Ideas for outdoor EFL activities

[JMS]

Our school has a little picnic day next week, and the brass want the  teachers to come up with a few ideas for activities that would last for about 30 minutes and would be suitable for outdoors. I have a few ideas but I thought I would pick your brains as well. Do you have any good suggestions for short, outdoor, English teaching activities?

-- JMS

[winjeel]

I can only think of the old favourites, even though they don't have much to do with ELT:

Hide and Seek:
Tell them to go hide, whilst you seek your whiskey.

Brandy:
Any child who moves from their hiding spot gets branded with an empty whiskey bottle, or a brandy bottle.

Chasies:
If they manage to dodge the empty whiskey bottle, then you have to run after them with it trying to knock them out

British Bulldogs:
Self explanatory (esp when taken literaly)

Helicopter:
An old favourite amongst girls, and boys do play it occasionally. The person in the middle sings a skipping rope round above their head singing, 'helicopter, helicopter turn a-round; helicopter, helicopter touch-the-ground'. When the word 'ground' is sung, the skipping rope it brought down to near ground level and the other children then have to move into the helicopter's arc and jump as the rope comes round. This is entertaining for them, and so it must be worth atleast a whiskey bottle and a half of time, plus they're singing in English!    :lol:

[talon2]

Rock paper scissor? Winner gets a drink of the teachers beer?

[winjeel]

Are they children or adults? What fluency and vocab' level are we talking about?

I can think of an activity called a 'Messenger Game' (works with all levels)

It's pair work. One person has the question paper, and the other is the runner (getting answers)

The Questioner reads a question (making it listening practice for the runner, note, don't let them look), then the runner goes for the answer(s). The runner returns and TELLS the answer to the questioner, this is listening practice for the questioner (not writing practice for the runner). You need to be sure they don't do this silently by reading and writing.

A list of ten to twenty questions is good, and the answers can be written on seperate slips of paper stuck on walls (or trees) about the place. This gives the runner more excercise, but don't put them so far away they won't want to try. Even though they are outside, it might be tempting to have a big seperation between the questioners and the answer slips... don't.

Also, halfway through, the runner needs a break, so have them change roles.

This is usually an indoor game for me, but this is the most adaptable game I know for ELT.

Hope it works out if you try it.  

[winjeel]

PS: regarding the Messenger Game....

The answers could be in the form of a big collage (I don't remember how to spell it... a bunch of pictures pasted together, cut-outs from newspapers and magazines)

Or written keywords, phrases, or whole sentences. Remember, the average memory can hold a maximum of seven items... which gives us space to be annoyingly cruel to students, especially if we start disturbing the runner going between answers and questioner. Disturbing, in the way of asking totally unrelated questions like, phone numbers, size of shoe (usually confused as suicide), and where they bought their t-shirts from

[winjeel]

Getting more task-based and communicative oriented

Race Around the World, and Shopping Spree

RATW, I'll e-mail you

Shopping Spree:
Well, they have cut outs of anything like clothes, food... whatever the theme is. Half the group are shopkeepers, and the other half are shoppers. Give the shopkeepers the cutouts, and the shoppers photocopied play money (same amount each person: at least 30 items for shopkeepers, and 15 'big' notes for shoppers, all the same denomination, or just two denominations)

Take the shopkeepers aside and say that they must make the most money, and lie and say that the shoppers are very rich, and they can "price fix". Seperately, take the shoppers aside and tell them that they must buy the most items, but also the winner is the one with the most money left over.

Give them five to seven minutes. Count things, declare winners, and yadda yadda

Change roles. Ask the new shopkeepers if the old shopkeepers were nice to them, then tell them that they could price fix, and give them a minute or so to plan this. Tell the new shoppers that they weren't kind to the old shoppers, so expect bad treatment, but they could do a special deal with some shopkeepers to help a shopkeeper make more money than others.

For added enthusiasm, you could offer a 'punishment' for the losers... this adds energy, especially when it's the second time round. Of course count things and declare winners, and the like.

When packing up, have one person designated as the 'clothes' collector, and one person the $10 note collector, and someone else the $20 note collector.

One last thing, give them some kind of dialogue to use, one that's appropriate for their level and the activity. Also, try out the dialogue, just to be sure you've got the right words.

I think that's everything.

[JMS]

Muchas gracias, por favor!

This pickernick* thing is on Friday. I am supposed to have a list of things to do by tomorrow. (if you are reading this three weeks from now, today is Wednesday!)

-- JMS

* Picnic

[winjeel]

Oh... another one...

Scavenger Hunt:
Make a list of questions, perhaps 10 or 12, and have them run (or quickly walk) to find the answers. These questions could be like:

> How many teachers have a backpack today?

> Near the entrance there are two cars. What is the registration plate number of the second from the gate?

(You will have tell them to ask you for help, and explain these)

For vairation, you could only give out two questions at a time on slips, rather than the whole sheet. Another variation (though in a smaller area) is to do it three legged... pairs tie one leg to each other.

Hope it helps some, let me know  

[JMS]

The picnic was a resounding success! The weather was good, a little windy, but not too bad. The location was superb, and everyone was in a good mood. A kookaburra even snatched a piece of barbecued kangaroo from my fingertips!

Our other two teachers had already beein doing activities for an hour and a half, so by the time it got to me they were getting a bit hungry and restless. I started with a simple activity to get their blood pumping (in an EFL way, not an Xtreem Sports way). There were about 25 altogether, including teachers, assistants and hangers-on). I called out numbers, and the students had to form groups of these numbers. Slowly, those 25 students were whittled away, as people who were not in a group were eliminated.

Then I did an exercise where the students divided into three groups (about six per group). With the help of the assistants, I then simultaneouly handed each group a sentence whch had been cut up into words. They had to put the sentences into the right order before the other teams. I did seven of these, though at the start I did not think I would use them all. In the sentences I reviewed a lot of the grammar I have taught lately.

By this time, the smell of bulgogi was wafting over from the barbecue area, and the students were getting restless, so they had a short break. I prepared some hangman. Instead of drawing a hanged man on the butcher's paper, students (in teams again) drew some cards out of a bag. These cards are modelled on 'Wheel of Fortune'. So if a team draws '200', then calls 'e', and there are two 'e's', they get 400 points. They can also draw a 'bankrupt', which will ose all their points, or 'lose a turn', or 'free turn'. Instead of using words for the hangman puzzles, I used well-known phrases.

We only had time for two puzzles. Then the food was ready so we went and ate.

The teacher who started opened with a nice riddle as an icebreaker, which I have posted here: http://winjeel.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=371#371

I got mildly sunburnt... I am a fool for that. I should have heeded the advice of that guy who rapped over the cover of the Prince song a few years ago: "Wear. Sunscreen."

-- JMS

[winjeel]

Wheel of Fortune sounds like a neat little idea. Did it take much preparation (sorry... tired teacher alert... the less prep the better    . Actually, I like to call my style, Dogma, where you go in with no props, and use nothing but scrap paper and the students themselves; better for the environment)

[JMS]

One of the other teachers had the idea... I was a little foggy following him at first, so he did it for me. He made up a 5x6 grid on the word processsor, and put scores into each box, as well as a few bankrupts and lose a turns and free turns. Made three copies. That took one or two minutes. Then we handed it to the secretary/t.a., who cut them up and put them into a paper bag. I suppose that would have taken 5-10 minutes. You can reuse them ad infinitum!

The main drawback with the game was the lack of a board! When I suggested hangman to the head teacher, she said we would bring paper with us, and I thought she meant one of those big A1-size pads you can get, with a backboard and stand. But there was just the A1 paper. Luckily I had two people hold the paper up in front of a tree, and the game was only 15 minutes or so.

-- JMS

[winjeel]

Directions

This one is best done in some kind of defined area, like a primary (elementary) school, or in one multistory building.

1. Do work on giving directions, such as go straight, turn left, go three blocks, etc... Perhaps some map directions information gap activities. So this is mostly in the classroom practicing this stuff.

2. Give them three photocopies of something like a turtle, rabbit, whatever. They write their own name on the front, and a short secret letter on the back, like, "Dear JaMS, love your riddles on the forum. From Andrew". You could suggest things that can be a little more riske like, "meet me in WLS Hotel, room 503 tonight". But three different messages for three different people who are in the class (Hello Kitty is not a student).

3. Give them three pieces of small scrap paper and peices of sticky tape. They hide their turtles (with secret message) and then write the instructions on how to find them. Give a template on the board on how to do this, and be sure that they don't stick out the instructions and give the turtles to the people (this is the wrong way round). Give them ten minutes, monitor and make sure they don't take too long, and give help with vocab as they need it.

4. Once ten minutes is up, they all meet in the classroom and exchange instructions (not turtles), and so they go out and find the turtles. This can take anywhere between two minutes to ten for some folks.

5. Afterwards, get them to talk about where the turtles were and the problems they had, as usually people talk about, in a postmortem kind of way, what they've just done.  

[MagicOPromotion]

Hi, All,
  I happend to browse  this site for teaching Chinese methods.  Let me know if you know any good website on-line with full text that I can print out and get some ideas from.  Thanks so very much
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