Richard Gresswell ran a minimal resources blog challenge over on his blog. Here are his rules:
“Describe an activity that requires no more than the teacher, students, and possibly making use of the board, pens, and paper. Describe the activity aims and procedure concisely in no more than 200 words.”
So here’s my entry, a simple vocabulary revision activity I did last week with a class of two business students…
In the previous lesson, one of the language needs that emerged was how to express an opinion. In the next class I wanted to revise the vocabulary that we had worked on.
- I gave each student a pad of post it notes and asked them to write something that someone could have an opinion about, serious or light, on the sticky side up, without letting their partner see. I had written an example on each pad to help them (the book you’re reading, your boss).
I’m assuming post-it notes are allowed in the challenge. It seems pretty minimal to me, but I could have easily used torn up paper and shuffled them like playing cards.
- As they wrote each note, they gave it to me and I stuck it to a small whiteboard I have.
- After they had written 6 notes each, I asked them to choose a note from the board. Because they had written on the sticky side up, they couldn’t see what they were choosing.
- They then asked their partner a question based on this subject.
This was a little twist that they weren’t expecting. I like to include these kinds of twists as it keeps them on their toes, and also revealed that they need some help in formulating these kinds of questions, something I’ll come back to in the next class.
- They took turns in answering the partner’s questions, expressing their opinion each time with the new vocabulary.
The Teacher James 