Post 5. Story Cubes

Speaking game
Pre-Intermediate - Advance
To build story based on the picture and words in the cube

The Teacher
The teacher prepares the cubes with pictures and words like verbs, phrasal verbs, new vocabularies, and so forth. The cubes can be downloaded from www.islcollective.com or other resources, or the teacher can make them her/himself, to make this activity more suitable with the lessons/materials discussed in the class.

Class Activities
Students work in pair/group, depending on the number of students. Each student/pair/group has got 2 cubes: the pictures and the words. A student throws the cubes, s/he has got to build a story based on the picture and the provided words. In pairs/groups, the higher level students can make this activity as a chain story. The students must carefully listen to what the previous student(s) say in order to make a good story.

This activity can be used to teach writing or grammar.

Comments

To Educate or To Teach?

People define the words educate and teach differently. The people doing the job is called educator or teacher. Educator seems better since the person not only teaches but also has other responsibilities or roles such as providing moral values in the lessons, make students have positive attitude, knowing students’ condition, discovering the superiority of students, observing them carefully, and many more. The definition is broader than the definition of teacher. I refer the definition to other cases, actually. A teacher is defined as the one teaching and doing things relating to transferring knowledge. Some like being called an educator. What makes them different? The definition of the term or the real work? Are you a teacher or an educator? I still remember that my teachers ever talked about this. They said that they weren’t teachers but educators. They also showed the reasons of this matter. Others have got cool terms to refer teachers or educators like a chaos coordinator, ...

Knowledge or Happiness?

Talking about teaching, it isn't as simple as some think about it. teachers are required to know more about their students, materials, and other things related. What's the main aim of education? Is it to make our students know what we teach in the classroom? Should we ask them to master our subject, but our students aren't interested in? Must we force or push them to get standardised scores in our subjects? How is happiness of students when they learn something? How is their mental? How do we understand and facilitate what they want and need in our classroom? What should we do when our students think that what we teach isn't useful for them? In the beginning of my teaching journey, I might focus on how well students master my subject. Then, I relaised that what I did might not be useful for students. Then, I try to teach about creativity of students in which students not only learn about the subjects but also activate or use them outside the classroom. Besides...

Teacher, -actually I call myself-, be a kid again, but still be mature.

Some teachers might be so excited to see cute things when going shopping for their classes or lessons. Others might think that those teachers are childish and haven't got happy childhood. Actually, it isn't about childish or mature. When teachers see cute things or children stuff and feel happy to buy them, it doesn't mean that they're immature. This is because their students need this stuff in the classroom. Let me illustrate, that a primary school teacher wearing kids-like clothes and bring a Spiderman bag doesn't mean that that teacher is childish. That teacher does this because s/he is with children. S/he wants to provide children environment since children are children. Let them grow and feel that they are children. Actually, what I want to write isn't about it. Kids grow up and have their own strengths. Can we do everything? Must we force students to be able to do what we master and neglect their skills which aren't in our subjects or majors? ...

TEFL Case

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