Goodbye, 2015: Class activities?
Sebah Al-Ali2015 is almost done; it’s been a crazy year. A lot has happened in the UAE, around the world, online, and in our personal lives. It would a great class activity if we used this opportunity to encourage students to think about the past year and reflect.
You can have students go through their photos/videos taken the past year, and find x number of:
- happy moments
- favorite dishes
- favorite screenshots (we take TONS of them! And any iOS device automatically sorts them into a folder called “screenshots”)
- interesting skills they learned
- places they visited
- goals they achieved
- lessons they learned
….anything that allows students to share their stories and practice using English to talk about their daily life activities.
For any of these activities, you can ask students to briefly explain what the picture is, when it happened and with who, and what makes it special. To target specific language skills, you can add a few language requirements like verb tense, kind of sentences, a number of words from their vocabulary lists, and so on.
The product of these activities can be in different forms using different apps, like:
- narrated stories using Adobe Voice, iMovie, or Educreations
- sound clips using Voice Record Pro
- captioned pictures using Instagram or Adobe Slate
- presentations using Keynote
- posters using Word Dream or WordSwag
Students’ products can be viewed in class for everyone to vote on the best/most creative product, or peer reviewed using a simple checklist asking. There might be some shy students who do not want their work to be seen by others, however. If you can’t convince them to share it with the class, they might be less intimidated if you view it on your own and give them feedback.
…if you’ve got any similar ideas or activities, please do share 
