Students are familiar with visiting shrines and getting fortunes around New Years. Instead of writing resolutions, you can have them write fortunes for their classmates!
Hand out your fortune sheets. Explain what goes in each section, such as 'Your Fortune'. The students can choose to write the overall quality of the fortune:
Excellent
Fairly Good
Good
So-So
Not Good
The blank space below that is for the fluffy sentence you usually see on fortunes that come from shrines, depending on the level the students can make one up or leave it blank (for example: 'This year will be a very good year!' or 'Bad luck comes your way').
Then go over the elements of the fortune (love, friendship, money, health, studies, sports, travel & success). Explain what they are, and what kind of fortune would be good vs bad for each category (you can use the PowerPoint). Depending on level/grade the students can then write specific fortunes for each category (there are some in the PowerPoint as examples), or if you have a lower grade/level, they can write 'good', 'so-so', etc for each category.
Once the students are done writing, get them to fold their fortunes up very small and collect them into a basket/bag/hat. Then go around the room and have the students choose a fortune! Watching their reactions is priceless.
Edit the PowerPoint as you see fit! Print the worksheet on A4 paper and cut it in half.
Updated to add the fortunes worksheet as a PNG and Word Doc (it's just the PNG in the document since the file was created in Illustrator but why not upload both).
Looks interesting. Can you upload a word version of the fortunes copy. The computers in my city can't read most pdfs.
This was great for practicing "will"! I love it when there are real-life examples/activities for grammar points. And it perfectly took up the shortened 40-minute classes for me, and my students loved it. Even some of the students who typically don't write anything decided to participate knowing that it was for one of their classmates.
This was really fun! Some students got really into it and wrote their own sentences, too. Excellent practice for "will."
Thanks for posting this! I it in my SHS English club (slightly modified for a higher level) and it went really great– I even set up some strings on the wall for them to tie their fortunes onto like actual omikuji, and now we've got a nice little clubroom decoration. :)