Drill the points of the compass, but rather than arrows or flashcards, get students waving their arms about! So arms up for North, arms right for East, etc. This will get confusing as the teacher stood at the front of the class will either be doing East and West opposite to the children, or could mirror it…
I found that it woke the children up, and was a good kinaesthetic activity.
This is a good way for testing vocabulary in a whole class situation. There are two ways of doing this: you either reward knowledge and the student gets to sit down when they get it right, or you challenge it and they stay standing. The last one standing can therefore be a good thing or a bad thing!
You go round the class, rapidly firing the vocabulary you want to test, English-TL or TL-English.
Have a load of pictures of vocabulary you are drilling on the board.
You point to a picture and say the vocabulary. If you’ve said the right word, the students need to repeat it. If you said the wrong word, the students need to not repeat it! I always start by doing a first round of the words all being correct to remind students of the correct vocabulary.
This is a bit like Snatch, but calmer and fewer bits of paper flying around!
You give students a sheet of paper with images (or words) on, and you shout out a word, the first person in each pair to put their finger/coin/counter on the matching picture/word wins a point.
Good for SEN classes for practising vocabulary. Students can then do the same in small groups, with one acting as the teacher.
Irregular preterites = difficult to learn.
Tactic 1 – the song, which I heard being sung around the corridors for days afterwards!
I got the kids to note down in rough as many stems as they could and then we wrote them all on the board and tried to match up with the infinitives
Tactic 2 – the table,
This is good for getting students to listen to others when reading a text.
Everyone has a copy of the text to read along. One person starts reading it… if they make a mistake, or someone thinks they do, they shout ‘Rhubarb!’ (in the Target Language, naturellement) and tell you what they think went wrong. If they had in fact made a mistake, the student who shouted out ‘rhubarb’ takes over reading and wins a point for their team (usually boys v girls/sides of the room/the usual groupings).
This is a good, quick and fun way to revise vocabulary.
Have a blank page on the IWB or whiteboard, students come up and draw a picture to do with the topic you are doing, others shout out or are selected to guess what it is.
It helps if you write down the word on a post-it that the student has to draw or you can just whisper it to them as long as no-one in the front row has crazy hearing abilities!
