Writing prompts is a blog full of interesting ideas to write about.
Ideas that are accompanied by a picture to boost up your imagination and creativity.
We all know that all writers sometimes get stuck, well, students too; but this lack of inspiration will never be used as an excuse if ideas come together with a picture. Prompts can be easily be displayed on a whiteboard and brainstorming can be done before students set out to do the writing task ahead.
Step 1. Look at the mosaic below with the faces of some well-known celebrities and, bearing in mind what you know about them, write a description based on their personalities. Make sure you use personality adjectives. Do not mention the name of the celebrity you are describing as your classmates aim will be to find out who you are describing. Please, don’t be too flattering or too hard on people. Remember that “not all that glitters is gold”.
Important: the description should be written in the way of a comment to this post. How to do it? at the end of the post, click No Comments (or 9 Comments if hopefully I have already published nine comments), leave the comments in the right field, repeat the required anti-spam word and click Submit Comment.
Step 2. Let’s have some fun. How would you fancy converting text to music? This funny programme allows you to type any words and it sings them back to you. Try typing some personality adjectives and listen to them sung by different people. The site is called Text to sing.
Step 3. Exercises. Do the following online exercises .
Step 4: Writing. How do you see yourself and how others see you? This task, as you can imagine, requires mature students as it involves writing and reading about you. First, students find a classmate they know pretty well. Secondly, students write about their own personality and then, about their friend’s personality. Encourage students to explain and exemplify why they have chosen a certain adjective to describe them and also to describe a negative trait in their personalities as well as in their friend’s. Students pair themselves and compare what they have written.
Step 5. Singing Hand in my pocket by Alanis Morisette
This is a new section I am starting today in this blog. I’ve always liked to store ideas for DIY projects although , to be honest with you, very often it remained a project beacuse I either lacked the time to do it or I entirely forgot about it.
Being this a blog dedicated to the learning of the English language , I still find that this new section doesn’t deviate from its main aim as you’ll have to read in English with the added bonus of having some fun while doing something you might enjoy .
Today , we will do bracelets with Popsicle ,(which are “los palos de nuestros polos de hielo”). I hope you like this new section and ,as the idea is not mine ,I’ll just publish the photo and link you to the blog where you’ll find the post. There you go!
Source Suzy Artsy Crafty Sitcom .Click here to read more
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This is a lesson I did with my upper-intermediate students in the computer room and I thought it might be useful to some teachers. The main idea is to retell a text you have previously worked with in class. This is important as otherwise the task of retelling might be a bit difficult for weaker students. This is how I did it.
♣ First, for homework, I asked students to reread the text several times .
♣ Then, in the computer room, I asked students to form groups of 3 or 4 and divided the text according to the number of students in each group .
♣ Now, individually and using the website Word it Out,
which is a word cloud generator, I asked them to select the key words in their texts, type them in Word It Out and generate the word cloud. If two words need to be together, it is easy with this generator. Imagine “suffer from”, you only need to insert _ between the two words and they’ll be kept together in the cloud.
♣ Students in groups again, retell the story with the help of the generated word clouds.
I especially liked this exercise as students get a lot of fun out of it and they collaborate every step of the way. Here are the word clouds generated by a group. I hope you find it useful!
