Duration: 5 minutes
Type: Partners
Overview of This Easy, Go-To ELL Activity
It’s a little like Turn & Talk, but with a goofy little twist of adding Rock, Paper, Scissors. Students practice a target grammar structure or sentence stem pattern by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors and then choosing a sentence for the other student to say. You can provide pictures to describe, example answers, and/or sentence stems to help guide student responses.
What You Will Need for This Speaking Activity
- Target Sentence Pattern or Grammar Structure
- Pictures, Example Answers, and/or Sentence Stems to Help Guide Student Responses
Step-By-Step Guide to this Speaking Activity for ELLs
- After practicing the sentences of a grammar pattern (as in the Kid-Inspired speaking grammar pages), put students in partners.
- See this article for how to start with the Kid-Inspired Grammar Speaking pages.
- If you are using Kid-Inspired materials, then cover the answers on the speaking grammar page, fold them under, or cut them off entirely.
- Students play Paper, Scissors, Stone (or Rock, Paper, Scissors or Hunter, Gun, Bear or whatever you like).
- The student who wins chooses a picture for the other student to say a sentence for. Students can say the example sentence if they remember or make up their own using the same structure.
- If the student makes a mistake, that student has to do 5 jumping jacks before he or she is allowed to look at the answers to help him or her remember.
Benefits of This Activity
- This activity is fast and requires no preparation, so you can use it any time you want to get students practicing a bit on their own, like when you want to help out a student or two who are struggling.
- Adding in a get-out-of-your-seat and move activity gets the blood flowing and makes it more fun. You can have them do jumping jacks any time they lose for more exercise.
- Students become more fluent with the sentence structure, having said sentences using that structure so many times. Students need to be making 100s of sentences with a particular structure, not 1 or 2, to really get it in their systems so they use it without thinking about it.
Have you tried this activity? How did it go? Leave your comments below!
