Getting the Crew Back Together
Students create a fictional team, then assemble a crew, drafting each member according to their skillset, personality, and role.
Student Projects
Project Type: Describing
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.
Let Me Introduce Myself
Students formulate an introduction for a character that makes quite the first impression, whether that character comes from fiction, pop culture, history, or the students’ own imaginations.
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
Unlikely Hero
Students create a character with two very different jobs, one in a mild-mannered profession, and another as an action hero. How do they use their skills, tools, and knowledge of the former to help them as the latter?
Different Perspectives
Students will write a description of the same place multiple times. Each time, they’ll do so from a new perspective, one that requires them to think about and focus on different things, and even the tone of the description should be a little different each time.
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.
People-First Language
This project is for practicing RELATIVE CLAUSES. Students learn about disabilities/disorders and about the people who have them. As we discuss them it’s often appropriate to have the modifier after the person, which can be done with Relative Clauses.
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.
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.
Offbeat Colors
Students should know the standard colors pretty well, but do they know colors like chartreuse, fuchsia, mauve, or periwinkle? This project is an opportunity to describe what’s new to them using elements that are more familiar.
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.
Treasure Hunts
Students will write notes to help their classmates find ‘treasures’ hidden around the school. Different types of notes will require students to call upon different grammar or vocabulary skills.
What’s the Difference?
Practice delivering explanations by writing down the differences between things that are very similar (and sometimes confused with one another).
Character Journey
Students can create characters that they’ll use throughout the year. Each month, the character progresses a little closer to their goal, but in the meantime, they can be used to answer questions and for other activities. The possibilities are wide open.
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.
Show, Don’t Tell
A common adage among writers is “show, don’t tell”. Writing in this way prompts students to think of different ways to express the same thing. Students will have to use expressions and imagery – like native speakers do in most situations – instead of being straightforward.
New Inventions
Encourage your students to think of some inventions, giving them a project to pour their creativity into. Different tasks throughout the project focus on different aspects of English, so this project can be used as a practical example for introducing new topics, or it might be a good review.