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, ...

Narrow Definition

I'm sure we ever heard that teaching is 1/4 and 3/4. 1/4 is for preparation and 3/4 is for performance. I absolutely agree with this. However, it doesn't mean that we prepare lessons in a very minimum level and get the best result. Imagine that the 1/4 preparation of a teacher is 1000, so the 3/4 of teaching of that teacher is different from those having 100 for their 1/4 of teaching. Preparing much isn't a mistake, but it might be that matter if it's preparing too much. Every teacher has got their own definition of 1/4 and 3/4 of teaching. This is why I'm quite irritated when I prepare lots of things for my lessons, and others comment that good teaching is 1/4 preparation and 3/4 theatre. I do agree with that, but it doesn't mean that we prepare nothing or we don't prepare well. We also know that the way be behave and treat students are always on students' memory instead of our methods. I totally agree with this, but this bothers me when others ...

Post 16. Grouping Students

How to divide students into some groups/pairs Pair works, group works, and class works are common class activities for a big class. When we split students into some teams, or they must work in pairs, we can use another way to group them. Every student has got a word. Students must go around the class and look for friends bringing words in the same given category or decided rule. The decided rules can be looking for synonym, finding the antonym, categorizing, or other ideas. Having found friends bringing the required words, they work in that group. By grouping students in this way, we can also review learnt vocabulary or provide new words for students.

TEFL Case

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