It's proably too late for that, but I rpomised myself to write every week and this week I don't have many ideas, so I'm just going to write about activities I used on my first lessons with returning groups.
On the first lesson after summer I feel like it's too early to jump in to normal classes but still you want to set out the right mood, revise some English and get to know your Ss better. So here's something you can do.
1. A classic Find Someone Who. Works well with oldies and newbies and you can vary the level of difficulty. I usually ask students to ask follow up questions and then report back on the most interesting pieces of information they found.
2. A classic Guess what your partner did this summer. Works well with rowdy groups where a mingle is not the best option. I usually give a list of sentences and ask students to guess which of those activities their partner did. They check in pair and again report on the most interesting stuff.
3. A classic Sit Down Who....Works well if you want to get it over with really quick :) You can use the prompts from idea 1.
4. Holiday activities lesson as generously shared by onestopenglish webiste I used this year.
5. Mobile learning idea. Students choose and show a holiday photo on their mobile device in pairs, guess the activities and discuss their summers. Again a quick and no prep activity.
6. Start off with a project (like I did this year). Introduce your students to Tour Builder and discuss the project you can make with them. I'm still in the process of carrying out the project but I'm already so excited about it. Updates will follow soon.
7. Remember the rules. Every year I set some time from the first class to remind Ss the rules of our school and introduce new ones. There are couple of ways you can make it more entertaining. This year for stronger Ss I made a word cloud and asked them to retrieve 12 rules from it. Ss worked in pairs, compared their results with other pairs and finally looked at my variant of the rules. It was funny to see how they interpreted many rules differently and come up with their own.
For weaker groups, I made a list of "New Class Rules" with items like "Be late" and "Keep our classroom dirty" etc. I asked them if they liked the new rules and gave them a task to re-write them to their liking. To my surprise, all of them had more or less the same idea of classroom behaviour :)
On the first lesson after summer I feel like it's too early to jump in to normal classes but still you want to set out the right mood, revise some English and get to know your Ss better. So here's something you can do.
1. A classic Find Someone Who. Works well with oldies and newbies and you can vary the level of difficulty. I usually ask students to ask follow up questions and then report back on the most interesting pieces of information they found.
2. A classic Guess what your partner did this summer. Works well with rowdy groups where a mingle is not the best option. I usually give a list of sentences and ask students to guess which of those activities their partner did. They check in pair and again report on the most interesting stuff.
3. A classic Sit Down Who....Works well if you want to get it over with really quick :) You can use the prompts from idea 1.
4. Holiday activities lesson as generously shared by onestopenglish webiste I used this year.
5. Mobile learning idea. Students choose and show a holiday photo on their mobile device in pairs, guess the activities and discuss their summers. Again a quick and no prep activity.
6. Start off with a project (like I did this year). Introduce your students to Tour Builder and discuss the project you can make with them. I'm still in the process of carrying out the project but I'm already so excited about it. Updates will follow soon.
7. Remember the rules. Every year I set some time from the first class to remind Ss the rules of our school and introduce new ones. There are couple of ways you can make it more entertaining. This year for stronger Ss I made a word cloud and asked them to retrieve 12 rules from it. Ss worked in pairs, compared their results with other pairs and finally looked at my variant of the rules. It was funny to see how they interpreted many rules differently and come up with their own.
For weaker groups, I made a list of "New Class Rules" with items like "Be late" and "Keep our classroom dirty" etc. I asked them if they liked the new rules and gave them a task to re-write them to their liking. To my surprise, all of them had more or less the same idea of classroom behaviour :)
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