I had a big wodge of FCE writing to mark the other week and as I was correcting the various letters, articles and stories I found lots of really silly mistakes that my students shouldn’t be making.  In a lot of cases, I could see why they had made them, but I got the feeling that if they had carefully checked their work before handing it in, a lot of the mistakes could have been corrected before I ever saw them.

Before class, I printed up some picture frames and then wrote one mistake from each student in a frame.  I stuck them up around the class before the students arrived and wrote on the board, “Welcome to The Gallery of Silly Mistakes – please feel free to browse”.  Once the students had arrived, we looked at the different mistakes and corrected them as a class – with lots of them kicking themselves for making such silly mistakes.

Karenne Sylvester did a similar, though far more technologically advanced version, here.