So I’ve been looking for ways to entertain them while also educating them.

• Exquisite Corpse often works but I do get students who refuse to do any writing of any kind because, “Writing is not fun. That’s not a game,” as one of them put it once.
• Three Headed Expert went okay once, but I think it needs a very particular group of students for it to work. It does seriously build grammar awareness though, if done right! I don’t dare try Three Headed Broadway Star (Damn I miss the British Whose Line Is it Anyway?s).
• I do rather like the idea of doing writing games with them though. So I was really happy to discover Twine, a program that lets students write their own interactive fiction (otherwise known as Choose Your Own Adventure) stories. It looks really cool  and the process of figuring out how it works is an exercise in English all by itself! And of course, they can also read other people’s stories.

However, we don’t have computers in my classroom, so I wonder if there’s an easy low tech way to do a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure in a class. I know that there is a low-tech way to do it, with that paper stuff and one of those pen things, but is there an easy way to introduce it to students and have them write a short one in 50 minutes?

Anyone have any other low-tech fun writing or reading games? Or Improv games that have gone really well?

Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for the link to Twine.

EDIT: This Read-Write-Think lesson looks pretty good to me. Without the online bit.

EDIT: More toys on how to do collaborative authoring in the classroom

This was a group of students I had had before and found a bit rowdy but intelligent and serious. I was teaching them in an essay writing class. We had been talking about thesis statements the class before and I was planning to quickly review it and then move on the introductions. I had planned to have a few students share their thesis statements, critique them publicly and then move on to other things. So I asked one student to write his thesis statement on the board. And that was the last thing we did that class.

This small group of students started ripping it to shreds, constructively. They highlighted everything I had taught them and more. Including the opposing argument in the thesis, forecasting what the essay would be about, using balanced, academic language, even the grammar of the thesis statement. Did it use parallel structure? Were the verb tenses correct?. It was such a great discussion that even the slacker students started listening in and commenting.

It is wonderful when it all comes together and you see students applying what you taught them and also enjoying themselves in the process. And yes, the essays I got out of that group were as good as I could possibly have expected.

On one side there are pictures of two similar but slightly different things, such as a pair of blue and a pair of white sports pants. On the other side, they say either either/or or Neither/Nor. Students have to come up with sentences for each one using the objects and the construction. I like the way lower level or less creative students can come up with sentences like:
“I will buy either a black shirt or a white shirt”
“I like neither hamburgers nor hotdogs”

and more creative students can give much more interesting and complicated sentences like:
“While it’s true that I can either go to the beach or go to Las Vegas, I would prefer to go skiing this weekend.”

If anyone has other games to play with these cards, please do let me know in the comments.

It doesn’t exist for retail sale anywhere!

But with a bit of ingenuinity, one can be made. I had a generic plastic backing thing for an iPod. All I needed was a book-like thing, a way to attach the back to the book, and maybe some protection.

I considered trying to cut a hole in a book but frankly I’m not that good at arts and crafts. So after wandering around Staples for a good half hour, I came up with this little beauty:

It consists of:

• a Rolodex card case with the envelope for cards taken out and the middle pocket cut out.
• A generic iPod backing, attached to the middle section of the card case with mounting squares.
• A sticky felt pad on the inside pocket

The rubber band is holding my ear buds onto the cover. If I feel very creative I might try to devise an earbud holding device. I do like the fact that I have two pockets to put stuff in, like a to-do list.

There ya go. An easy, cheap, cool looking iPod 3G case.

• Humor and fun are important. Humor plays a million roles in my classroom. I use jokes to lighten the mood and make learning fun. I use self-deprecating humor to make students feel comfortable challenging me and so that they understand that mistakes aren’t bad. I use jokes and humorous stories to establish rapport. And I make silly skits and demonstrations of words or grammar points so that students will remember them. And occasional bits of irony directed at my students soften the blow of criticism or discipline. Plus if I couldn’t vent by sassing them ironically from time to time, I might become a danger to myself and others.
• But learning isn’t always fun. Learning doesn’t have to be torturous. I always explain to students, “I’m making you do a rough draft, not just to torture you but so you learn the writing process. I’m teaching you the subjunctive because it helps you express ideas, not just because I’m mean.” But boring drills and cloze exercises and repeating the same point ten times are beneficial in moderation. So is writing and rewriting and rewriting again. Or reading the same passage over and over, analyzing words and looking up allusions, until it becomes clear to you. I believe it was Diane Larsen-Freeman who said something like, “I don’t see it as my job to entertain my students.” I am here to educate them and they aren’t all going to like everything we do.
• Mastering something is fun. That being said, reminding students that the pain pays off with a new skill or knowledge never hurts. Telling them that they will be so happy, and their teachers so impressed, when they can write a beautiful and clear essay because they use parallel structure and linking words well is a good way to keep motivation up.
• Technology doesn’t matter to me. It really doesn’t. I don’t see it as my job to prepare students to use the Internet. Or not. I do think students have to learn to type and I do now make them type and print their essays, double-spaced, 1 inch margins and so on so they are ready for university. That means I am happy to sit down and show them how to do that on a computer. But I don’t see why using Facebook or Twitter inherently makes learning better. I just don’t. And a lot of “technology” lesson plans are just as easily accomplished with bits of paper and a pen. I have nothing against students who like technology and I do encourage students to watch movies and videos and listen to presentations. I think flash card sites can be useful (although I learned Russian with the boring 3″x5″ kind and did just fine). But I don’t really see the inherent benefit of technology for the sake of technology.
• Grammar is important not as a system of rules to be slavishly memorized, but as a set of tools that make meaning. I hate when students ask me, “Is I like ice cream right or I liked ice cream or I have liked ice cream right?”. I tell them, “I don’t know. What are you trying to say?” One class I taught where students had to read a book over a one month period was truly awful because there was no time to finish the book, and they didn’t get it, and they didn’t really enjoy the book at all. It ended up being me reading out loud and stopping every few pages to discuss what happened. One thing that I did get to do with it was point out grammar in use: “Look here’s a flashback. It’s further in the past. So he’s using past perfect!” “Why is he saying, I have made fire? Because he has that skill now and can use it. Present perfect to connect past to present!” If that could be a course, Read and Notice Grammar, I would be the happiest teacher in the world.
• Learning is Holistic I’m hardly the first to notice this but you can’t teach the present perfect, then stop and teach vocab, and then go on and teach articles. Students learn a bunch of stuff at any one time. You can isolate for the purposes of practice and to clear up any mistakes, but students have to encounter and make language while juggling many different things at once.
• Communication is the goal Some students (and teachers) get off on learning obscure grammar terms and translating difficult words. Or memorization. I don’t think that’s bad if that’s how you learn, but ultimately the goal is communication. Producing language or recognizing and understanding language. Listening and reading are part of communication after all.

I’m sure there’s a million more ideas I could come up with but I think those are the big ones that guide what I do in the classroom. Always welcome comments, suggestions and recommendations to get better as a teacher.

I should begin by telling you this class is called Listen and Speak, it’s beginning level and there are 5 students in the class. And it’s a supplementary class.

So I went to the students’ main teacher and asked if there was any area of speaking that they needed particular help with. She said practicing gerunds would be good, especially in sentences like, “I enjoy dancing,” or, “I think about travelling.”

So I took a bunch of the the phrases, that could easily have gerunds added to them and wrote them on bits of paper with blanks, such as:

When will we go __________________?

I also wanted to chose phrases that were commonly used in spoken language so they could be more fluent in saying these chunks. I then found phrases that made good answers or continuations of the phrases with blanks.

First, we quickly reviewed gerunds and I had them add them to sentences on the board.

Then I pulled out my cards and we drilled each phrase separately. I worked on intonation and fluency.

Then I handed each student one card and had them add a logical gerund. They then read them out loud and I corrected fluency. We also discussed some issues that came up: “Let’s go playing,” for example and why we don’t say that, for example. I kept handing them new phrases to practice and add gerunds to until we ran out of cards.

Now I read out the “answer” cards and anyone who thought they had a logical question to go with it could read out the whole dialogue. If they were right, we stacked them together into a mini-dialogue.

After we had matched all of them, or decided we couldn’t match the rest, we discussed one mini-dialogue and who would say it and why. What was the context?

I had intended for them to do the same thing in pairs, but they ended up constructing mini-dialogues using different cards, so we went with that. They were pretty funny!

So that’s how it went. Any ideas for follow-up or to do it better next time?