The other day I did a creative writing activity with my teen class (ages 12-13). The activity was based on the teacher resources in English in Mind, and it worked well. Students had to describe the colours, sounds and smells in their house, and write about things like their favourite place to be in the house, what they might change about their living room, etc. It was quite a free task, but I set a few challenges to include certain language structures we’d covered (e.g. similes).

Anyway, I gave each student a piece of paper to write their ideas on, and they added a bit of colour afterwards. I’d shaped each paper so that when they came together they would make the outline of a house. It made quite a nice display and they enjoyed trying to fit the pieces together. Here’s how it looked:

You could do this for a lot of different activities, it just adds a bit of creativity to your classroom displays. Make sure your students write on the correct side of each paper though – I marked the correct side with a little dot.

If you try this type of thing out please take a picture, I’d love to see some other ideas as my displays often look a little boring!

Categories: Lesson Ideas, other

Tags: British Council, British Council Bangkok, classroom displays, efl, elt, lesson ideas, lesson planning, short activities, tefl