Totally True 3, Unit 16 “Animal Artists”

These are an introductory and an extension activity for TT 3 unit 16.  You should copy the PDFs to your Z drive or to a USB flash memory. 

Introductory activity: 

1. Tell the students to keep their books closed.  Put the painting slide on the “Unit 16 animal artist” PDF on the screen.  In groups, ask students to look at the painting and speculate on the character of the artist.  They can use their dictionaries and should write three adjectives.

2.  Elicit some of their answers, then show the picture of Congo, the chimpanzee artist on the next page.

3.  Teach the lesson in the way you prefer.

4.  Put the “Three artists quiz” on the screen.  Read the descriptions of the three different artists.  They are:

¨     Jackson Pollack, an American artist whose paintings have sold for up to US $140,000,000.

¨     Ian Ford, an American pre-school child.

¨     Kamala, an elephant who lives in Calgary Zoo.  Kamala’s paintings have sold for up to $2000. 

5.  Tell the students that each artist created two of the paintings.  Students talk to partners* and guess who created each painting. 

6.  After the students write their guesses, show them the second slide, on the third page of the PDF, which shows the answers 

Unit-16-Animal Artist

Unit 16 Painter-Quiz

Totally True 1, Unit 16: “Man Leaves Wife in the Atlantic” 

Here are two exercises that worked well with this unit.  The first is a worksheet to 

pre-teach some of the vocabulary and the second is a pantomime activity to 

reinforce the vocabulary and the details of the story. 

1.  Before starting the unit, give each student a copy of the worksheet.  They can 

do it individually, or in pairs.  They may need dictionaries to check the spelling of 

the words.  Check the answers together. 

2.  Teach the unit in the way you prefer. 

3.  After the story has been read and understood, make groups of four and give 

each a set of cut-up pantomime cards.  They should be shuffled and put face 

down in a stack on the table.  They should have their textbooks open to the unit 

16 story (p. 70) at this point.  The teacher demonstrates by picking up a card and 

pantomiming the sentence.  I usually do “They were in a race with 35 other 

rowboats.”  The students look at the story and guess which sentence I’m 

pantomiming. 

4.  In their groups, the students take turns picking up a paper and pantomiming 

the action.  Others look at their story and say the sentence they think is being 

pantomimed.  The correct guesser receives the card.  At the end, the one with 

the most cards, the “best guesser”, is the winner. 

5.  Do a second round, but this time have the students all close their books. 

Have fun!

TT1-u16-instructions

TT1-u16-pantomime-cards

TT1-l16-vocab-pre-teach

The system works by spaced repetition and some of the content is rich enough to maintain interest over time. There is also a social aspect that allows users to follow and encourage each other.

I recently created a list of 40 key vocabulary words from units 9-12 of Let’s Talk 1 for my Level 2 Eigo IIA class, but the system is open and anyone can use the list. Please take a look and consider giving it a try with a class if you have time in the computer room. Each target word has one or more example sentences with high quality audio for some basic, brief listening input and dictation practice.

Eigo IIA: U-80: Step 1: Units 9-12

Site navigation is in Japanese or English and login is quite simple. If students already have a Mixi, Yahoo, or Google account, they can simply login in with that username and password.

If you fancy trying them out, I’d be interested to hear what you think. They may give extra ideas/activities for the 2nd writing task in the Level3 Writing Course.

There are no ‘how to notes’ with the slideshows, but I think they are quite easy to follow - I allowed a lot of discussion and pair-work for students to talk about the points raised as the slideshows played.

Damon

Slideshow 1 - 4 paragraph: basic opinion essay (Money for space exploration: good or bad?) zip file
Slideshow 2 - 4/5 paragraph: more detailed opinion essay (Do we need to learn a language?) zip file

The instructor notes are in PDF format but the slideshows are in editable .ppt and .key formats as well as PDF. The Keynotes presentations are more attractive, but Mac only.

Identical files are also on Shared Files and hard copies in the appropriate binder on the B course shelf.

Task 3 Grammar support hypotheticals and conditionals

Level 3: Task 1 Materials zip (pdfs)

Level 3: Task 1 Materials zip (docs)

Presentation handouts

PowerPoint slides

Activity Time
35 ~ 50 minutes depending on how much reinforcement / explicit teaching / grammatical accuracy
you fancy.

Activity Goals
Encourage understanding of descriptions and comparisons.
Allow practice with comparatives and superlatives.
Motivate basic inferencing skills.
Passive review of the past tense.
Active review of adjectives.

comparatives.superlatives.practice

passages-unit8-skimmimg-for-students.doc

passages-unit8-skimming-for-teachers