Chapter 1 6 Toolkit 3: tools, techniques, activities
Here is a wide—ranging collection of ideas. Dip in here and try some out in class.
(But also keep tinkering with them. Don’t let any of them set like concrete.)
Flashcards
Flashcards is ELT jargon for pictures (or diagrams, words, etc.) that you can show
to students, typically something you can hold up when standing in front of the
whole class. They are also useful for handing out as part of various activities.
Schools sometimes have their own library of flashcards, but many teachers build
up their own stock. They are a very useful teaching aid, especially in your earlier
years of teaching.
To start collecting, you need to approach the world with a ‘flashcard’ frame of
mind! Whenever you look at a magazine, advertising leaflet, etc., keep your eyes
open for suitable pictures. When the publication is ready to head for the bin, cut
out the pictures you need. Generally, choose larger pictures that will be clearly
visible even from the back of the classroom. You will find some subjects are very
easy to find (cars, food products, perfumes, etc.) whereas others (people doing
specific everyday tasks, faces expressing different moods, etc.) are harder. After
a while, you’ll need to start looking for specific things that fill in gaps in your set.
When you have a number of pictures, you’ll have to find some way to organise
them, maybe in folders sorted by topic. It may also be worth taking the extra time
to make cards longer-lasting, by sticking them down on cardboard, keeping them
in plastic pockets or even by laminating them.
What can you do with them? Here are a few typical uses:
- to quickly show the meaning of a lexical item, e.g. to iron;
- to illustrate presentations of language, for example by giving a visual image to
an imaginary character e. g. ‘This is Marilyn. Every day she gets up at six
o’clock ...’ etc.;
- to tell a story, providing occasional images to give students something tangible
to look at and help their understanding, e. g. ‘. .. and then a large green lorry
turned around the corner and drove towards them’;
- as prompts to remind them of a specific grammar point or typical error,
e.g. a flashcard with the word past on it to quickly remind students to make
verbs in the past form;
- as seeds for student-based storytelling activities, e. g. handing out a small
selection of pictures to groups of students and asking them to invent a story
that incorporates all those images; i
- as prompts for guessing games, definition games, description games, etc. For
example, one person in a team has a picture of a person, which they describe.
Then the other students are shown a pile of seven pictures (including the
original one) and have to work out which picture was described.