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Author Topic: Looking for ideas on Discussion based activities for mid to high level students  (Read 901 times)

Offline Amerz100

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Hello everyone,

I wanted to get some ideas for discussion based activities.

I work at EiE - a chain of franchise hogwons - associated with Korea University.

I teach both Elementary and Middle school students.

I am good for activities for elementary elementary students or lower level students.

For the mid to higher level students they want me to focus more on discussion based activities.

Any ideas or suggestions for discussion based activities?

I've been using the Phonics/Prelets series of books for lower level elementary students. They also have their own Lets speak, Let's Express and Lets Talk series of books on their intranet. The content on the games I use are obviously correlated with the lesson taught. The higher level books include Debate and Essay and Reading and Essay. I don't know how familiar you guys are of these books but I guess its irrelevant. If there are resources/materials available for any of these books on waygook.org then please direct me to them.

I was just struck by a thought of utilizing these interactive games - such as Mario, Jeopardy etc with higher level discussion based activities - you can't go wrong with Mario - and the games serve as motivation for the students.

Thoughts?

Thank you so much in advance!!
Amerz

Offline daktariB

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I work at 2 middle schools, but I found this to be pretty entertaining for myself and for making students talk about themselves and learn about each other more. Plus it helped me figure out topics to facilitate some post-game discussions later.

The game is simple, "Never have I ever". I usually combine the worksheets I use with mini-dialogues that I can bounce to if the game fails, so just ignore that part of the attachment and look at the bottom half with the game.

The way I do it is:

1. Explain that this is a game where everyone stands up and says things they have never done but think others may have done.

2. In the event someone says "Never have I ever ....gone to Seoul" and you HAVE gone to Seoul, then you sit down.

3. Last person standing is the winner - Although depending on how good the English level is and how big the class is, I will let the last couple people standing win together if they have all stated one of their options during that round.

4. I spend arguably half the time just making sure everyone has a minimum of 2-3 options to play the game with (I have 20-30 kids in a class) but for smaller classes I would want everyone to have 3-5 options so we can do more rounds.

5. After everyone is on the same page I usually play 5-10 rounds of the game before they either seem like they have had their fill or the class ends. Honestly every class I've tried this with (Middle school grades 2-3) seems to really like it so boredom hasn't been an issue for me with it.

BONUS***** = You can potentially learn a lot about your students this way, and they can learn about you. Sometimes kids will deliberately try to embarrass their peers in good fun. Hopefully you don't have any mean kids who would try to expose a horrible secret of their classmates. But in my class the most scandalous thing that came out was when a middle school boy was exposed for smoking a cigarette and another for trying on make-up, neither seemed too embarrassed, and they all seemed to enjoy the game with no hiccups and even my native co-teacher seemed to think everything was in good fun and was just happy everyone was speaking English, so I'll leave its place in your class to your discretion for your situation. And it is nice to join in with them! My kids were shocked to find that I have eaten fish eyes and bugs (Thailand times) and they had many questions about that!!!

Hope this helps.

Offline Amerz100

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Thank you so much for your idea and insight!

I work at a Hogwon so the class sizes are significantly smaller - I normally have minimum two students to a max of 10.

Amerz

Offline hamaone

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I happened to find this site and found this useful. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/speaking-listening-techniques/It is more engaging to have various kinds of discussion strategies once we set the topic.

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/speaking-listening-techniques/ 

I also recommend you read comments in this site which have more related ideas.
Good luck on your teaching^^