BACK TO THE GRIND AFTER THE EASTER BREAK!

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OMG! Time does fly! It has been ages since I last posted on my C1 blog. I have been as busy as a bee and had no time at all to devote to my facet as an amateur blogger. My apologies, everyone! Nothing can be done now but just... mend my ways! So, here comes a new update!馃挭

Going back to the grind in class after a holiday break (we have just enjoyed our Easter week!) has always proved to be challenging. Unfortunately enough, most students have got into the mood of getting away from their learning馃槈. That is why setting up the right class atmosphere on the very first session after the holiday is always on my top-priority list. No wonder some retrieval practice will do the trick! 

So, I entered my classroom with a very positive mindset, determined to grab my students' attention and kick-start the lesson with a retrieval quiz. I designed it on @genially_es (I simply love it for quizzes!) to recall some of the expressions regarding fast fashion and social responsibility we had been working on in our Student's Book just before the holiday:


Once the right mood was gauged, I moved on to this reading activity. If you are interested in having a sneak peek at the original source, I have just added the site link at the bottom of the document. This time students worked in pairs (I had previously divided them into As and Bs) to quickly scan just half of the text to find the headings that matched their paragraphs. So typical! No mysteries there! The fun part happened when they got together with another pair to find out that they had chosen the same heading for some of their paragraphs! Some lively debate took place and, in the end, everybody got their answers correctly.

Last, but not least, we used the ideas in the text above to accomplish an oral task that was set just like in the exam. As we are getting closer to exam dates, students are becoming more and more anxious, and doing some extra exam training is always welcome. You may also take this as an opportunity to check up on how oral mediation and production work here in Galicia!

The good thing about this session was that the students could grab some of the ideas and vocabulary from both the retrieval quiz and the reading comprehension task above and use them as a source of inspiration for the final oral mediation and production tasks. It came as no surprise that their anxiety got reduced and the class session resulted in huge success. So, devoting time to the previous reading comprehension task was key!

I hope you have enjoyed this idea! Just let me know how it goes if you try some of this in class!


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