counting down

Posted by beth on April 28, 2008

Well, there came a point about three weeks ago when I thought I would never see this week – the LAST week of the semester – and yet, here it is.  So today, I finished up some things we’d started last week, and then I asked the class what they wished to do for their last few days with me. Their response: learn fluent English, play games and review what we’ve learned all semester. Done and done.

So the plans for this week include:

• An alibi game in which a crime has been committed and pairs of students must come up with a shared alibi. The pair are then questioned individually by the rest of the class, and the pair with the weakest alibi gets framed for the crime. This is great for reviewing past tense statements and questions.
• “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything” – It’s downright miraculous, y’all. In this one ridiculous and utterly amusing song, we’ve got present perfect, articles, gerunds/infinitives, past participles and relative clauses. It’s seriously like 3/4 of the semester in one song. So I’ve taken the lyrics, screwed them all up, and I’m going to have the students edit them and then check their answers by listening to the song.
• “Careless Whisper” – Do I really need to elaborate on or justify the use of George Michael in any situation (not just ESL class)? Sigh. If I must, it has a few lovely examples of “as” as a subordinating conjunction, as well as several examples of the third conditional. Plus it’s George Michael.
• I have a rather in-depth and possibly boring/terrifying fill-in-the-blank list of sentences wherein the students are required to select the proper verb tense based on the context. I’m trying to figure out how to make it fun. Any thoughts or ideas would be most welcome.

Yay last week!!!!