Life Swap
People/Characters are placed in positions they aren’t used to and have trouble adjusting. Students use ‘too’ and ‘not enough’ for this project.
Student Projects
Collaboration: pairs
Guided Recommendations
This project is for practicing CONDITIONALS. Students create a flowchart to establish a branching path for possible recommendations for their chosen topic. They’ll need to use Conditionals when they explain their chart.
Critical Hits & Epic Fails
In role-playing games, players often simulate chance – by rolling a dice in many cases – to determine the effect of an action, or an
Missing Verse
Students analyze song lyrics to understand the tone, message, themes, and style, then write a missing third or fourth verse.
Scene and Herd
‘Herd’ and ‘flock’ are words for groups of animals, but some animals have a group term specific to their species. These venery terms typically have addition (more common) meanings, so for this project students will combine the two definitions into one scene.
Fictionary
Students write their own mini-dictionary (or an excerpt of one) based on a fictional property they enjoy, providing definitions to made-up words.
Clouds and Constellations
Different people can look up at the clouds or at the stars and see different things from the person standing next to them. In this project, students will have to defend what shapes they see by identifying its features.
Pun-chlines
Here’s a great way to practice idioms and other sayings by changing a detail or two to fit a new context. Students get to deliver jokes by substituting one of the words from that expression with another word similar in either sound or meaning.
Natural Disasters
This project is for practicing ACTIVE & PASSIVE ADJECTIVES. Students learn about and compare different natural disasters, including what causes them and the effect they have on the world. This project is mostly done as a giant class discussion.
Celebrity Interview
This project is for practicing GERUNDS. Students design and participate in silly activities in the style of the Olympics.
You Know Me So Well
This project is for practicing QUESTION TAGS. Students play The Newlywed Game – except as friends – and instead of stating what they believe to be true, they’ll put it in the form of a question.
Sillylympics
This project is for practicing GERUNDS. Students design and participate in silly activities in the style of the Olympics.
Create a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story
This project is for practicing CONDITIONALS. Create a number of scenarios, each of which leads to two others. When you’ve finished, readers can choose which path they want to take, and by the end their story experience will be different from others.
Memes
A popular way of expression on the internet is through memes. Depending on their age and access to the internet, your students probably see memes quite frequently. Why not take the opportunity to use them to practice English?
What’s the Difference?
Practice delivering explanations by writing down the differences between things that are very similar (and sometimes confused with one another).
Advice Videos
Let your students consider: What is something you wish you knew a couple years ago? What’s something you’d like to tell your younger self? While reviewing a few grammar points, students can prepare a short video in which they give advice to younger students.
From a Picture, a Thousand Words
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Indeed, there is so much one can say about any given image. So let’s see just how much we can say about one picture: students need to describe, analyze, and speculate on everything they see in the image.
Make Your Own Zodiac
Zodiacs incorporate a lot of different elements and group the specifics together in interesting ways. Getting your students to design their own zodiac allows you to review multiple topics. It also requires reasoning and encourages creativity.