(my site's been down - sorry, I'll fix it over the holidays!)
Here it is!
Happy holidays!
Karenne
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Karenne Joy Sylvester
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Many thanks for this Karenne. I used it as a spur-of-the-moment activity with a class of very mixed-level adults. (We're supposed to be doing "Commercial English for Businesses" but it was their last lesson of the year, and I thought they could do with some speaking practice.)
They LOVED it! Nice and scalable for mixed levels, lots of real communication (they were butting in on each other - in English, no less) and lots of laughing at the shared personal experiences. How do you avoid getting an awful gift in the first place, sort of thing.
Oh! I am so glad to hear that :-) I've been toying around with the idea of loading up the rest of these on my blog next year instead of fixing my website so I just might do that... my students also love these!
Ta, very much for coming back to tell me!
K
Karenne - let me also tell you that I loved your question worksheet. And my students loved it more! (The one where they can put in a subject in the circle in the middle and ask various questions around it.)
I've got a kind of theory about language learning and progress. I think that students only really progress when they begin to trust you. There always seems to be a block to progress (not necessarily related to learning a language, but a psychological block that results in a distance being created.) As soon as that block is removed, students begin to relax, trust, and voila, progress happens.
(I know this sounds hippy-dippy stuff, but I saw it happening when I was teaching 1-1, and I'm convinced it also happens in bigger groups.)
When students get to chat with each other / with their teacher, like in your lovely open-ended exercises; bonds deepen, students relax, and a warm glow of shared experience permeates the room. The satisfaction of expressing experience, feelings, whatever, has far greater impact on confidence than mere linguistic ability, I think. You can do far more (as a teacher) with a group of learners who trust you, trust each other, and feel good about expressing themselves, than you can with strict adherence to accuracy of form and expression.
A very roundabout way of saying that I love these activities of yours, because they do far more than just "teach" a few words or structures.
Happy holidays!
Clare x