Eva Buyuksimkesyan 4 skills, drama, efl, ELL, elt, energizers, esl, ice-breakers, lesson idea, lessons for teachers, narratives, reading, speaking, stories, storytelling, teaching, teenagers

Three Chairs, A Drama Activity for Language Classes

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I’ll share a quick drama activity I learned from our drama club while performing at an event at school.

  • Put 3 chairs in front of the board.
  • Put labels on the chairs as “sad-1”, “happy-2″,”angry-3”
  • Write some situations on slips of papers and put them in a box. (You are waiting at the bus stop and the bus is late / You are going to take an important exam /You are travelling to …
  • Let students choose a slip of paper
  • Give them a few minutes to prepare a very short story based on the situation they have on their papers.

Begin with the volunteers. Explain the rules.

Tell students that you will shout a number from 1 to 3 and she/he will sit on that chair and start telling the story according to the emotion written on the chair. While the student is telling the story change the numbers randomly.

This activity will be suitable for intermediate and above but I think it can also be tried with beginners as a reading aloud activity. The teacher can give a text to practise reading aloud and then asks the students to read the text sadly, angrily, cheerfully, etc

 

Eva Buyuksimkesyan fun, fun activities, future tense, games, ice-breakers, ideas, lesson idea, lesson ideas, lessons for teachers, narrative tenses, narratives, past continuous, past simple, past tenses, poems, realative clauses, revision

Revisiting Grammar

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May is round the corner. This means another school is about to end. Here you can find some revision games and activities that you’d like to use.

When I’m 65 (to revise tenses, time clauses)

Team your students

Prepare small cards, on small cards write random numbers such as 18, 22, 56, 38, etc.

Put the cards upside down on the desk

Tell students, take one card and make a sentence.

  • When I’m 65, I’ll probably have grandchildren.
  • When I was 18, I was a student at university.

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I had a great holiday there (to revise tenses)

Put some postcards or photos of places on the walls and tell students to walk around and imagine they were on holiday. They have to concentrate on one picture and then go back to their seats and write a paragraph, how they spent their holiday there. Then they can read and their friends try to guess which picture he has chosen.

I’m poem (to revise participles, relative clauses)

Ask them who they are. They will probably laugh and tell their names but tell them what roles do they have as a person in different places. Tell them that you’re their teacher, a mother, a wife, a friend, a colleague and although you are the same person but for your different roles, you have different responsibilities, feelings, emotions. Ask them if they are the same person as a sister, cousin, grandchild etc. Then give them the skeleton and ask them to write a poem describing who they are for different people and how they feel and react.

  • I’m the girl who loves reading books
  • I’m the sister watching you grow up
Eva Buyuksimkesyan christmas, christmas activity, dictation, efl, young learners

Chinese Whisper Dictation

As we celebrate Christmas on January 6th, I planned this lesson for my young learners for tomorrow.

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The lesson is for A1 students

  • Divide the class into two.
  • Ask students to make a row in from of the board.
  • On slips of papers, write short sentences and give it to the one at the back.
  • Tell him/her to whisper the sentence to his/her friend so that he/she passes it to the one in front of him.
  • Continue till the first person in the row.
  • The one in the front row will write the sentence on the board.
  • Check mistakes.
  • Then the one in the front row goes at the back.
  • Repeat the process until all the students come to the first row to write the sentence on the board.

I learned an activity similar to the one above at a drama workshopI attended  last week. In that one, the instructor, showed us a picture and wanted us to make a sentence and write it on papers left for us. We even discussed to create a story that way but my 4th graders are slow learners and need a lot of practice and guidance. I want to try this one first and then maybe in a second attempt I can ask them to write their own short sentences.

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Eva Buyuksimkesyan efl, esl, links, young learners

5 Fun Sites for Young Learners

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Starfall itself is an amazing site but if you click on this link, you will be taken to an amazing list of activities and games. All About Me  is a fun game on starfall that your young learner will create a character and hear how to say the words.

On toytheatre.com you can find games, stories and some tools to write and create stories, even print or save them on your computer. I especially loved the crossword puzzle page where the learners can play a word game by sliding the crossword bars up and down and left to right to exchange letters 

Roomrecess.com is focused on providing children with free educational games. The students can choose a game on vocabulary, reading or math. They are really fun to play. 

Learn English Kids  is a secure environment for the kids and has lots of free online games, songs, stories and activities to have fun and learn English.

English for Young Learners  is a site where you can find free fun learning resources on reading, listening, speaking and writing.jelly beans for faves

Eva Buyuksimkesyan storytelling, young learners

An Unprepared Storytelling Session

I’m so much exhausted these days. There are many thing at school that we have to do. Our Comenius partners visit us next week. Actually it is very exciting to plan everything. We have to deal with arrivals, presentations, meetings, day tips, etc. We are even planning a Europe Day celebration on May 9th. I’m sure it wil be a great event. I will tell about it later.

Well, as I’m so much involved with these things, I can’t spend enough time for planning my lessons. Anyways, I had a lesson with grade 6 today and had no preparation and to be honest, I was very relieved. Even at the door I was thinking whether it would be a good idea to play a word game with them.

When we greeted each other, I suddenly decided to do a story-telling session.

First we brainstormed fairy tales. I wrore them on the board. They told me their favourite ones.

Wordle: little Red riding Hood

Then we chose ‘Little Red Riding Hood’

I told them to list nouns and adjectives that comes into their mind when they think about the story.

Then they listed the verbs in the story.

I wrote ‘Once Upon a Time’ on the board and told them I would tell them the story but they would help me when I stopped.

I started the story and they helped me when I stopped.

All the words were on the board and it helped them a lot.

They learned past simple tense, past continous tense, present simple and present continous also will and present perfect so it was very easy for them to help me tell the story.

When we finished, I told them to write it with their sentences and as we didn’t have enough time I told them to make their story an illustrated book for next week.

If I had planned ahead, I’d have gone to the class with pictures.

Maybe I would give pictures in jumbled order and ask them to put the story in correct order.

Or even I could have prepared slips of papers with sentences from the story and ask them to put the story in correct order.

However, at the end of the session I was very happy with the product. They were great!