‘Pass it round’ (Part 1)

Hi everyone!
Recently I have been suggested trying out several activities for the upcoming webinar on Vocabulary Activities. Honestly, I was amazed by the book ‘Vocabulary Activities’ by Penny Ur aiming to encourage teachers to use new ideas for their lessons to make them more engaging, yet beneficial and effective. I was really inspired when I started trying out the activities and I wanted

The first one I’ve given a try, was ‘Pass it round’. It was a follow-up task with suffixes for parts of speech. Students had been given a worksheet to come up with nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs with particular suffixes. So, ‘Pass it round’ was a revision activity just the following lesson.

Outline: students should add new items to vocabulary lists as they are passed round the class. S/s are divided into groups of two and three, they are given a sheet of paper with suffixes -ship, – ment, -ance/ence, – tion and -ness (as an example). Students are allowed just a minute to fill in at least one variant. Then the sheets are passed to another group and it has to read all the variants and has to add their ideas. The process continues, and each sheet goes to the group that hadn’t seen it before. When the groups have contributed, they can leave their sheets on their desks and can move round the class to see the others.

That’s what we’ve got today:

The task turned out to be very engaging. To make it more competitive teacher can use a timer to have the exact time for filling in the sheet.

This task is great for revision, but also, it can be carried out for vocabulary expansion.

I’ll definitely try it out with other groups.

Thanks for reading!