Monday 12 March 2012

April Fool's Day - Some Ideas


Last week Thomas explained to us how Americans celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and April Fool’s Day. Then in groups we discussed how to deal with these festivities in our classes. We chose April Fool’s Day instead of St. Patrick’s Day since none of us had ever considered the possibility of using the festivity in our lessons. Our group came up with the following ideas:

Pre-activity:
Tell the students that the government has announced the timetables are going to change so that from Easter on they are going to have lessons in the morning and the afternoon, after a short break for lunch. Preferably, the Head would announce that, to lend credibility to our story.
After a few moments of panic (allow the students to scream for a minute!) we tell them it’s a joke, because it´s April Fool’s Day. We show a short video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6SLgQeGoIs) that explains the celebration, and we ask the students to connect it to the Spanish “Día de los Inocentes” (28th December)

During-activity:
We give the students some “stories” to read. They have to guess which ones are real, authentic stories and which ones are fake. Then they have to explain why they think so.
(see Document 1)

Post-activity:
Since students usually like to write bizarre stories, we ask them to make up their own ones. They should take care that what they write has at least the appearance of truth, so that the story could be considered a “genuine” one and then fool others. To make it a bit more complicated they have to include in their text 5 words that they have taken out of a bag (at random)

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