Weird stories

Procedure:

1) Hand out one odd news item to each student. Let them read it. Do not let them communicate with each other and do not answer any vocabulary questions. Tell them to try to remember their story in as much detail as possible without having to be able to quote it verbatim.

2) Get students to stand up and pair up, standing anywhere in the classroom.

3) Ask them to share their stories with a partner.

4) Ask them to find another partner and share with him or her the story they heard.

5) Repeat step 4 once or twice.

6) In the whole group ask for the funniest story or let each student repeat the story they liked best.

 

Variations:

A

1) Students share their stories in their mother tongue with a partner..

2) Students then pair up with somebody else and share the story they heard, retelling it in the target language.

 

B

Students are given a suitable news item to read at home and look up unknown words. They should be prepared to tell the stoy albeit not verbatim in class in the next lesson.

WHY

A fun way of getting students to talk. The news items are intriguing. Students get away form translating verbatim and (have to) paraphrase.

Newspaper clippings in the students' mother tongue. One per student. Each one consisting of one piece of weird news. You can stick the snippets on a piece of stiff paper for later reuse.

If you have no time to hunt for the right kind of news in German: an excellent source for suitable texts is this little book:

Falk van Helsing
Des Wahnsinns fette Beute
Die dümmsten Verbrecher der Welt
Eichborn Verlag
Paperback, 96 S., 2004
ISBN 3821848715 - Preis € 7,95