MY BEST LESSON: It’s a fundamental rule of language teaching that all-singing, all-dancing oral routines are strictly for the morning, and that afternoons should revolve around quieter activities.
Keeping Kelly and Jason in their seats is the name of the game and if they do some meaningful work it’s a bonus.
Which is all very well in an ideal world. But how do you develop the oral skills of a class you rarely see before lunch? This was my dilemma a couple of years ago with a Year 9 bottom set. I solved it with the help of several sheets of sugar paper, four felt tips, lots of coloured card and a large bag of sweets.
What I produced was a simplified version of Trivial Pursuits, with four categories instead of six. The rules were unchanged. Each colour represented a different topic or language area. It proved a big hit so I had to restrict its use to avoid losing the novelty value.
Materials * A sugar paper board, laminated to be robust enough to take a severe battering.
* Four sets of colour-coded cards, containing both questions and answers to facilitate independence.
* Paper to keep the score.
* Prizes. It’s amazing what some pupils will do for a sherbet lemon or a Mars Bar. Their desire to win also made them very exacting and they often disallowed answers I would have accepted.
Questions * I prepared cards for the first game and as the year went on pupils added to the stock. During other lessons, it gave early finishers something useful to do. It also served as an occasional homework.
* The level of difficulty varied to increase the element of chance. If the brighter sparks had won every time, the others would have lost interest.
Benefits * For me: after the initial evening preparing materials, I was set up for the year.
* For the pupils: consolidation of new language and revision of previously learned material which might otherwise have faded into oblivion.
Alison Thomas Alison Thomas writes on modern languages at www.tes.co.uk
