What do they look like?
The students will give descriptions of people and clothes and will respond to other people’s descriptions.
Setting up the task
Hand out copies of the sentence patterns from the Unit 15 overview for their reference. Play Scene P. Use your copy of the Scene P transcript to guide your students’ understanding of the content.
Describe a person
Make small sets of cards, enough for one set per group, using the template on Worksheet 15.3 (What do they look like?). The students place the cards face up on a desk. Then they take turns to describe a person on one of the cards without saying which card it is or looking directly at the card. The first student to identify the card by pointing to it earns a point.
Signing descriptive sentences
For the next task, the students place all the cards face down.
One player turns a card face up. That player then signs four sentences about the person illustrated on the card while the others slowly count to ten.
If the player has not signed four sentences by the count of ten, the other students support the student’s learning until they have completed the task.
The focus of this task is on individual improvement through peer-assisted learning.
Play a describing game
Distribute two sets of the cards to each group of three students.
Deal four cards to each student. Place the rest in a pile.
The students place their cards face up on a desk, using a makeshift screen to hide their cards from each other. In this way, their hands are free for signing.
The object of the game is to get as many pairs as possible by asking each other whether they have a particular person. This means signing a description of that person.
When the students describe a person successfully, they get to take the card and get another turn. If the person they ask does not have the matching card, they pick up a card from the pile. The student with the most pairs at the end wins.
Tell a story
Now get the students to take turns to tell a story, following the guidelines in Activity 14.4 but adding a further card prompt: a description of a person. Tell them to look back at the feedback they received on their storytelling performances in Unit 14 and to strive to make the suggested improvements as they prepare for this task.
Get them to tell their audience about the aspects of their performance that they are trying to improve. Decide on the process you and they will use to enable them to review their own performance against their own criteria for improvement.
For example, you could:
- record the storytelling performances so that the students can review their own and others’ performances and compare these performances with earlier ones
- give them a sheet to use to assess the improvements specified for each person.
Discuss, feedback, feed forward, rewatch
Together, discuss each student’s performance and agree on the improvements each student has made. Play scene P again and find out how much more your students can understand.
