ESL Writing and Speaking Game

This is a link to a writing and speaking lesson I used with my higher level class last week. http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/writing-bingo/ The link has a great explanation about the activity, but I will add a couple of things I did slightly differently/ think were important.

Firstly I changed the topic from my vacation to my childhood memory. This was simply because I have recently done a vacation lesson. I added a couple of slightly different questions for the students to answer. I think this activity would work well with any topic.

Secondly I had a worksheet with a space for the students to write in which I told them they had to fill, most students got pretty close to filling it too. This mean that all the students wrote a decent length paragraph.

I wrote a paragraph about my own childhood memory before class and used it to play an example game before the students started. In the classes when I used my example the students all wrote a lot more and seemed more imaginative than the first time I did this lesson, where I just explained the activity to them.

Finally as my class has 20 students it would have taken too long to do each game separately, so I split the students into groups of five and they played the game in their groups. I then asked each groups winner to read out their paragraph to the class.

The activity took up a whole 50 minute lesson.