Here is the second and the last part of my 4 day Pilgrims course.

* Students make a circle with the first letter of their names or their birthdays.

* Students throw a ball to each other saying their names and when everyone says his/her name, they have to throw the ball back to the person who has thrown them saying their names. Challenging!! 

* Teachers make a circle, everyone says how many years they have worked as a teacher adding the number they have heard from the teacher before them. (We ended up 114 years of experience in teaching. It was great fun!)

* In a circle, students throw a ball to each other saying ‘I like….’, when everyone finishes their sentences, students throw the ball back to the people saying what they said they liked (Danny likes travelling etc.)

* In pairs, students write three words about their lives. It can be their age, their brother’s name, what they like to do, the year they were born etc. The other pair tries to guess what the words mean by asking questions.

* In groups, students try to find a word starting with ‘T’ or ‘C’ for these sentences.

•  Something that has wheels.
•  Someting that is worked by electricity.
•  Something that you can find at the coast.
•  A sport or a hobby.
•  Something to do with weather.
•  Something that is in your living room.
•  Something that is yellow.
•  Something that you wear in cold weather.

* Teacher gives some questions to the students before the reading activity. Students try to answer the questions with made up answers. When they finish, they retell their story looking at their answers. The good thing is that everyone will end up having a different story. Then teacher gives the real story. What’s your story out of these questions?

1. Where is Minton?
2. How many medical students arrived in Minton?
3. What time of the day did they arrive?
4. What did they tell the landlord of the pub?
5. What did the students do the following weeks?
6. How did the local people feel about the activities of the students?
7. How did the local people stop the young students and get them leave the town?

I can send you the real story, just let me know.

* Teacher starts telling her true story using not more than 3 or 4 sentences then she stops and asks the students to go on telling the rest of the story trying to guess what it may have happened and ended. When they finish telling the story, teacher tells the real story of her own.

* After students read the story, teacher writes some words from the story on the board and asks students to put the words in order as they are in the story without looking at their texts.

* Teacher writes a sentence, a rhyme or a song on the board and reads/sings it with students. Every time they read/sing the text on the board, teacher deletes a word or chunks to make it more difficult and fun for the students to read and remember.

* Students tell the number of the letters of each word as they read it. (Jack/four, and/three, Jill/four,went four, up/two, the/three, hill/four ….)

* After students read a story, teacher divides the class into groups of three and each group members choose to be either A, B or C. Teacher dictates questions adding one of the letters from A,B or C. All the A’s in the class has to write the question whenever they hear ‘A’ letter. The same goes for B’s and C’s. When teacher dictates all the questions, each students answers her/his answers and shares it with the rest of her group. (It was difficult to explain, hope you get it)

* # Students work in pairs. Each pair has six different words on their lists. They try to memorize the words, pairs change their lists and try to remember the words on their lists. # Each pair tells 5 words form the other pair’s words list and they try to remember the 6th word on the list. # Each pair tells 4 words form the other pair’s words list and they try to remember the 5th and the 6th word on the list. #Pairs get their own lists and try to write the other pair’s words on their papers.

* This is a post-reading activity. Teacher divides the class into groups, each group is asked to read one paragraph of the text, then teacher asks each group to write one or two sentences after their paragraph that will not change the story.

* Students expand the story with the adverbs and adjectives that the teacher has given to them.

* Students add one extra character or a scene to the story.

* Teacher gives each student an animal word (sheep, dog, bird, cow etc) Students start walking around the classroom making the noises of these animals. Each students try to find the rest of his/her group by listening to the noises. Students can be given different songs, they hum around and find the rest of their group.

*  Teacher gives each student in the class a letter, A,B,C…. (All the letters of the alphabet should be) . Teacher shouts out one word, e.g DOG. The class try to spell that word by standing up and saying their letters at the right time.

* Teacher lays the pictures of the story on the floor and hands out different parts of the text to students. They try to match the pictures with their texts. When everyone finds the right picture, they read their texts and show their pictures.

* Students choose one sentence from the story and write each word of their sentences on small papers and place them on their desks randomly. Students walk around the class and try to put the words into correct order to find the sentence again.

* Teacher gives different parts of the story to some of the students in the class. They all stand up and face the rest of the class. Each student only read their parts of their story while the rest of the class try to put the story into correct order moving students to the right or to the left and asking them to read their parts.

We can easily make our students read the texts more than once by using these activities and make them understand the it thoroughly. I hope you enjoy and find these activities useful.  

I would like to thank to Philip Franklin, the Coordinator of the Foreign Languages Department of Terakki Vakfi Okullari for this opportunity.