Yesterday evening I had a lesson with three red students. They were all ready for the “shooting the breeze” review of the intermediate level. So I went through the questions with them by giving examples and asking them to make questions to each other using each grammar point we were reviewing. I got a kick out of the exercise of asking them to describe their best friend’s face. I did this with one of the students and he described his friend’s face while the other students and I each drew our interpretation of his friend’s face. What surprised me was that, although there were some small differences, for the most part the sketches each of us made looked pretty similar. The best part was our interpretation of his bald friend’s beard. I started out showing a heavy full face beard from ear to ear while the other two students showed sparsely populated beards only in the chin area. The student said that his actual beard was somewhere in the middle of what we drew. We all had a good laugh when we shared our sketches.
When we got to the part of describing our bad habits, we had a good laugh when my female student said that one of her worst habits was talking too much. She was a good sport about it and said that it was true and I told her that talking too much can be good if you want to get a lot of practice using English.
We finished up with a one point for “it depends on”. I got this started by asking my female student what her choice of a dress depended on and she responded that it depended on the color, the fit and the price. Her good example made it easy for the other students to come up with equally good sentences.
This lesson was a lot of fun and the students appreciated it as they could really enjoy using English. Great fun!
Al Bartle (Smith’s School of English – Okamoto)
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