“Mistakes Were Made.”
This project is for practicing PASSIVE VOICE. Students hold a press conference explaining what went wrong but avoiding blame.
Student Projects
Collaboration: small groups
Getting the Crew Back Together
Students create a fictional team, then assemble a crew, drafting each member according to their skillset, personality, and role.
Monster Rampage
This project is for practicing PRESENT PERFECT CONTINUOUS. Imagine a normally cute creature is now giant-sized and is accidentally terrorizing the city! Your students are reporters sharing breaking news on how the city is reacting.
Batteries Not Included
Students are prompted with a few disclaimers, then work backward to create a product for which all of those disclaimers would apply. Students get to be creative and silly as they learn to both understand and explain the meaning and need of various disclaimers and product features.
Onomatowhat-just-happened?
Students receive three onomatopoeia sounds as prompts, then work backward to come up with a scenario that would explain how those sounds came about.
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.
Celebrity Interview
This project is for practicing GERUNDS. Students design and participate in silly activities in the style of the Olympics.
Sillylympics
This project is for practicing GERUNDS. Students design and participate in silly activities in the style of the Olympics.
Fairy Tales Interrupted
This project is for practicing PROGRESSIVE/CONTINUOUS TENSES. Students will first conjure a backstory to a fairy tale character and lay out a scene, then investigate the scenes that other teams have put together to determine what was going on.
Another Time, Another Place
This project is for practicing REPORTED SPEECH. Teams design a scenario, a setting, and a quote. Then other teams are challenged with reporting it in other settings/scenarios. See how many they can do in under a minute.
Family Feud
This project is for practicing ‘WH’ QUESTIONS. Students create the content for the game by writing questions. Next, they conduct a survey, and finally they get to play the game!
Synonyms based on Emotion
In this project, we’ll look at synonyms for verbs that incorporate an emotion or attitude that the doer of the action (the subject) exhibits. Given a list of synonyms for an action, students must identify an emotion or attitude that is associated with each.
Surveys
Creating, administering, and reporting surveys can be a great way to practice a number of grammar points, such as question forms, expressions of preference, comparatives and superlatives, quantifiers, and reported speech.
Story Cards
Design elements of stories on cards. You can use them as prompts later, but for now, your class can put the ideas on paper.
November: the Writing Month
November is National Novel Writing Month, but your students don’t have to write a whole novel all by themselves. Instead, have students write just a chapter or two. Put them all together for a class-written novel!
Storyboarding
Students create an outline of a story they know well. But instead of just words accompanied by bullet points, they’ll have more of a visual component to it and show the flow of progression.
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.