ESL: US map activity

Hello everyone,

I would like to share a very cool map of the US you could use for your teaching. I plan to use it in my Spanish classes as a speaking activity but I think it would be great for ESL. You can have your students learn the states, talk about them, and learn fun facts about them.
It would be as good for any language class to get students to talk and react in the target language as well as use descriptions and comparatives. I hope you find a way to use it!


MAPS: What Your State Is Good At, And What It's Lame At

http://www.upworthy.com/maps-what-your-state-is-good-at-and-what-its-lame-at

Let us know what you think! Connect with us @C_LaCross

Writing Activities: Celebrity Interviews

Chris here again with a fun writing activity to share with fellow teachers. This one involves an activity centered around a celebrity interview scenario and can be expanded in numerous ways. Enjoy!

Celebrity Interviews

Pre-activity

•           Find magazine cover and article templates (e.g. Time)
•         Depending on the material being covered it may be worthwhile to research celebrities who happen to be outspoken on the given topic(s)

Activity

      

• Present the magazine templates to students and offer potential celebrities for them to choose from

• Divide students into groups of three

• Students interview one another and the interviewer will write out the interview at the same time

• Either the teacher or the students should take pictures of themselves which will be placed on the cover of the magazine templates

• The teacher can add the pictures and articles to the templates, although it can be rewarding to let the students do this as it will help them practice formatting skills

• Students type their interviews and go through the writing process

• If the students do this step they should print their completed article with the cover to class

• Students who were not part of the original group must choose an interview that interests them and write a response (length variable) to at least one or more of the other interviews

• The ‘celebrity’ who was interviewed must then offer at least one response of their own (this keeps the discussion going)

• This is a great activity to incorporate technology as this could be easily incorporated into a class blog!

Post-activity

•       This discussion could be expanded and continue throughout the semester
•     Teacher ensures students completed the required steps of the activity and acts as the editor in chief
•    You may find a particularly stimulating topic that the class discussion focuses on - this could be expanded into a debate
• This activity practices conversation, writing, vocabulary use, and almost always has a high level of student interest!

Let us know what you think! Connect with us @C_LaCross

German: Ferien Activity

Chris here again. Today I have a fun activity to share with fellow German teachers. This is a two-part activity that I recently used in a second semester class on the first day back from Spring Break. I first had students get into groups of 4-5 and they then proceeded to interview each other about their Spring Break activities. Students were required to take notes on their partners' information. I then collected all of this material and created several cards with each containing one (hopefully unique) piece of information from each student. These were then randomly distributed back to the students, hopefully avoiding someone getting their own information. Once all the students had a card they were then required to change these statements into questions and begin the search for the classmate whose information matched the card. This allowed the entire class to participate and presented several opportunities to practice asking questions.

Students really enjoyed the activity and were free to subsequently form small groups in order to continue discussing what they did over Spring Break. Feel free to give the activity a try and let me know what worked and didn't, and what you would do differently.

Let us know what you think! Connect with us @C_LaCross

German: Einladungen Activity

Chris here again. Today I would like to share a fun activity with fellow German teachers which will get the whole class up out of the chairs and talking!

This activity is about accepting or declining invitations to go do various things. The activity could be done as a partner activity but I feel that it is more effective as a class activity with everyone having an opportunity for multiple interactions with their fellow classmates.

The activity features intensive practice with the following grammatical areas:

• möchten
• Asking questions (word order)
• politely accepting/declining offers

There are two groups of answers students will use. I put these in a table and then tell students to choose four of each and write each answer on a separate note card. Alternately you could prepare multiple copies of these ahead of time. Students will have eight different cards with which to do answer invitations during the activity.

So kann man sich entschuldigen:

Ich habe leider keine Zeit
Ich muss noch viel lernen.
Ich bin leider Krank.
Ich muss mir die Haare waschen.
Ich muss noch arbeiten.
Ich habe leider schon andere Pläne.

So kann man eine Einladung annehmen:

Das ist eine tolle Idee!
Das  klingt gut!
Das klingt romantisch!
Das hat mich schon immer interessiert.
Das  mach sicher Spaß!
Das möchte ich unbedingt machen.

Below is a list of suggested activities to use as invitations. Feel free to add your own or have your students come up with their own!

Möchtest du....

zusammen Deutsch lenen?
einen Spaziergang machen?
ins Theater gehen?
ins Kino gehen?
tanzen gehen?

eine Studentenkneipe besuchen?
zum Markt gehen?
zusammen einen Kaffee trinken?
etwas Zeit zusammen verbringen?
einkaufen gehen?
in die Disko gehen?

To begin the activity, I have all the students stand up and then begin to ask invite each other. If a student answers affirmatively they will give the card with their answer to the student who asked. Students then switch roles and repeat the above step. After both students have had a chance to ask, they will then find new partners and continuing circulating like this until they have either spoken with everyone in class or the time limit has been reached. It is highly recommended that you also participate in the activity and this will also help you to do any spot-corrections and ensure that students remain on task.

Comments and suggestions welcome!


Let us know what you think! Connect with us @C_LaCross #teachger #learnger

German: Bingo made active - Reflexive Verb Bingo

Chris here again. Today I have a fun activity I have created for a lesson on using reflexive verbs in German. This is a Bingo activity to help students practice their recognition of reflexive verbs, however, I have built in an output component by taking the standard Bingo format and requiring students to ask classmates questions on health and hygiene using reflexive verbs. Students will then answer either affirmatively or negatively using the reflexive verb from the question. Thus, the activity also turns into a race as the students fill out their Bingo sheet as they ask and receive answers to their questions. This format in turn allows all students to participate rather than sitting and only listening to the teacher with each student getting several chances to both produce and hear reflexive verbs being used. This also reinforces the vocabulary being learned. Teachers should circulate around the room ensuring correct usage. I have included a template below for download. Feel free to create multiple alternate sheets. Let me know how this activity works for you!

Reflexive Verb Bingo 

EFL: Memory Chain activity videos

Chris here again. Today we have a couple more EFL videos to share with you. These two videos feature our students doing a memory chain activity. Each successive student must state their own required information as well as that of the previous student(s), thus the activity requires good listening skills and is a nice way for students to practice first and second person conjugations. Comments welcome!

Group Activities: Debate format

Chris here again. Today I would like to share a recent activity I used to wrap up units on Salzburg and Vienna. This was for an advanced German class so one would need to simplify the activity for lower levels.

In order to test students' knowledge on the various topics covered for both cities I decided on using a debate framework  along with mini presentations to bring out the students' best. Students were organized into two groups with each group representing one of the cities. The groups had two days to research as much information as possible on their respective cities with topics ranging for sightseeing to local cuisine and architecture, travel and lodging costs. Each group member would be responsible for a specific area as well as having a general knowledge of their city.

The goal of the activity was to present the best possible arguments as to why one should visit either Salzburg or Vienna. Students had to try to convince one another that their city was in fact a better place to visit. Groups would be given points based on breadth of knowledge as well as their ability to effectively debate and support their arguments. Groups were given free reign as to how to present their information and could use anything from PowerPoints to handouts. The activity itself was setup as a debate with groups being seated in rows facing one another and two podiums setup at the front of class.

The activity was a success and students were really motivated to demonstrate that their city was the better one to visit. Students were very creative and managed to incorporate a great deal of information not presented in their textbooks to support their arguments. There was a great deal of back-and-forth discussion and students spent the entire class period speaking in German!

Questions and comments welcome!

Group Activities: Card-based activities

Chris here again. Today I would like to talk about a fun activity I recently created for a unit on relative pronouns and clauses in German. The activity is broad enough that you can apply it to practically any type of grammar or vocabulary exercise! Let's get into the activity...

I based this activity off of the mechanics of the card game war. The goal is to take away all of your opponent's cards. This concept could easily be employed in the classroom with students making some simple cards by folding a piece of paper and cutting/tearing it into 8 pieces.

One each piece of paper students where instructed to write a sentence with just the main clause while leaving the spot normally occupied by the relative clause blank.

Berlin ist eine Stadt,

Ich haben einen Hunder,

Dast ist ein Buch, 

Once students have all of their cards prepared they are then free to begin pairing up with their classmates. A student will present one of their cards to their partner. He/She must be able to complete the sentence by adding a relative clause. Students should not take longer than 30 seconds per card. If the student successfully completes the sentence they receive that card. If not, they must give their partner one of their cards instead. This process repeats itself and the other student in the pair now has a chance to present one of their cards.

Once each student in a pair has had a chance to present one of their cards the students are free to switch and find a different partner and then continuing on as before. If a student has no more cards then they are eliminated. The student(s) with the most cards at the end is the winner.

The benefit of this activity is that the entire class is involved, everyone has multiple opportunities to speak, and the students are presented with the target forms multiple times as they have to create their own answers spontaneously. This forces them to think and actively use the language.

I recently tried an alternative version of the activity which allowed for a nice transition to a homework assignment. How well students did in the activity would determine the length of the homework on an individual basis.

The activity was the same as above although this time the focus was on reflexive verbs. The other major change from the activity as described above was that rather than trying to gain more cards the goal was for students to actually try and get rid of as many as possible. If a student managed to end up with zero cards left they would have no homework! For this version, a student would present their partner with a card as normal (cards had a reflexive verb written on it). The partner would have to create a sentence using the reflexive verb. If the sentence was correct the student who presented the card would be given another card by their partner. If incorrect then the student presenting the card would be allowed to give away one of their cards. This would continue with students switching partners regularly.

After ten minutes or so students were asked to stop and count the number of cards they had. For each card students would have to write a sentence using the reflexive verb in a sentence. These sentences should be combined together to form a story if possible. Thus, the more cards each student had the longer their homework would be. Students were extremely motivated for the activity to try to get down to zero cards!

Hopefully you find the above activity useful!
Comments welcome!

Group Activities: Interview Bingo

You have probably used Bingo activities in lessons on teaching numbers and counting. Is that all that can be done with Bingo? Traditional Bingo activities in the language classroom lack in interactivity and mostly practice students' receptive skills. However, you can expand your activities repertoire to include a more advanced and interactive form of Bingo by using interviews (question and answers) with a target form or vocabulary. This works best if you provide students with prepared Bingo sheets as handouts in order to save time. You can setup the grid size as normal or a 4x4 for shorter versions. Instead of having numbers in each square you include a question with target grammar or vocabulary. The students must then go around and ask their classmates the various questions on the Bingo grid. If a student answers affirmatively, then they sign the Bingo sheet. If not, the student must keep asking until someone answer with yes. The first person to get a Bingo wins. The teacher should circulate to make sure the students are providing correct questions and answers.

We will be providing downloadable Bigno activities soon so stay tuned!

German: Charades with Reflexive

Chris here again with a fun activity for your German classes. Charades is a fun game that pairs well with language teaching. I recently used this for a lesson on reflexive verbs and daily routine/hygiene vocabulary.

I gathered several pictures of the target phrases such as I wash myself / Ich wasche mich and then divided the class into two groups. One student from each group came up to the front of the class and was shown a picture featuring one of the daily routine tasks. Then each student modeled the activity for their group. The group members then had to guess the correct reflexive phrase. Once you cycle through the various tasks once you could go through a second time but have the students in the groups write the correct phrases on the board after each task is modeled. You can have a lot of fun with this activity by having guy students get tasks such as applying makeup to oneself - Ich schminke mich! Students tend to really get into the acting part of the activity so motivation and attention are high.

Spanish: Recetas con Se Pasivo

Hello all, Claudia here,

I recently used a fun activity for practicing the se pasivo with my students and I would like to share it with you. First I had different cooking recipes of Latin American dishes for the class to see. In Spanish, recipes are normally written in imperative or infinitive. I then have the students change the recipes into se pasivo which is a pretty good practive for conjugating.

Here is an example of the activity:

The fun part comes as a home project! Have your students form groups and make a video of themselves making a dish of their choice using the se pasivo. This is a really fun activity for students and a nice way to get them to practice outside of the classroom. An alternative to the videos could be to take pictures while they cook and make a presentation to the class.

Grammar Activities: Conjunctions

Hello everyone, Chris here again. Today I would like to share a few ideas and activities for helping students practice conjunctions. These activities work for both coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

FREE SPEECH ZONE

This is a very simple, but interactive, activity. As you know, students often ask the same questions over and over again: “Where are you from? What do you do? Do you like pizza?” This will get students to ask interesting questions, which should result in more lively discussion.

Here are the rules:

1. Make a lot of small cards with interesting topics written on them, such as: LOVE, JEALOUSY, MONEY, SEX, DRUGS, CLONING, FRIENDSHIP, GAMBLING, etc. Look for topics that make students want to speak – even controversial ones.

2. In groups of 4-5, students will take turns selecting a card. Each student will talk a little about the topic on the card selected. For example:

MONEY: “For me money is very important, but it is not the most important thing. It is only a way to reach a goal. Success should not be measured by the money you can make.”

3. The other students should ask questions of the speaker and also express their own feelings on the topic. There is no limit on the length of discussion.

4. When a group feels that it has exhausted the topic, they should alert the teacher, who will then let another member of the group choose a new topic.

German: Marek's Game

This is a game using locations on maps with prepositions and conditional situations.

A student is provided a virtual representation (picture) of a type of location (e.g. Grandma's house, Berlin, Soccer field), and a conditional situation (e.g. driving to, living/being at, or coming from given location). The student must provide the correct prepositional phrase using each of the following: correct preposition, correct grammatical case, and the correct vocabulary.

The way this is done is by presenting the Power Point, identifying the locations and meanings of the situational icons. Once the introduction has been made, a randomly selected student will be chosen to provide an answer. The instructor points to a location icon on the map and then the situation icon next to the map. The student then provides the answer.

This is a collaborative project that I created with the help of my colleague, Marek. My contribution to this game was to make it a Power Point and add some additional locations/situations.

Group Activities: Reviewing Numbers 1-100 (game)

Hello all, Becky here!

The number game is called "X" and it works in any language.

The teacher establishes a number pattern: Divisible by ___ or containing ___. At first you start out with one number -- divisible by 6 or containing a 6. With practice I get complex -- divisible by 3 or 8 or containing a 7, for example. Then the students form a circle and count in order in the language. When a student has a number that fits the pattern, they have to "X" out the number (say X in the target language).

EX for the 6 pattern:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, X, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, X, 13, 14, 15, X, 17, X, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, X, 25, X, 27, 28, 29, X, etc. It gets tricky when you hit the 60s because they are all Xed out!

If a student says the wrong number, they sit down. If they say the number when it should be X, they sit down. If they say X when it should be a number, they sit down. Last person standing wins. If there are only 3-4 left and they are all doing really well, I let them all win. Some reward is helpful to have on hand!

Enjoy!

Group Activities: Never have I ever with 10 fingers

Hello everyone! Becky here. :)

We played 10 fingers in my class today to review the present perfect and had a BLAST!

Here is the way it works: Everyone writes 2 sentences (depending on the size of your class) that are true about things they have NOT done. Then, each person reads a sentence and if the rest of the people in the class have done this, they put one finger down. The person who gets all their fingers down first loses. The person who has fingers remaining the longest wins (if you get that far).

My sentences were true about me but aimed at getting some of my students out:

—No he estudiado comunicaciones. (I have not studied communication.)

—No he vivido en D.C. (I have not lived in D.C.)

—No he estudiado en India. (I have not studied in India.)

—No he vivido en una ciudad grande en EEUU. (I have not lived in a big city in the U.S.)

Enjoy!

German: Relative Pronouns Activity

Hello all, Chris here. Today I would like to share an activity I recently created to practice relative pronouns with my students. As usual, I will leave the grammar explanation up to the individual teacher. While this activity is for intermediate level German, it can easily be adapted for other languages and levels.

To begin the activity, ask the students to come up to the board and sketch a few city blocks or even a whole city with various streets, buildings, etc. These should all be labeled. At least 2-3 buildings should be labeled as apartments. Add details such as floors and apartment numbers for each apartment building. To make the activity easy you only need to add as many apartments as there are groups. Although, you could add a few extra empty apartments. Students will then have to state that no one is living there.

After this is completed, have students get into groups of 2-3 although having them do the activity individually is a viable option. Each group needs to pick a specific apartment they will live in. The groups also need to come up with an interesting fact about their apartment, such as they have parties every weekend, they have a dozen cats, they always play loud music, etc.

Once the above steps have been completed, have one student in each group go around to the various other groups and interview them asking where they live or Wo wohnt ihr? The group should also talk about their apartment and their interesting fact. Once all of the groups have been interviewed, have the students return to their groups. Now the students write about the various groups using relative clauses to add more information about the other groups. For example,

In der Obergasse wohnen Tim und Jurgen, die jeden Tag laute Musik spielen.

An alternative way to do the activity would be to have someone from each group stand in front of class and show on the map where their group lives and why their apartment is interesting. The other groups could then immediately start working on their sentences using relative clauses.

A good followup to this activity would be to have the students ask and provide directions to the various other groups and their apartments. I like to do activities which require the students to build upon previous knowledge rather than just singling out a single area of grammar. In this case you would be combining relative clauses with the puzzle solving aspects of giving directions (imperative).

I hope this activity works well for you! Comments welcome!

German: Reflexive Verbs Hot Potato

Hello all, Chris here. Today I would like to share a fast and fun activity you can use to help your students practice reflexive! As usual, I will leave the grammar explanation up to the individual teacher.

This activity is a group activity involving the entire class. Have the students form a large circle with no desks or chairs in the middle.

For the 'hot potato' you can use anything suitable such as a tennis ball or foam ball.

To start, a student will toss the ball to another student and name both a reflexive pronoun and a reflexive verb. The student who received the ball must then make a sentence from this. Upon successfully making a sentence the student is then free to choose the next student to toss the ball to and repeat the above process. Each round a new verb should be used. You can add some competition into the activity by eliminating anyone who is unable to make a correct sentence. After a few rounds you can add another layer to the activity by adding in the category of tenses for students to choose when picking the next student. Generally you just need to practice the present and the perfect tenses. After several more round of this you can add in the final category of sentence types, e.g. declarative and questions. As a final challenge I added negation as well.

The activity worked really well and the students managed to get a good amount of practice with the reflexive. 

Comments welcome!

German: Future Perfect Activity

Hello all, Chris here with an activity to help your students practice the future tense and the future perfect or Futur II in German. While this isn't a tense that receives too much attention in textbooks and introductory courses, it is nevertheless a useful part of the language for students to know in order to express themselves more fully, especially abstract situations.

I will skip any grammar explanation as that will be up to the individual teacher.

First have students speculate on what they think their fellow classmates will have done this coming weekend.

Bob wird wohl seine Hausaufgaben gemacht haben. or Stefanie wird wohl nach Hause gegangen sein.

Students should try to speculate on as many of their classmates as possible. Obviously their success in this will depend largely on how well they know their fellow classmates. The activity will assume that students all have had a chance to get to know one another to a certain degree. Future perfect would generally be taught later in a semester or course so there should already have been plenty of opportunities for students to get to know one another. Allow students 5-7 minutes for this part.

The next part of the activity requires the students to write out what their plans for the coming weekend will be using Futur I. This can be done on scrap pieces of paper or note cards if the teacher can supply them. Provide each student with two note cards. On the first card students are to write what they will actually do. On the second card students should write a false statement about their plans.

Ich werde fernsehen. and Ich werde mir ein neues Auto kaufen. or Ich werde nach New York fliegen.

These false statements will serve to add confusion. Once students have finished writing, collect all of the cards. Students should not write their names on these cards. Mix the cards up and randomly redistribute them. Students must now interview each other about what their weekend plans are and they can use their speculations in order to help them guess whose card(s) they have. This will help them asking questions in the future tense. An alternate way is to have the teacher add in a few of their own statements while secretly removing some of the students' cards. This will keep the students guessing as to who the owner is. Another alternative is to first divide the class into smaller groups and then proceed as described above. This will make it easier on the students.

As always, questions and comments welcome!

Japanese: Manga Activity

Hi all, Junko desu.

Today I wanted to share a fun activity for creating manga dialogues ４コマ漫画(4 colums comic) has been popular in Japan for ages, and you can still find them in major newspapers. If you want to use this in class, it's really simple. Distribute different blank mangas to students and have them work in groups to create dialogues. When it's done, the teacher can show the blank manga on a screen, and students will then tell a story!