Good morning, good morning and happy Friday from Literacy Connexus everyone! We hope that this blog post finds you healthy, happy, and with a hot cup of coffee in your hands.
If you caught Monday’s blog post about Ruth, you may have seen the Easter egg I left for today’s post promising an activity idea for your classrooms. If not, I hope that you are pleasantly surprised by today’s post.
Today, I’m going to share one of my favorite classroom activities – and how I stretch it to fit almost an hour’s worth of ESL conversation and activities.
“Tell Me About This Picture”
Now you may be thinking that describing this picture could be a good activity, but surely not an hour long – is it?
And the answer is – it could be!
Here is how I would use this one picture to build vocabulary, practice grammar, and foster conversations in English.
- I would ask students to identify as many things in English as they can in the picture. Here is where we can build vocabulary. Students will often say things like rice, spoon, drink, beans. Transcribe the words that students come up with onto your screen or whiteboard, and then point out a few extra words. What is the red thing under the lunch? Oh, a placemat! Have students write the vocabulary words in their notebooks. Are there any words that they didn’t know before?
- Next, ask students to tell you about the picture. What is this a picture of? Where do you think this is? Who is in the picture? What time do you think it is? This is a great time to practice those tricky wh- question words and have students give you a little more detail about the picture. Encourage students to use complete sentences. I have students simply do this part orally, just to toss around some ideas.
- Then, I ask my students to write down 3 of the sentences that they shared with the class. This could look as simple as “The girl eats lunch.” for low level students.
- Next, I like to have my students share some of their sentences again and we do what I like to call “live editing”. As my students read their sentences aloud, I like to transcribe them on the board or screen exactly as they say them. Then we identify any grammar or word order mistakes and correct them as a class – typically paying extra attention to whatever type of grammar we are working on in class that week. Ideally, each student should share at least one sentence in this section.
- After we have at least one sentence for each student, I ask students if we can add any details to any of our sentences. Sometimes, well most of the time – this stage takes a little prompting at first. If we have a sentence like “The girl eats lunch.” I may ask the class Where does the girl eat lunch? At school. Okay now, “The girl eats lunch at school.”! Continue to add detail to the rest of the example sentences from the students. Or, if your students are just rocking their complete sentences, you could have students come up with questions for each sentence instead.
- One of the last things that I like to do with an activity like this, is have a nice conversation about the picture. In the case of this picture, my class and I discussed what kinds of things they eat for lunch, the things their children eat for lunch in school, the things the children in their country eat for lunch in school, and whether or not they thought that school lunch in the United States was good and/or healthy.
So you can see, that one picture could be worth about an hour in an ESL classroom! This is one of my favorite activities because it let’s my students work up from words to sentences to conversations in one simple lesson and all with a familiar topic. It’s also great for those days when nearly everything you planned for your lesson has gone wrong and you have very little to work with.
Would you use this in your classroom? Let us know in the comments.
For more content from Literacy Connexus, don’t forget to subscribe! Until next time, blessings and happy teaching.