Description:
A versatile sentence building activity that gets the students up and moving. By the end you should hopefully get amusing sentences like "I am sure that Doraemon ate Nobita in 2002."
How to play:
You'll want to construct a sentence one step at a time on the board, demonstrating what will go in each section just before the students then write it for themselves. One time my JTE had the target grammar sentence written on the board already which was good for eliciting what kind of word should come next (subject, verb, adjective etc.).
- Print off and cut up the Word Fold template. Give every student one strip (containing the boxes 1-5).
- On the board write "I am sure that" and elicit the other words that could be used in the place of 'sure' (sad, glad etc).
- Get the students to write "I am XX that" in Box 1. (They can choose which word they want to use).
- Demonstrate folding the paper over so that Box 1 is covered. (3 folds in half of Box 1 usually works). Have the students fold up their paper.
- Tell the students to stand up, and shuffle their papers. They want to swap papers with as many people as possible. 20 seconds or so is good. (Actively swapping your own as fast as you can with any and every student helps them realise it doesn't just have to be with their neighbours.)
- Get them to go back to their seats. Now you repeat, demonstrate what they should write in the next box, let them write their own version, roll the paper over so the box is covered, and go shuffle! (Allow a little extra time for a good old shuffle on the final round.) (Notes on what exactly goes in each section are covered in the "Sure that word fold explanation" file.)
- At the end unravel the papers and enjoy the hilarious sentences! At the bottom there is a "意味" section for the students to correct any sentences that currently don't make grammatical sense and to translate the sentence into Japanese to a) see if they understand the grammar, and b) so they can get a kick out of telling their friends what was written.
Files: