Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Those ten minutes left


We all have been fresh, hurried teachers at some point in our professional life. There are some times when an exercise turns out to be shorter than we thought, or we discover that our students have suddenly become desperate for "one more" activity.
What ever the cause might be, even the most relaxed professional checks the clock in panic from time to time. Rather than panicking, we should treat the five to ten minutes left as an opportunity to give our students extra doses of motivation. Here is an opportunity to play, review and show the students why you love English.
Here are some few ideas, fun ideas how to deal with these time gaps :

1. Always keep a picture, comic strip, or drawing at hand. You can use them for multipla activities, as a discussion about the subject, or imprompt role play of the situation etc.

2. Play a short session of an oral game like "animals,vegetable " /yes-no questions/, mime the word, I spy game, Simon says...etc

3.Recycle a topic you used for revision. Write a list of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions or any topic covered in previous lesson and have students to formulate sentences.

4.Taking to consideration the class level, vocabulary and structures already taught during the course, write 10 headless sentences /.......is used to water plants/ or 10 tailess sentences / A vase is a used to......../ Have two or more teams complete the sentences in three or four minutes. Finaly ask the students to read out loud the sentences and correct.

5.Write a simple sentence like "Today is a beautiful day ". Your students will have to expand it, by adding one or two words together. If someone suggest a sentence is incorrect is out of the game.

These are just few ideas collected by my experience, you may heard of them through another source, but the real issue is to try them out.
Start a list of your own activities, keep it in hand and make it grow. Maybe you will discover gaps in time are worth creating after all.

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