Teacher Discussion Forums

Has anyone else worked without texts?? What has proved successful??

I teach in Bulgaria and am starting my second year with a small group of smart, motivated kids. This is an optional class. We finished our workbook last year so this year we're on our own. Their level is probably low intermediate at this point. My idea is to come up with several projects to try and provide some continuity to the class, so that we're not doing something completely different and random each class. Each project should take about 2-4 weeks (we meet twice a week.) some ideas i have so far:

story writing
creating personal blogs
class debate - assigning the topic and who is pro/con, then they have
class time and homework time to prepare
write their own autobiographies - probably the last thing we'll do

that's all i've come up with so far, and that won't take us the whole
year. has anyone else done anything similar?? or has anyone come up with a different solution to the no-texts problem? i haven't found many
internet resources for something like this, most of the stuff out
there is just grammer worksheets (which i'll sprinkle in also)

oh, and they are 10th-12th graders

thanks for the help!!

-mary

You could try having them look up their favourite singer, band, movie star, TV personality, political person, or most influential person in their lives.

They could make a time line of their lives on a long sheet of paper before they do their autobiography. We did one on rolls of brown paper or rolls of white paper for adding machines. You can mark it off in half or quarter years and they can add graphics or pictures of people, books, movies, TV programs, radio programs, newspapers, magazines, travel, family events and so on that influneced them over the years. They can add comments in graffitti all around the graphics.

They could make a tourist brochure for their area or town in English with unusual things that teenagers would like to know or see.

They could translate menus for the tourists or brochures in the local museums or art galleries.

They can make their own movies based on myths or important stories for their area wiht storyboards first and then acting in the movies if you have a digetal camera and a video camera.

You can have a games week with team competitions for an English cup. I got a pretty English tea cup and painted the name of the school on it and the logo then filled it with candy for the winners. You can use such games as:

List all the things in one category that you can in five minutes - sports, cars, names of countries, popular English singing bands, stars in the sky, oceans or rivers, types of clothing, colours, transportation, animals. I usually do two categories a class and then play another game.

Make sentences out of a list of five or six words.

The alphabet city game - start with a city like Vancouver. The first team has to chose a city that starts with the last letter - R as in Rome. The next team has to chose a city starting with E and so on. The team that keeps going with a two minute time limit wins.

Teams can make up names and chants or cheers.

They can sing a song in English or do a short impromtu play give five characters such as a queen/king, a talking camel, a poor man, a baker and a tennis player.

They can play charades or pictionary.

Give points and have a running score so they can see their status.

They can make a newletter or newspaper for the school.

You can share all this writing so they can read each others work once it has been corrected and presented in some interesting manner - posters, booklets, games, binders, printed on t-shirts, or written on windows in special paints for window writing or on curtain material.

We also talked about this at:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... ight=#7322

those are all REALLY great ideas, thanks for taking the time to reply.

i'll definately use your idea to do a biography, i like the idea of making a visual time-line. Making puzzles/homework for eachother is an awesome idea, it could be like they are the teacher for the day, doing a presentation, leading a discussion and giving out exercises. Then we can repeat the same process a few weeks later for autobiographies.

the game week would work great for last week of the semester.

you're ideas about 'local spots' are really ambitious, but definately something to think about. maybe we could even integrate it somehow into the local tourist office (it's a tiny town in the mountains, and they are just now trying to branch out into ecotourism.)

thanks again for the ideas

-mary