Chapter 20: Getting Youth on Your Side: Coping with Young Learners 291
Most series of course books are accompanied by teachers’ and resource
books that contain games and activities. Even those designed for adult learn-
ers give you great ideas which you can transfer to children’s topics.When you adapt activities from books, use colourful cards that kids can move
around and attach amusing pictures, perhaps something they can colour in
afterwards.Trying other activities
Depending on the resources available to you,
you can invent your own activities to practise
language.
Here are a couple I use; the first activity is
fun if you have English newspapers or maga-
zines around. The second requires no special
resources at all. What they have in common is
that the children don’t need too much involve-
ment from you so they can be more in control of
their own learning.
Making a newspaper collage
For this you need a newspaper or two (comics
for lower-level students), scissors, card, five
or six boxes or envelopes and glue. Make sure
that everyone has access to a page or two of
the newspaper.
You simply chose a particular part of speech
(verbs, nouns, adverbs and so on) and give
students a time limit of a couple of minutes to
find examples of this kind of word on the page.
They can underline the words and you then
need to do some feedback to make sure that
they’ve got it right.
Next you get them to cut out all the examples
they’ve found and put them in the designated
box or envelope. After a few rounds you end up
with collections of nouns and verbs and so on.
Finally, have groups of students pick three
words from each collection without looking.
They have to think up a short story using all
their words, no matter how bizarre, and write
it out on a large piece of card. They stick their
chosen newspaper words directly onto the card
and write the rest in with their own handwriting.
Award a prize for the most original.
By the end of the lesson, they’ll have learnt
several new words and practised sentence
structure in English.That’s a good question!
It’s always best to let students generate
language themselves so here’s a game that
does just that.On strips of paper ask students to write down
questions they’d like to ask their classmates.
They may be about their favourite things or more
along the lines of ‘What would you do if.. .?’
When they’ve finished, go through and weed
out any that are just too cheeky or inappropriate
for other reasons. If you have a good question in
poor grammar, put it on the board so that other
members of the class can help correct it. Try to
include about twice as many questions as there
are students so that you retain the element of
suspense. And now put the questions in a hat
or something similar.Finally you go from student to student and ask
each person to choose a question without look-
ing. On the flip of a coin, decide whether the
student has to answer the question or nominate
someone else to do so.
By the end of this lesson, the students should
have practised asking questions in English and
they should also know quite a bit more about
each other.