Search Results for: character build

August 25

Visual Literacy

End of Week 3 now and I’m very excited as this afternoon I’m doing the session on Visual Literacy.  Followers of the blog will have noticed I’ve been using more multimedia resources this year and this afternoon’s session is a very hands-on look at using video and photos in the classroom.

For the trainees attending the session, and for anyone else who’s interested, here are some useful links to sites and lesson plans using video and pictures:

• Ceri Jones has some great lesson plans on her blog close up

Lesson Stream, Jamie Keddie’s site, provides very detailed lesson plans based on short clips

• On this blog you can find a lesson plan on Planking and another on character builds taken from a screenshot

• Michelle Worgan has posted some great activities on her blog, including a lesson based on Free Running

eltpics gives teachers a place to share pictures on a variety of topics, all of which are available under a Creative Commons License.  If you’re interested in joining the venture, check out this post on Sandy Millin’s blog

English Attack is a great site where your students can learn English watching short video clips and music videos

• The onestopenglish article Teaching English Using Video also provides very detailed plans for teaching different levels and looks at the different activities you can do with video

August 10

Telling stories

I REALLY love character builds as a way to introduce a topic.  Yesterday there was a text on Speed Dating and so to introduce the topic I drew my friend, a stickgirl, on the board.  I elicited from the students that her name was Mary, she was an English girl with long, curly hair and she was a teacher.  I then drew an unhappy face and asked them why she wasn’t happy.

“She hasn’t got any money.”

“The crisis, the crisis!”

“She can’t go on holiday.”

So I drew a stickman next to her and explained that it was her ex-boyfriend.  I then asked the students to tell me about him and it turns out his name is John, he’s Chinese and he’s very rich because he’s an economist.  Anyway, we quickly got rid of him as he had made my friend, Mary, miserable.

 

So we went back to Mary being unhapy and I explained that she wanted to find love and asked where people go in Cádiz to meet and find romance.  They gave me some ideas and, unsurprisingly, Speed Dating wasn’t one of them.  So I then invented a reason as to why she couldn’t go to the places they had suggested to find love:

The beach – Mary, being British, has very pale skin and she burns very easily so doesn’t like going to the beach.

A bar – she’s uncomfortable being in bars as she’s not a big drinker and feels silly sitting there with a glass of water.

The cinema – she doesn’t speak good Spanish and as all the films here are dubbed, she can’t watch them in the cinema.

The park – she hasn’t got a dog and feels a bit silly walking round the park aimlessly.

In the street – she’s a little suspicious of meeting men on the street.

 

Poor Mary!  So then I told them that I had suggested Speed Dating.  Nobody had heard of it, which led on perfectly to the first activity, which was a short text about what Speed Dating is and how it works.  The character build was a fun way to introduce a topic which was new to the students, and it involved them from the start.

November 15

It’s all in the eyes…

If you want to bring a bit of creative freedom into your classroom and need a quick activity to get students talking at the start of the lesson, why not try this one?
Draw a stickman, or indeed stickwoman, on the board and invite a student to the front to draw the facial expression.  Then ask as many questions as possible to build up a character, giving the students the opportunity to be as imaginative as they like.
I tried this activity with a group of teachers at the ACEIA conference in Sevilla yesterday and they came up with some great ideas:
  • One pair had a man who was really thirsty because he was stranded in the desert after being abducted by aliens
  • Another teacher had drawn a guy who’d had one of his eyebrows shaved off after a drinking session with a friend
  • There was also a stickman who was so angry he had smoke coming out of his ears (what do you think could have made him so angry?)
The beauty of this activity is that it requires no preparation and it will really motivate your students to speak.  You may need to keep pushing them with more questions, but once they realise that there are no right or wrong answers, they’ll be more encouraged to reply.  It’s also a great opportunity to practise a whole variety of tenses:
  • What’s happened to Tom? (or whatever name they choose to give the character)
  • And where was he?
  • What was he wearing when it happened?
  • What could he have done to stop it from happening?
  • How is he feeling now?
  • What do you think he’s going to do next?
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