Those Wonderful Pictures With A Story To Tell......... lost
Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 7:10 am
Hi there,
Hope you don't mind a long story but I feel I've got to try and give you something in exchange for a request for something I need that I've been searching hard for, but can't find.
I worked in a school 8 years ago where they used large A4-size photocopies of pictures with a situation in them, with no vocabulary at all pinned on them, but with 'a story to tell.' I still have 3 or 4 copies but need to find a new lot of a dozen or so of these pictures, to design a new (final) oral exam for the 12 years to 14 years age groups, coming up fairly soon.
Unfortunately, at the time, I was a little less alert - 8 years ago that is- so I failed to ask the teachers I was working with, where they got this lovely resource! They are possibly from a variety of books, but one significant factor marks them as so useful: there is a real situation which students can spend time describing, with occasional prompts from the 'examiner-teacher.'
I'll give you an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. I've used one picture very successfully with Form 1 here in Hong Kong- age 11/12. I split the class into boys v. girls (THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is a definite goer...). They choose a group leader by the 'rock/paper/scissors' method. Then the group leaders set the order of students who must stand up. A group of 10 girls will start with the group leader. If the boys are unequal in number, e.g. 8, when we reach the ninth girl, it goes back to the group leader of the boys.
First they study, all of them, under a time limit of 5 minutes, the picture they see, writing both sentences, and questions that they can ask the opposite team, the sentences will describe the picture, or answer questions they feel it's likely the opposite team will ask: it's a traffic jam!
It's a classic crossroads- with a car dead centre, and a man changing a tyre which obviously has a puncture. There's a line of cars and lorries one way, buses and vans and 'open-back' Toyota-styles the other way. There are two cops, one talking animatedly to the guy with the tyre-change, the other trying to guide the traffic. There are shops (with newspapers in front, or fruit and veg, etc) and a bank, and people watching from windows of surrounding buildings, people getting out of a bus, fed up with waiting in the queue, adults, kids, drivers visible in car windows..... some angry, some bored- faces and expressions are visible but not too well defined, it's basically a cartoon.
Kids are asked to stand and in 1 minute deliver the question- girls ask boys, e.g., and boys have one minute to answer- BUT- all sentences must be delivered with perfect, or near perfect grammar (it's an 'English-medium' chinese school). 5 points for each correct sentence, even if the answer may be wrong (i.e. number of women in picture wrongly counted etc.....)
The result is a fierce contest, as boys and girls try to outwit each other and the judge goes mental (that's me....) with the bolder- girls, usually...- who argue the odds over whether the boys deserve any points for their lousy grammar or wrong answer.
So, guys, can you help? That's the game I play, and don't tell me it can't be adapted for poorer groups- you can allow for weaker responses if the whole group is fairly weak. It is also a good game for very large groups- and the books with the sentences can be shared, so if another girl has a better question that's more difficult for the boys, she just gives her book to the person standing. It is a really good laugh.
So where can we find more pictures? I continue today with my hunt, but perhaps some of you already have an answer.
Cheers, Roddy.
Hope you don't mind a long story but I feel I've got to try and give you something in exchange for a request for something I need that I've been searching hard for, but can't find.
I worked in a school 8 years ago where they used large A4-size photocopies of pictures with a situation in them, with no vocabulary at all pinned on them, but with 'a story to tell.' I still have 3 or 4 copies but need to find a new lot of a dozen or so of these pictures, to design a new (final) oral exam for the 12 years to 14 years age groups, coming up fairly soon.
Unfortunately, at the time, I was a little less alert - 8 years ago that is- so I failed to ask the teachers I was working with, where they got this lovely resource! They are possibly from a variety of books, but one significant factor marks them as so useful: there is a real situation which students can spend time describing, with occasional prompts from the 'examiner-teacher.'
I'll give you an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. I've used one picture very successfully with Form 1 here in Hong Kong- age 11/12. I split the class into boys v. girls (THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is a definite goer...). They choose a group leader by the 'rock/paper/scissors' method. Then the group leaders set the order of students who must stand up. A group of 10 girls will start with the group leader. If the boys are unequal in number, e.g. 8, when we reach the ninth girl, it goes back to the group leader of the boys.
First they study, all of them, under a time limit of 5 minutes, the picture they see, writing both sentences, and questions that they can ask the opposite team, the sentences will describe the picture, or answer questions they feel it's likely the opposite team will ask: it's a traffic jam!
It's a classic crossroads- with a car dead centre, and a man changing a tyre which obviously has a puncture. There's a line of cars and lorries one way, buses and vans and 'open-back' Toyota-styles the other way. There are two cops, one talking animatedly to the guy with the tyre-change, the other trying to guide the traffic. There are shops (with newspapers in front, or fruit and veg, etc) and a bank, and people watching from windows of surrounding buildings, people getting out of a bus, fed up with waiting in the queue, adults, kids, drivers visible in car windows..... some angry, some bored- faces and expressions are visible but not too well defined, it's basically a cartoon.
Kids are asked to stand and in 1 minute deliver the question- girls ask boys, e.g., and boys have one minute to answer- BUT- all sentences must be delivered with perfect, or near perfect grammar (it's an 'English-medium' chinese school). 5 points for each correct sentence, even if the answer may be wrong (i.e. number of women in picture wrongly counted etc.....)
The result is a fierce contest, as boys and girls try to outwit each other and the judge goes mental (that's me....) with the bolder- girls, usually...- who argue the odds over whether the boys deserve any points for their lousy grammar or wrong answer.
So, guys, can you help? That's the game I play, and don't tell me it can't be adapted for poorer groups- you can allow for weaker responses if the whole group is fairly weak. It is also a good game for very large groups- and the books with the sentences can be shared, so if another girl has a better question that's more difficult for the boys, she just gives her book to the person standing. It is a really good laugh.
So where can we find more pictures? I continue today with my hunt, but perhaps some of you already have an answer.
Cheers, Roddy.