Create a grid which contains a list of 20 questions. Each question can relate to films, books, hair colour, family, favourite food, last holiday, sport, shoe size etc. Have fun inventing questions, for example what is your favourite sandwich filling? Students should fill in their own answers to the questions and then move around the class to find other students with the same/similar answers to theirs. You could enforce a rule that you can only use the same person for a maximum of two answers. This should encourage each student to interact with as many of their class mates as possible.
Tag: questions
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
Something in common…
Tags: grid, questions, similarities
Monday, June 15th, 2009
Guess who?
Simple game using post-it notes. In pairs, students take it in turns to guess who they are. One student writes a key person’s name onto a post-it note and sticks it onto their partner’s forehead without them seeing what it says. Their partner must then ask questions which can only be answered with yes or no. They can have upto 10 questions in order to guess who they are. Then students swap roles. Useful for revising facts about key people in a topic.
Tags: key people, post-it, questions
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Musical chairs
Set up enough chairs for each student and on each chair place a question relating to the topic being studied. The question should be numbered. Students need a pen and paper and all start the game on a chair. They answer the question on their chair, noting down the number. The music begins and students move clockwise around the chairs. You remove one chair for each round. Each time the student sits down when the music stops they must answer the question on their chair noting down the number of the question. The aim is to be the person to collect the most answers to questions and the answers must be correct - so the more different chairs they get to sit on the more likely they are to win. When the last student has sat on the last remaining chair, get students to mark their answers and the winner is the person with the highest number correct. Good as a starter to warm students up - or at the end of the lesson as a recap.
Friday, May 29th, 2009
Corners
Devise four categories/people/theories/studies from the topic previously studied. Write each one on a large sheet of paper and blu tack one in each corner of the classroom. Students start in the middle of the classroom. You ask a series of questions relating to the topic, for example ‘Which theorist said that……’ and students must move to the corner of the room which they believe is the correct answer. To avoid students acting like sheep, tell them they may bluff and stand in the wrong corner. Then allow 5 seconds for them to move if they wish to do so. Any students standing in the 3 corners which are not correct are eliminated. The game continues until a winner emerges. You will need a number of tough questions for the elimination process to work.
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Coaching
Students work in pairs, one student is the coach and the other is the learner. Provide the all coaches with the same topic area which the learners need to be coached on. The aim is for each coach to try and make their learner the best in the class. Allow coaches 20 minutes to train up their learner on the chosen topic, they can do this by rote learning, making up silly memory aids for their learner, testing them on key terms etc….the coaches can use any method they wish to make their learner the best. At the end of 20 minutes, coaches to one side of the room and learners to the other. The teacher will ask the learners questions about the topic to determine who is the champion learner. The best learner and their coach win a reward.
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Group presentations with audience participation
Divide your class into groups of 3 or 4 students and allocate a section of a topic or a study to each group. Allow the group plenty of time to plan and prepare a presentation to be done in front of the rest of the class. The audience must take notes from the presentation to check that they are listening.
The presentation must make use of visual aids and every member of the group must contribute. Students must not simply read out a script - this is not allowed. The group may produce a short handout for their audience to accompany their presentation or might produce a written test.
To make the presentation more interactive, the presenting group must find a way of testing their audience and, at the end of the presentation, members of the audience must ask the group questions about the content of their presentation. As an added incentive, the audience could rate the groups on the quality of their teaching with the highest scoring group receiving a prize.
Tags: audience, groups, presentations, questions
Monday, May 11th, 2009
Post it!
Give each student a post-it note and ask them to write down one question they would like answering based upon the content of the previous lesson. They then stick their note on the whiteboard and take away another person’s note. Each student must then attempt to answer the question from the post-it note they have chosen. If anyone gets stuck, it can be thrown open to the rest of the class (or the teacher!)