LEVEL____ Pre-intermediate AGE_____________9 to 14
TIME____________ 40 minutes
LANGUAGE______ Skills: listening fluency and speaking fluency through simple retelling; summarizing and sequencing; past tense; new vocabulary
MATERIALS______ A big piece of paper for the map; a small piece of paper (about A5) for each child; scissors to cut out their pictures; glue or pins to stick the pictures on to the big piece of paper; and a big, blue felt-tip pen for the child who draws the river.
PREPARATION 1 Practise telling the story.
2 Make word cards with the following words written on them:
a school a boy a big stick a river the moon two little men a large hole (tunnel)
a tunnel through a hill fields o f com
a little man on a little horse trees a palace a king a prince a ball a house
The words must be large enough to read from a distance.
3 Put up the big piece of paper on the wall.
IN CLASS________ 1 Tell the children that you will tell them a story but that you need them to draw some pictures for it before you begin. Tell them that they are going to make a map of the story together.
2 Give each child a word card and a piece of paper to draw on.
Make sure that everyone knows what each word means. They should draw what is on their card. Begin with the words which will take longer to draw, for example, the school. If you have more than sixteen children, two children might work on the same picture, and some children can draw extra trees so that each child has something to draw.
Tell them their picture must only show the object you have given them without any background. It must be clearly drawn and be about as big as their hand so that other children can see it when it is put on the map. The child doing the river should draw it directly on the big piece of paper near the bottom, with the big, blue felt-tip pen.
If they find the drawing very difficult, you can give them one of my pictures to copy.
S T O R I E S A N D L E S S O N P L A N S
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Have the scissors ready for the children to cut out the shape of their picture.
During this step in the activity repeat the words very often and ask the class to repeat them with you.
3 Display the pictures on the wall or on tables (not on the map yet). Ask the children to look at the pictures and to predict whatl they can about the story. They can try to predict the sequence in | which the pictures will be referred to. You might ask them to stand in the sequence they predict, in a big circle, holding their pictures. They will need the connecting word then.
4 Collect the word cards and then give them out to different children.
5 Tell the story. As the children hear the word on their word card they should hold it up and then go to the right picture, take]
it down, and give it to you.
Stick the picture on the map. Keep the house and school on one side, the hole and tunnel in the middle, and the fields and palace]
on the other side. Don’t stick down the boy and the two little men. Everything else should be stuck down permanently.
You can hold the pictures of the boy and the two little men and move them.
Keep the word cards on your table.
6 Ask for volunteers to retell the story, guided by the map and pictures. Here is an example of a retelling of the story which pre-intermediate students might manage to approximate:
There was a boy. His name was Elidor. He was not very good at school. His teachers hit him with a stick. One day he ran away. He ran to the river and he hid by the bank of
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the river. He stayed there for two days and nights. Then two little men came. He followed them. They went into a tunnel and then they came out in a new land. They went to a palace and Elidor met the king. Elidor played with the prince. They played with a golden ball. One day Elidor went home to see his mother. His mother said she wanted some gold. Elidor went to the palace again and he took the golden ball. The two little men ran after Elidor. Elidor got home but he dropped the golden ball. The two little men took the ball. Elidor ran after them but he couldn’t find the tunnel. He looked for the tunnel for a long time. When he was old he was very sad because he took [had taken] the golden ball.
FOLLOW-UP 1 Follow this lesson with the second lesson plan.
FOLLOW-UP 2 The children each draw a map and pictures and write the story in their books.
COMMENTS _____ 1 This technique can be used with any story in which there is a journey which the children can represent with a map and in which there are objects and people which can be drawn by the children and placed on the map.
See: 3.7, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, 3.4, ‘The little Indian boy’, 3.12, ‘Strange animal’, 6.6, ‘The boy who cried wolf’, 3.14,
‘Tom Thumb’.
2 The children encounter a high proportion of language which might be beyond them, but they should manage to get enough of the story to enjoy it. This provides excellent training in listening fluency, strengthening their confidence, and developing their skill
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in looking for meaning from any clue (linguistic or non- linguistic).
LEVEL AGE TIME
LANGUAGE PREPARATION IN CLASS