Classroom Activity: Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me

For anyone who isn’t up to date, the TEFL Logue was “it” last week and tagged a few others. Like many an EFL teacher, I immediately started thinking “How would I use something like this in class?”

Here’s what I came up with (keep going til the end for the quiz!):

Students write three to five things that they think the others don’t know about them (if you have a more reserved group, they could also have the option of making them true or false) and share this somehow. It could be very informally as a mingling, or it could be more structured with the onion formation or two lines facing eachother and one moving. You could also choose a structure that they should use when writing the facts: present perfect simple/continuous, past simple, conditionals, etc.

After this exchange you can “test” their knowledge or memory somehow. Perhaps – you’d have to have been listening and taking notes during the first part – you could read out ten sentences and they have to say one by one if they are true or false and correct them if they are false. You could do this as a dictation and students write down individually and then check as a group.

You could collect the papers on which they’ve written their three facts and distribute them between groups – each group has to make (some number of) questions based on these facts which they will ask an individual on the other team (Andrea, if Zlatan was a car, which one would he be? Or “Denis, does Nada have two dogs or three?”).

Or, you could collect the papers and make an activity for the next day. Perhaps with questions of your own, perhaps with statements with the words in the wrong order, perhaps a grammar auction with some mistakes added (or left in!) to be corrected. Or you could make a Find Someone Who activity and students with better memories will be able to do it much more quickly.

My quiz would look something like this (you have to check here, here, here, and here for the answers):
Which three bloggers have no sense of direction?
Who can eat up to 3kg of bacon in one sitting ?
One blogger mentions an unusual plane ride – how old was s/he and why was it unusual?
One blogger has a picture of an animal in his/her profile – where is this creature currently residing?