I have tried to publish this post three times and Chrome keeps crashing (booo) so I am going to keep it short! I had a brilliant lo-tech lesson with my Y12 French last lesson on Friday where we played bingo/loto! We did not practise numbers or do it because it was Friday, rather, I wanted to assess not only individual speaking skills but also group speaking and listening skills.
I asked the students to prepare a 1 minute presentation on the sad and timely theme of "celebrity kills" and gave each one of them this card (now this has been in my teacher toolbox for years and I think I adapted it from something one of my own A-level teachers, the wonderful Shelagh Espinoza, used to do but its origins are hazy!) Download Oral bingo
Very simply, each student had to give their uninterupted presentation and then the others had to jump in with any of the above so that we had a very varied conversation and students were really working hard in order to interact in lots of different ways whilst at the same time trying to get a column, then row and finally a full house. This was an incredibly rich source of feedback from students in the form of how agile their thinking in French was and also how rich their vocabulary is. No iPads, no tweeting, no Posterous, just good solid learning! We must not forget the simple things...
great, simple ideas indeed... I am sure the competitive element adds an extra spark, too...
Posted by: Alex Bellars | February 19, 2012 at 06:43 PM
Love it!
Posted by: Lisibo | February 19, 2012 at 07:20 PM
Fantastic stuff, Chris! Variety is the key, isn't it. I love this idea.
Posted by: Rugbytreasure | February 19, 2012 at 08:29 PM
This is based on an activity from 'Advancing Oral Skills', which is an old CILT pathfinder I wrote many moons ago. It was originally Tony Lonsdale's idea which I took a bit further. Nice to know it worked well.
Do you know 'Unplugged' by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury?
Many of their suggestions would work really well at AS/A2, in the lo-tech vain.
Posted by: Anneli | April 10, 2012 at 03:51 AM
Great simple and lovely I wish most of the blogs can be as this. Like my page at http://www.textme4free.com/
Posted by: dorotheo | May 04, 2012 at 07:35 AM