Biography Writing Activity

Recently I've come across Tricia Hedge's book Writing. It's a book of writing activities that follows different stages of writing. I found it very useful especially in terms of giving controlled writing practice to Ss. I've noticed that coursebooks often contrive writing in two or three stages. At the same time, coming from my students' feedback, writing is one of the most difficult tasks for them. One of the reason being a multiple tasks you need to perform while creating a text: getting ideas, organising, drafting, proofreading and so on. Anyways, there are plenty of activities in the mentioned book and I recommend it to everyone with the same concerns as me.
The book also inspired me to create my own activity which I will briefly describe.

This week we've been studying biographies, we had an interesting text about Matt Damon and couple of more exercises to study the genre. However, I felt it was too early to give my students writing biography for homework. Last year, one student copied information from wikipedia and, frankly, I was afraid it would happen again. So on the second lesson I decided to revise what we have learnt about biographies and teach them how we can use information from the Internet.

1. Ask Ss to brainstorm (or remember in my case) the typical parts of the biography in groups or pairs (Birth place, Achievements etc). Give them couple of minutes and hold a feedback session after.
2. Write up all the categories on the board. We used an empty desk and sticky notes.
3. Show a picture of a famous person of your choice (e.g Mark Zuckerberg). Elicit any kind of information Ss may know about him/her. If you get some good answers, ask Ss which category it belongs to. Put it on the sticky note and place it next to the category.
4. Explain that Ss are going to read pieces of text from the article about this person. They have to find information related to the categories on the board. I intentionally chose a more difficult text (wikipedia article), to make the task less straightforward and train Ss deduction and scanning skills. You need one article for a class, cut it in a pieces and give out to Ss.
5. Ss read the texts and find relevant information. They put it on sticky notes and connect it to the right category.
6. After given time, take away the texts and hold a feedback session as to whether the content matches the category. If some categories are without information, just erase them.
7. In pairs Ss decide in which order they will put this information in the biography.
8. Give Ss a certain amount of time and necessary guidance. For example, I wanted them to use time-sequencing words (we practiced them at the previous lesson) and a variety of past tenses.
9. Ss work together to write their version of the biography based on the information on the board.
10. Ss exchange texts and check it for accuracy and logical content. After that they can discuss the corrections they proposed.
For homework, Ss write the biography of a chosen celebrity following the guidelines from the lesson

Phrasal Verbs Storytelling activity

 In the book we follow phrasal verbs are divided by prepositions and I find it challenging to study/revise the verbs with almost nothing in common, but creating stories is a real life saver in this situation. Here is one I came up with.

1) First, introduce new phrasal verbs (we had verbs with ON). We did couple of activities from the book to make sure the meaning and the use are clear.

2) I prepared a story at home containing plenty of phrasal verbs ( I included some phrasal verbs we studied before)

Olivia woke up at 8 o'clock. She was late. She couldn't do it again. She wanted to turn up in time for the important meeting. Frankly, she didn't want to go because she didn't get on well with people from work. She got up quickly, put on some clothes, grabbed a sandwich from the kitchen and left her place. She made couple of steps from her house, when suddenly something small landed at her feet. She screamed and looked at it. It was a flower pot. Somebody must have thrown it out of the window.  Olivia picked it up. She liked plants because she grew up on the farm. She looked up but all the windows were closed so she couldn't find a person who did it.She wanted to carry on walking but wasn't able to do it. She was no longer hurrying up to work. Olivia said "Hold on" to the plant and went back home. There she put the flower on her sink and replanted it. Next day she went to a community college and took up a course in biology. She's going to be a farmer!

 I drew some marvelous illustrations to the story.

3) In  class distribute the pictures and encourage predictions. Then read the story to the class, ask sts to listen carefully and number pictures in the correct order. After that they have to assign a phrasal verb to each picture. You may want to read the story again.

4) After we checked the order and the verbs, I asked them to work in pairs and try to remember my story with as many details as possible. Then have a brainstorm session with the whole class.
5) Now the fun part. Ask students to work in pairs and on the basis of the pictures create a new story. They can use them in any order they want. Give some time to plan it. Then ask them to use 6 phrasal verbs in their story (by this time, we'd had a list of phrasal verbs on the board that we studied in this course). Monitor the accuracy of phrasal verbs use.
6) Sts write their story down but put the gaps in places where phrasal verbs are supposed to be. Then they exchange stories and try to figure out which phrasal verbs are missing. Having done that, they read their stories out loud and check the verbs the put in.
7) After that its time for teacher's feedback.

This activity turned out unexpectedly well and kept everyone in the class engaged. Hope you enjoy it too!