Free Practice

Today's class was my opportunity to correct the mistakes I made the last time. I went early to the classroom and I arranged the desks in four groups because the warm up I had prepared was for working in groups. I started the class with the warm up. The students work in groups of seven ( the class is too large, that is 28 students); they had to re-arrange some strips in order to form coherent sentences using the simple past tense; they had 2 minutes to do so, and after those two minutes they had to change places with the next group in order to work on their strips. At the end, the group with more correct sentences was the winner. My tutor liked this warm up, but the only thing was that it took more than 10 minutes. I consider that there shouldn't be such a strict rule for warm ups; I consider that if students are learning and enjoying a warm up, the activity may continue without falling into the comission of a "sin". Well, maybe I'm mistaken, but that's what I think. After the warm up I continued with the free practice; students worked in the same groups, they had to write a short composition about Charly (an imaginary guy) describing the activities he did last week. They started to write, but the interesting thing of this activity was that they had to pass to the front to read the compostion and also to mimic the actions they wrote. It was funny because they wrote some funny, embarrasing, and strange things that happened to Charly, so they had to mimic everything. To finish my class, I made them work in pairs. They wrote 10 statements about what they did last week (5 were true and 5 were false) and their classmate had to guess which ones were true and wich ones were false. They liked the activity and they use the target structure to perform it. This was my today's experience. I enjoyed it.