful images from the web and they read the slides instead of telling them to us.

 Then we talked about plagiarism and I repeated many times that there was no need to write sentences but they should have notes on their slides. I also suggested that they could use the web 2.0 tools I taught them.

After a few units, I realised the presentations became better but at the end of each presentation I repeated what my expectations were.

And yesterday a student presented about talk shows. She used a glogster instead of power point and in the end we watched an animation she created with GoAnimate. It was brilliant and the other students also enjoyed listening to her. She never read, she talked. She was creative and I really felt very proud.

I think from now on the others will do their best to be as good as her.
GoAnimate.com: esayan show by selin236

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!