level: Junior High
target_English: Past tense or future tense
This activity works very well with big and small groups in JHS and all grades. Students can either work individually, in pairs or in small groups of 3, 4, 5 or 6 students.
1. Give each student, pair or group some scissors, glue (prit-stick glue works well), large sheets of B4 card and a selection of travel brochures of Japan and other countries.
2. Students plan a trip (or give a report) around the world by cutting out photographs of places, animals, food, etc.
3. They stick these photographs on their card.
4. Next to each country the students write a description of what they will do or what they did in each country.
For example:
On December 22nd we went to Australia.
We stayed in a very nice hotel.
We went to many interesting places and saw many cute koalas and kangaroos.
Or future tense can be used for planning a trip:
For spring vacation we will go to China and visit many places.
We want to see the Great Wall of China, eat lots of delicious Chinese food and see some pandas.
If writing longer sentences is too difficult for some 1st graders, they can just write the country name and day/date. For large classes it usually takes two 50 minute lessons to finish this activity. After students have finished their posters, get them to give a very short speech about their trip. I've done this activity with many 2nd and 3rd grade classes and every time I do it the students love it!
UPDATE: I did this activity once again as part of a team-teaching activity with all my 8th Grade classes this past week . We used the structure "going to".
The Japanese teacher wanted to do other activities in the class as well, so we shortened the time of this activity to about 25 minutes. As we had large classes of about 40 students, we made 6 groups.
As we only had 25 minutes the students had to be very organised, work as a team and work very fast, but this was great practise for them! All students participated and many groups produced some excellent posters. One of the best posters today was one about "Tahiti". The photographs were laid out very well and the students worked together as a team to design the poster and write interesting sentences. On this particular poster they wrote:
A: What are you going to do this summer?
B: I'm going to visit Tahiti.
B: I'm going to go swimming and visit a hot spring.
by Sara Wolsey
