Inspirational English, May 2017 Inspirational English, May 2017 | Page 8

Continued from previous page
Please share with us a "Zero Resource" activity that we can
easily use when we have some spare time at the end of a
lesson.
A great activity that will keep your class on their toes is the adaptation of the
“hedbanz” popular game. Not only do we play it with our young learners in order to
revise every day vocabulary such as food or animals but also with older students to
practise their idiomatic expressions, phrasal verbs etc. The game can be played in
pairs or small groups. You will need rubber bands, pictures and/ or small pieces of
carton paper with idioms, phrasal verbs or any other vocabulary you wish to revise
with your students. Each student wears a card around the head and without looking
at it, tries to guess the word/expression found on it by asking 3-4 questions. If the
student gets the right answer he or his team gets one point. The winner is the
student or team with the most guesses. This activity works on multiple levels as it
contains an element of fun, practices speaking skills and revises vocabulary. It also
builds on interpersonal skills as we mentioned earlier on.
You also run workshops for teachers. What are the three top teaching tips you
would like them to remember when they leave?
I run my workshops in the same way I teach – I try to instil enthusiasm in teachers and encourage
collaboration among them. At the same time, my goal is to trigger critical reflection mechanisms in
teachers – step back, recapture past experiences, mull them over, evaluate them and eventually make
future adjustments or changes to teaching practices. When they leave my workshop I want them to
remember that there isn’t just one way to teach such and such, that there is a way to move away from
teacher centred instruction and conduct student centred lessons, and that there is a way to plan fun
packed lessons that are appealing to a variety of learning styles.
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