This is an activity that one of my JTEs made, so the included pictures are from her. They're tif files, but school computers should be able to open them. I thought it was fun and works really well for creative classes though, so I wanted to share it here. The activity is simple and easy to make if you need to find the rooms on your own.
How to Make the Worksheet
- Find 4 (the number is how many groups there are) different rooms and print out one copy of each room for each group. So each group should have 4 rooms. Finding rooms is pretty easy. Just look up "room drawing" or something like that in google images and choose your favorites.
- Put a number or a letter in one corner of each page so the groups know which room belongs to which group. For example, group 1's room is labelled with the number 1 in the top right corner of the paper.
- Make a separate worksheet for writing 4 sentences that use "There is" or "There are" about their room. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. It could even just be scratch paper.
How to Play
0) If necessary, review the prepositions and the grammar.
1) First, give each group their room and the worksheet for writing sentences. So give group 1 the room labelled with a 1, group 2 the room labelled with a 2, etc.
2) Each group must add 4 new things into their rooms. The group has to write the 4 "There is/are ~" sentences on their worksheet and draw that (those) item(s) into the room. For example, "There are three people on the table" is one sentence. This can be done in about 10 minutes.
3) After the 10 minutes, hand out the other rooms to each group (group 1 gets rooms 2, 3, and 4; group 2 gets rooms 1, 3, and 4; etc.) with one copy for each student.
4) Have the groups take turns saying their 4 sentences. In between each sentence, give time for the other groups to draw in the items to each room. After the group has shared all their sentences, take their picture and show it to the other groups. This way they can compare the actual room to the version they imagined.
Other Notes
- I recommend not handing out all the rooms at the start to make sure the groups don't get confused. It also keeps their desks from getting cluttered.
- Give the groups dictionaries so they can look up interesting items. However, walk around and read their sentences. If the English name for something is too difficult, you should have them use the Japanese name to avoid too much confusion.
- Walk around and help them with making the sentences. Some of my students made really interesting ones like "There is an AC under the AC" or "There is one grain of rice on the table." Another group decided that the carpet in their room was actually grass and turned their room into a barn by adding different animals. For anyone else from Hawaii, one of the groups wrote "There is a Humuhumunukunukuapua`a on the table" and they spelled it correctly!
- This activity works well for students that are creative and/or funny. If you think your students are just going to write boring things like "There is a pen on the desk" then you might want to do a different activity.
- The writing / drawing time depends on how many groups there are and how long it takes them to come up with the items. If you have a smaller class, you could try having them draw more than 4 things. For bigger classes, 3 might be enough. Also, since each group starts with a different room drawing, having more than 5 groups might be difficult for this activity.