Survival kit: three motivating activities

1 The poster carousel

Activity for visual learners: each student has an envelope with a story inside. They have to create a comic strip with their stories. When they finish, they stick the sheets on the wall. Then all students get to the wall and must guess what happened in each story. The owner of the drawing says yes or no, and gives hints until her/his mates guess right.

Example of story:

Last weekend I drove to the mountains with my family. We stayed in a nice big square house. On Saturday afternoon we started to hear voices in the dining-room, and we were very frightened. We tried to keep calm, so we went outside to have a walk. We came back in the evening. We were in the kitchen cooking the dinner, when we heard the terrifying voice again. When I was in bed, I had a nightmare: a monster came into my bedroom and ate my shoes. When I got up, I went downstairs and I saw the key to the mystery: I saw a parrot flying in the dining-room. There was a parrot in the house, and it was its voice the one we heard.

2 Solving a mystery 

For practising the logical smart: In this activity students are divided in groups. They read a mystery and have to reach a solution. If the groups don’t guess right, the teacher gives a hint.

You can find an example in this link. If you click on the wrong answers, you will be provided with a hint.

http://kids.mysterynet.com/solveit/

3 The brainstorming

For read-write learners: When we are teaching vocabulary, for example, about the topic of environment, students make a brainstorming writing down key words. Later they organise them in mind maps and fill in these maps with more vocabulary.