Work Sneak with a twist

Those of you who have read my blog in the past may remember the game Shoehorn. Whereby students have to take words from the previous class or from the target vocabulary provided by the coursebook; and try to shoehorn them naturally into a somewhat contrived conversation. The results of this are often rather amusing, particularly with higher levels.

I've recently changed jobs and in our meeting we were sharing ideas.  A colleague of mine reminded me of the idea of rather than forcing the words into a conversation perhaps letting them do it a little more naturally and slightly less contrived. Students are provided with 5-10 words (from previous classes and from coursebooks) and they have to try and get them all into their speaking throughout the class. This idea jumped out at me and I decided to use it right away.

I'm not sure whether you stay on top of new vocab that occurs in class, but I do. I always write it on the side of the whiteboard, review it at the end of class and get a students to act as the scribe and write all the new vocabulary on very simple grids(which can be found here), which I later cut up and put into a box for each of my different classes. At the start of my next class I simply placed the words from the previous class on my students desks and asked them to keep their words a secret but to try and get them into the speaking throughout the class.

It went down a treat and at the end of the class students could announce how many words they'd used and the meaning of said words. The next class the pile of words grew and the task of getting the words into their natural speech became a little more difficult.

I hope your students, of all ages and abilities, enjoy it as much as mine did.

Til the next time

@ELFuencyfacilitator