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Fun DELTA Activities

March 18, 2012 · No Comments · ACTIVITIES, grammar, speaking, vocabulary

Last Wednesday was my first day at DELTA. It was such a tiring but also a full day for me. Of course, from day one I involved in lots of various activities with my new friends. Here is a brief selection from those that mostly caught my attention.

Get rid of the cards (Relative Clauses)
You can use this activity to revise vocabulary or some grammar topics. Actually I preferred to use it to revise relative clauses in my class. The aim of the activity is to get rid of all the cards until the end of the game.

- Beforehand prepare the questions and the answers on the same card as in the example.

Question: I talked to the girl. Her car had broken down in front of the shop.
Answer: I talked to the girl whose car had broken down in front of the shop.

- Tell students to fold the paper so that the answers are not readable from the others. On the other hand, the question side is open to the other students. (On one side the question, on the other side the answer is written.)

- Give four question-answer cards to each student

- Tell them to stand up and mingle with others.

- While walking around and they show the questions to others The student who cannot answer any question correctly has to get that card from his friend. If they answer a question correctly, they keep the cards.

Clockwise Speaking
- Divide the class into two groups.

- Tell the first group to line up around the class in a random order.

- Tell the other group members to choose a student from the first group and stand next to him.

- Set a question so that they can start a conversation.

- Don’t forget to set a time limit.

- When the time is up, the members of the second group move in the clockwise and match with a new partner.

- Set another question to be discussed then.

Picture Dictation (How to Teach Articles)

- Have you ever used picture dictation to teach articles

- Tell the students to draw a big table on a piece of paper.

- Tell them to draw a pair of shoes under the table.

- Then go on dictating the picture in your mind.

- The important thing is to start drawing the new object repeating the previous one using “the”.

If you have any memorable activities from your DELTA years; please share them with us.

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I Want to Play a Game: Fun Revision Activities

January 8, 2012 · 1 Comment · ACTIVITIES, grammar, vocabulary

Since two weeks later there will be a final exam for my students, I’ve decided to look for revision activities/games they can enjoy and recall the subjects that were taught before. Here are three of them that I found useful and fun:
The Millionaire Game: It’s an effective game in which I can insert any types of questions. If you wish you can also play the game with groups. The rules are:
  • Write the amount of money for each question on the board: $100, $500, $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, $5,000, $7,000, $10,000, $15,000.
  • Remind the students they have five lifelines which are mentioned below. (These lifelines are really great to incorporate the other students into the activity)
  •  The value of each question answered correctly is added to the student’s bank.
  • The student who gives an incorrect answer at any point in the round leaves without any award.
  • Don’t forget to set a time-limit depending on the level of the students.
VocabBingo: Although this activity needs a short preparation beforehand, it is a useful recycling activity for students.  
  • Prepare a wordlist including the definitions and parts of speech of words (e.g. a preposition or a verb) as a teacher’s resource
  • Hand in the list of the words and the blank Bingo Cards to the students.
  • They are supposed to choose 10 words from the list and place them on the card.
  • The teacher starts to read the definitions randomly.
  • Students try to guess the word and its parts of speech. If they have that word on their card, they put a cross on it.
  • The first one who finishes first calls out “Bingo”.
Jenga: I’m pretty sure most of you play this game when you come together somewhere with your friends. If you have one at home, why don’t you use it in your class?  You can revise everything with these magic blocks.
  • Write your questions on cards. My suggestion is specify the difficulty of the questions in an order.
  • Divide the class into groups or play it as a whole class.
  • Each time a student comes to the board and pulls out a block. If he/she succeeds pulling out the block, he/she hears the question.
The aim of the game is to balance the tower on top and answer the questions correctly. For each correct answer students get a point. 

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“Turning Challenges into Opportunities” Doğuş ELT Conference

November 29, 2011 · 4 Comments · ACTIVITIES, CONFERENCES, grammar, reading, speaking, TECHNOLOGY, WEB 2.0 TOOLS, writing

Last weekend I attended a great organization focusing on how to turn challenges into opportunities, held by Doğuş University.  It was a conference full of precious speakers, many hands on activities and various surprises.  I enjoyed every minute of it.

 

David Cyrstal’s Notes: David Cyrstal is an entertaining speaker, coloring his talk with demonstrations and movement. He started his talk with the question “How can you detect whether you are an internet addict” then, he offered his own criteria: “if you visit the bathroom in the middle of the night, does it occur to you to check your email on the way back to bed?” I think the answer is “No” for my case (just for now). It was also relieving to hear from him “internet addiction is ideal for the linguistic addict.”

Özge Karaoğlu’s Notes: I fell so happy to have such fruitful people like Özge in our field. She gave me very constructive ideas using the web securely and effectively. Here are some of them:
  • Delicious is a tool providing you to save, stack and share your favorite links and topics on the web.
  • Bloglines is an excellent site for you to find and track your favorite websites and blogs in real-time. This web tool allows you to follow the recent news and updates on the blogs or websites that you follow.
  • Cybaryman is a great online resource bank not only for teachers but also for students.
  • Linkedin is an e-portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system connecting users and creating online communities.
  • Me on the web is my favourite tool among the others since you can manage your identity on the web. When you set up Google alerts, you get email from Google whenever your name, email or any search terms you specify are mentioned on the web.
  • Goqr.me is a tool enabling you to generate QR codes. Özge mentioned that we can give the answer keys to the students in the form of QR codes so that they can scan and read them.
George Pickering’s Notes: I think he is one of the exceptional people who could capture himself as a monkey and put his photo together with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
He mainly mentioned about framing issue during his talk, the filters we use to view ourselves and the world. I strongly believe that zooming into the frames changes the vision of understanding of our students. Towards the end of his talk, he showed the sentence “Opportunityisnowhere” and asked us to read it. I was the one who read it as “Opportunity is now here.” Well, I think I am a little bit optimistic.
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Michael Oneil’s Notes: At the beginning of the session, Michael shared a video of Bill Gates on creating great teachers. You can watch the video here. He explained how to improve teaching and learning establishing a taxonomy of successful teaching with 49 teaching techniques. He categorized this taxonomy into seven parts; Setting High Academic Expectations, Planning that ensures Academic Achievement, Structuring and Delivering Your Lessons, Engaging Students into Your Lessons, Creating a Strong Classroom Culture, Building and Maintaining High Behavioral Expectation and lastly Building Character and Trust.

 

Many of my friends were presenters at the conference including me (I will give more information about my workshop in my next post) On the first day, I attended a nice workshop given by my colleagues Merve Elbirlik Tülek and Emine Bülür Civanoğlu on “The Power of Images to Boost Learner Creativity and Motivation”. Many thanks for their practical ideas.
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Paul Seligson’s Notes: I saw that he had so many things to teach me. I wish I could have regular sessions from him during the term. He mainly informed us how to facilitate the learner’s fluency with enjoyable and creative tasks such as fluency role cards, Mexican wave but the most interesting one was his suggestion on giving a short break to the activity in the middle of the lesson and asking the learners what they think at that moment.
I have learned such valuable things and met many precious friends at this conference. It was also so fun to follow the tweets on #DogusELT during the conference.
 

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