I don’t know about you but I had never heard of a Russian Tea party before.  But after last week’s workshop Elena put on the most wonderful evening full of Russian tea, dancing, fairy stories and some great games.  And many of the ideas I think might work great in your class – they were certainly a lot of fun for us!

Tea to Start…

First of all we had some wonderful tea served in Samovars,  pots of tea surrounded by hot coals.  What a fantastic invention!

Then a very cool way to teach Fairy Tales…

Elena brought out some Russian fairy story books.   She has a very good way of teaching them:

1) She gives the foreign language version of the book to the students (i.e. me today, at this point of the evening I couldn’t read Russian yet!)

2) The student has to guess what the story is just using the pictures and gets them to read what they think might be happening.   Very often there are subtle differences between the languages, here we had Goldilocks and the 3 bears, but not the one I was used to! We also did the Russian version of the Gingerbread Man – called Kolobok!

3) Then Elena pulls out some toys of the characters and gets the students (us!) to act out the story!  It was actually a lot of fun, even for us all adults – I’d definitely recommend giving it a try!

Where are you? Game

Then after lots of Russian dancing and some fantastic traditional games, we had this game which can be maybe be used in your classes?

1. Everyone gets in a circle and holds hands.

2. One person is in the middle, blindfolded.  That was me again.

3.  They have to catch one other person who is free to run around the inside of the circle.

Sounds easy?  Not blindfold it’s not! 🙂

But you have one extra tool, you are allowed to shout out “Where are you?” and the person who is running has to answer “I’m here!”  It gives you a clue, but of course by the time you spin round to where they are they’ve probably gone!  You win if you catch them!

Lots of fun – and a great way to practice the question/answer!

Learning to read with Bingo Scrabble.

I also had a request for them to teach me the Russian Alphabet – or rather Russian phonics, all the textbooks were teaching the names the letters  rather than the sounds they make, which is pretty useless if you’re trying to learn to read!

So we played bingo.  But this time when you got a number you didn’t cross it off, you got a scrabble tile.  And my job was to read it!  Which I couldn’t at first of course, but as we went through the game everyone taught me each sound, and as the duplicates came up I got to try and remember which was which!   And there you go, how to learn to read Russian in less than a half an hour!  (Mind you my brain was aching a bit after the first 20 minutes!)

We also did some spelling practice later.  Any idea what this says?

There was also lots more Russian dancing,  I’m very glad we didn’t have videos of this one!

And finally a quick picture of how I was greeted at the airport, complete with a Russian flag dress and a bear!

Thank you to everyone for such a wonderful evening,  I do a lot of “cultural” things as I travel around the world and today was by far the best! 🙂

Could you use any of these ideas in your classes?