A blog for teachers

[Т А Кузнецова]

English with Jennifer

(a blog for teachers)

www.englishwithjennifer.wordpress.com

This week we are going to look at another blog which is useful to teachers. Here you can find a lot of ready made activities and much more: videos from YouTube on different issues of the language.

Here is one of the activities:

ACTIVITY: Story Scramble and Retell

STEP 1 – Place students in groups of 3 (or 4 if necessary). Write two topics on the board and ask the group to initiate a conversation about ONE of them. Choose topics that have broad appeal but are specific enough to quickly inspire personal stories. Examples: (1) Pets I’ve Owned / (2) Bad Food Experience. Allow groups about 5 minutes to converse freely. Give them a 1-minute warning before you tell them to stop.

STEP 2 – After this initial period of conversation, ask each group to choose one student to retell a BRIEF story from his/ her past (less than a minute). If it’s difficult to choose one student, have them flip a coin or draw straws (slips of paper). Tell them each person will have a special role. Student A tells the story. Student B sits next to Student A and transcribes the account exactly as it is told. Student C (and D if there are four) listens and asks questions either for clarification or to prompt Student A.

STEP 3 – The roles change slightly. Students B and C now look at the transcribed text suggest corrections. Student A must give his/ her approval for changes to be made. Student C rewrites the text starting each new sentence on a new line with wide spacing. Ideally, there should be about 8-10 lines. Model (based on a true story):

My family had a cat while I was growing up.

It was an outdoor cat, and it liked to hunt.

It usually brought home whatever it killed.

One day it brought a chipmunk.

The problem was that the chipmunk wasn’t dead.

It was hurt and scared.

The cat chased it into our house.

It took my brother and his friend and two hockey sticks to get the chipmunk out of the dining room and back outside.

I stood screaming on a kitchen chair the whole time.

STEP 4 – The text is now cut out line by line to create strips of paper. Ask each group to shuffle the strips and hand them over to another group of students.

STEP 5 – With their set of strips, each group must assemble a story in what they believe is the correct order. Once they feel that the order is logical, they must rewrite the story in paragraph form. Editing and revision are allowed.

STEP 6 – Using the final drafts, the groups read their assembled stories to the class. The original story-teller may comment on the accuracy and quality of the final version. Final drafts can be handed to the teacher for additional corrections.

STEP 7 – (Optional) – Independently, each student may write a short account on the other topic that was not chosen by their group and submit it to the teacher. Once revisions are made, these stories may be shared orally in a later lesson.