Teaching Unprepared

TEACHING UNPREPARED

Simple ideas are sometimes the best. In The Way We Do It teachers describe activities that have worked for them in the classroom. In this first article, Jane Airey confronts the challenge of teaching unprepared and shares three well-tested activities.

You find you unexpectedly have to teach a colleague's class and you have nothing prepared. What can you do that will benefit the students with no more resources than a lively mind and some blank paper?

I have imagined the class size to be 12 but all three activities can be adapted for any number of students.

1. Circle stories

This is my favourite activity in this situation and it practises speaking, writing, reading and grammar.

Put the students in groups of three or four, each with a blank sheet of paper and dictate the first line of a different story to each group. With larger classes you might like to write the lines down yourself and distribute the slips of paper to save time. The group continues the story for five minutes.

Say 'Stop!' and get the groups to pass on their story to the next group in a clockwise direction. The next group reads what the first group has written, makes any corrections and then continues the story.

Continue like this, giving the groups slightly more time as the stories get longer. When the group eventually gets the story it started, the members should decide how to finish it.

A class of 12 conveniently makes four groups and five additions to the stories which I feel is enough.With a larger class it would be necessary to have larger groups or two sets of circulating stories.

The stories are then read out to the whole class. As everyone has contributed to all stories there should be great interest to see how the stories progress. The stories can then be collected in by the teacher and used later for correction work.

Here are some beginnings that I have found work particularly well:

- Jane seemed like an ordinary teacher but she had a terrible secret.
- Tim woke up to see green and red flashing lights outside his bedroom window.
- Julia was driving along a dark country lane. Suddenly her car stopped.
- Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess.

As you can see I have chosen very different story types to practise - fairy stories, horror stories, science fiction.

2. Elaboration dictation

This is another easy but more structured way to practise writing narratives. You will need to make up a very simple story (easy to do on the spur of the moment) and then dictate it to the students. They write it down, leaving big gaps in between the sentences. Then in groups of three or four they rewrite the story using better vocabulary and tense variation.

You may need to prompt the use of adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, tense combination and connectors.

Again, this is not only practising writing but also speaking as they negotiate in their groups the best way to embellish the story. The teacher's role is to circulate, helping and ensuring that everyone is involved.

For example :
(Dictate)It was a cold night.
(Students write)It was a cold, dark night and the wind was howling in the trees.Julia drove her car.Julia was driving her car along a narrow,winding country lane.She saw a dog.Suddenly a small shaggy white dog rushed out in front of herShe crashed.She braked hard but the surface of the road was greasy and she skidded and crashed into a tree.

3. Picture dictations

Draw a picture on a hidden piece of paper and as you do so dictate what you draw to the students, who draw what you describe. Try to recycle some language that you have done recently and also introduce the language of position.

For example:'In the bottom left hand corner I am drawing a beautiful young girl sitting in a deck chair. Next to her, underneath an umbrella...'
This is particularly good for students preparing for oral exams where they have to describe pictures.

The students then repeat the dictation in pairs from their own pictures, comparing the final results to see if they gave/understood the instructions correctly.

One of my most successful attempts at this was dictating an under the sea scene with lots of fish, starfish, coral etc, in preparation for the song Octopus's Garden by The Beatles.