Archived from Englipedia.
Originally submitted by Natasha Anders on Jul 14, 2009.
MATERIALS NEEDED:
- Inventions worksheet
- Colour markers, sticky tape & glue
- Colour A3 sheets of paper
DETAILED EXPLANATION:
- Students work in groups to come up with interesting new ideas (inventions).
- Encourage them to be bold and imaginative.
- Once they come up with a basic product, they have to think about what it can do, how much it will cost, how it will look and what it will be called.
- They then have to think about advertising it to their classmates.
- The advertisement has to be "made for tv".
- Their ultimate goal is to present their advertisement to the rest of the class (with the help of visual aids).
- Each student has to speak in their final presentation, so when they are working on their scripts they have to ensure that each student has a role to play.
VARIATIONS:
- This activity works well at both my high level and low level schools but of course low level students will need more time to work on the project and a lot of help with translations.
TEACHING SUGGESTIONS:
- It's always good to give the students an idea of what you expect from them. Most of them would not have done anything like this before, so it's up to you (and your JTE) to give them a demonstration.
- This means that you have to come up with an imaginative product of your own, convince your JTE to have a laugh with you and do some over-acting in front of the students.
- If you're willing to put yourself out there, they may be encouraged to do the same (your demonstration , for the sake of your JTE, should be shorter than you want your students' to be).
- Please see Page 2 of the handout. This is a demonstration I did with my JTE. It's corny but that's the idea.
- Allow them to do their creative thinking in Japanese, it's not easy to brainstorm in another language.
- Tell them that the first class is for discussing their ideas in Japanaes but that eventually they have to translate everything into English.
TIPS/CAUTIONS:
- Give very careful thought to your groups.
- Putting quiet students in a group with quiet students results in a shy, unproductive group.
- Genki students with genki students results in a disorganised, noisy group that spends more time chatting about everything under the sun rather than working on their actual project.
- I find these methods effective in all of my Elective (and regular) classes.
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