Good evening one and all
Over the last few days we’ve been making great progress with the group.
Unfortunately one lady has dropped out due to personal reasons
Please find below what we (Sam and I) have done since Friday:
Friday
We began with a bit of small talk, discussing what we had all been up to since we last met. Next was a session of ‘hot seat’, which meant the participants took turns to sit on a chair at the front of the class. While they were there, the other students through random words at them and they were to try and translate, once they made a mistake they had to give up the chair for the next person.
We then revised the difference between the present forms (simple#continuous), I gave them a worksheet called ‘But what are they doing now’. It was an exercise which had diagrams of 15 people, it showed the people in their jobs and in an activity labelled now. They wrote sentences for each picture using the correct time form.
The final part of the day was taken up by a board game which was based on the simple past.
Monday
We started, as usual, with some small talk; discussing what we all did over the weekend. Followed by a round of ‘hot seat’, but this time the students were to call out verbs in their infinitive form and the person sitting on the chair had to say what the simple past form was…
I then spent a little time introducing the past continuous in all its uses.
Once they seemed to get the gist of it, I gave them a worksheet with exercises using the past continuous in the positive, negative and question forms.
To continue on with this we played a memory game, I wrote on the board what 3 people were doing at 3 different specific times in the past. Then I rubbed them off then asked questions such as:
What was Scott doing at 3pm?
What was Mary doing while Scott was running?
As always the participants find this a very strange time form but managed to use it quite well-
Tuesday
After our small talk we played a memory game called ‘I went to the supermarket and bought…’. The game is great for practising the alphabet as well as vocabulary based on everyday products.
After breakfast I introduced the present perfect simple, which we highlighted by translating some typical sentences. I then gave them a picture of a bedroom, they had to suggest to me what they thought the person ‘has done’.
Next was a worksheet to practise the the question ‘have you ever…’, after which the students wrote 5 of their own questions to ask each other.
To finish the day we played a mix of all their games.
Wednesday
We were given another 10 copies of Business Basics today, which should be enough for the class.
We started the day with a brief revision of the simple present perfect. The first exercise we did was to write 6 sentences- 3 true and 3 false for the students partners to guess.
This was followed by a mingling activity called ‘Have you seen the pyramids?’, in which the students had to ask various questions to as many other students as possible. After this we played a game called ‘Experiences’ where, while one student had to leave the room, the others chose a student for the absent student to guess by asking questions in the simple present perfect.
Following some modelling the students played irregular verb table tennis. Following on from that we went over the Essential Grammar unit 18 called How long have you…? doing the accompanying exercises.
Next we played a simple present perfect board game. Lastly we did a worksheet called ‘Townscapes’ using the simple present perfect to talk about changes.
This led into a group discussion about the changes to Leipzig’s cityscape over the last 25 years.
Have a great day tomorrow.
Regards,
Sam and Scott[/u]