Wednesday 15 December 2010

Christmas Time

Its the time of year where teachers are asking for the yearly Christmas lesson.
I feel like I should  direct ALT's to some free and fast resources for classes.

The Boggles World Website is packed with worksheets for Christmas.
Thanks to a fellow Wakayama ALT for putting me onto this.

CHRISTMAS TREE ACTIVITY
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This is on the Boggles World Xmas page. It is listed under word scramble

A quick warm-up activity which a friend told works well for Highschool classes and good JHS students is the Chrismas tree Wordjumble worksheet. The sheet speaks for itself but here is a good way to adapt it to a Highschool class.

1) You have to put the kids into groups (probably 10 groups of four students). Get the students to join their desks together. Ask the JTE to organise this if they don't understand.

2) Distribute the sheet and explain the activity in easy English. The students have to make many words out of the letters C H R I S T M A S  T R E E. The words should fit the categorys given at the bottom of the sheet.

3) The students have to find as many as they can in ten minutes.

4) Calculate and allot points. Congratualte the winning team!

A friend of mine said he was able to drag this out to 35 minutes. So it should be able to kill some time. Furthermore it gets the students working in a team and competitive. Hopefully, it will get them in the mood for a Task Based Learning style activity afterward.

Christmas BINGO
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These randomly generated bingo sheets are avaliable on the Boggles World ESL page.

The Christmas BINGO is also a great way to warm-up. Put the students into groups and give them one bingo sheet each.- This will kill 10 mins or so.

To get a whole lesson out of it....

PRE-TEACH any words they don't know. Get the students to write the definitions down in Japanese. Then play Bingo. You  can follow up by getting them to write a 100 word Christmas story using some of  the new words.
Offer a prize for the best story.  I did a lesson similair to this during halloween and  I got some really good stories.

Anyway these are just some warm-up ideas which you can use to take more time if you want.
I however, have made a TBL lesson for Christmas which is very similair to the one on Jim's English Teaching blog. I will get the students to re-order a story. I will report on procedure and review after I run it.

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