we made a film. Due to popular demand, here it is...
http://vimeo.com/46025864
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Making Predictions....
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| Will 2013 be a good year? |
Tuesday saw the return of my ESOL night class after the Christmas break.Our course book grammar focus at the moment is future forms which lends itself perfectly to thinking ahead at the beginning of a new year.
- I began the lesson by asking learners: Will 2013 be a good year? and gave each learner a post it note on which they had to write a simple "Yes" or "No." On the count of three we revealed our answers and amazingly we all replied with a resounding YES! (With the current economic climate and the dreich January weather I had been expecting a few more negatives...)
- Delighted to find my learners in such a positive frame of mind, I wrote the following headings on the board: weather, Shetland life, the world economy, new inventions, politics and celebrities. I asked my learners to work in groups of three and to write five cheerful predictions about any of the afore mentioned headings. (Had they replied NO at the post it note stage, they would have been required to write pessimistic predictions.)
- Learners had five minutes to discuss and write their predictions. I let them know that we would record these (to revisit later in the lesson and also, perhaps, at the end of 2013). Groups had the chance to practise reading sentences, but I did not correct language at this stage.
- We enjoyed listening to each others' ideas about 2013. You can listen to some of our predictions at: http://audioboo.fm/boos/1147824-2013-predictions. My learners used future forms inconsistently or not at all, e.g.: We think a lot of rain, but summer time a lot of sunshine or hopefully somebody invent a water powered car.
- We then brainstormed future forms my learners already knew. They were familiar with quite a few, as I had suspected, but we needed to generate a number of examples, focusing on meaning, form and pronunciation.
- Finally we listened to the recording again, and spoke about whether the predictions needed to be altered in any way. Learners were able to successfully "fix" the instances in which future forms had been used inaccurately.
After all this language input, we revisited 2012 with @leoselivan's fun and fantastic New Year quiz, which Leo has tailored to suit a range of levels. This went down really well - you can find it on: http://leoxicon.blogspot.co.uk/
Happy New Year everyone!
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