Take songs and have them find mistakes in song lyrics and correct them and then sing them.

1. To make sure you know the alphabet – Ask your students if they know the alphabet, obviously the answer is going to be yes. Firstly tell them to say the alphabet … a,b,c …. and everyone can do that really quickly. Then add in a small twist make them say the alphabet backwards. It’s really fun! 2. To be used in sciences – At the end of a lessons give each student a green and a red piece of card, ask them true or false questions on what they have just learnt. E.g. Humans are mammals true or false. 3. When your students are concentrating – make them stand up and when you say stop the walk on the spot, when you say go they stop, when you say clap they jump and when you say jump they clap. It gets then awake and lively again and is like a brain teases. 4. In math and language lessons- use white boards and ask simple questions. E.g. (french lesson) – write house in french. There are loads but can’t think of any right now. Hope this helps! : )

Find the error

1) go around in Germany, and take pictures of sign that have some English errors….show the picture in class and see who can find the error first, and then get them to suggest corrections.

2) same as #1, but use literature….tourist brochures, ads, product instruction manuals, advertising, newspaper articles/headlines

3) smooth the English: similar to #2, but using longer text passages.

4) Please explain it to me: Take photos of things from common daily life in Germany….so they all know what it is in German…and ask them to tell you about it in English by writing a simple paragraph. Have them turn these in to you. You screen them for the ones with obvious errors….and without revealing the author, use it as a sample exercise to get everyone to suggest how to correct/improve it.

5) Plain English Please: government gobbledygook and obfuscation….US presidential campaigning is a really great source of this kind of stuff….or government forms / instructions. This can be a real challenge even for us Americans.

6) The Blind study partner: A simple exercise in building mental images for a person who is blind from birth so they have no prior images to recall. Then have the students try to explain or describe things to the blind student. For example, tell the blind person what is a square (geometric shape). The words used will tend to be concrete words rather than abstract…as concrete words help to create mental images…but look at the language and grammar needed to clearly and concisely do this for even simple easy vocabulary.

7) Describe the taste (or just about anything): a really fun lesson. Bring in some foods that are either familiar to everyone or new to them. This can be a great way to get the word order down….adjective/noun sequences, etc. If you show a picture to them and ask them to tell what is in the picture….or have them write it down…then scan for and select the problem papers to keep the authorship anonymous…then do a group review/correction session.

hope this helps….active participation in class should make coming to class lively and fun while providing a good learning opportunity for all.

Mad Libs are great. We also used to have a game that was similar to Boggle. Sorry I can’t remember the name if it had one. It had cubes with words and punctuation. You shook them up, spilled them out and the challenge was to make a sentence that was grammatically correct with a time limit. Points awarded – deducted based on accuracy.

Teaching stores sell blank cubes so you could devise your own.

Have fun – sounds like a great experience!

Mad Libs are great. If you don’t know what they are, they are little books that have stories in them but in order to finish the story, you have to fill in the blanks with different parts of speech i.e. verb, noun, adverb, adjective, etc. My now husband when we were dating had trouble with grammar and highschool. We did these sometimes in the evenings and it helped him alot. Also, I noticed my little 2nd grade brother bringing one home that his teacher had made up for Language.

Try Madlibs. They’re fun and effective.