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Teaching Passive Voice: ideas for your classes (Part 2)

 

Hey, Great Grade Teachers!  We're ready to share more ideas to teach the Passive Voice effectively. Read, try them out in class and make sure your students get incredible results.

What’s it made of? What’s it used for?

This task is performed by students in a group. You need to make word cards for each group of 4-7 students. They take turns picking up the card and describing the object depicted on it (or the name of which is written there). Ask students to think about the following questions: How big is it? What’s it used for? What’s it made of? The first person to guess the word keeps the card. The winner is the one who collected the most cards. You can use the following words: desk lamp, notebook, mouse mat, scanner, coffee cup, chair, desk, light switch, plug, pot plant, drawer, phone, stapler, paper clip, envelope, printer, headset, etc. Or use any other words on the topic being studied. Another version of this game is called "Something in common", and it can also be played by dividing the class into 2 teams. Each team receives a set of cards with the names of two items written on them. For example, ‘a window and a lamp’. Team A picks up a card and asks team B, “What do a window and a lamp have in common?” Team B has a discussion with each other and gives an answer using Passive Voice, for example, "Both are made of glass." If the answer is grammatically correct and satisfies the teacher, then team B keeps the card. If not, team A gets a chance to answer and pick up the card. The team with the most cards wins. Here are examples of words that may be on cards: forks / coins (are made of metal) tennis / squash (are played with a racket) coffee / cotton (are grown in tropical countries) polar bears / penguins (are found in the Poles) shoes / socks (are worn on foot) presents / greeting cards (given at Christmas) bottle opener / corkscrew (are used to open bottles) paints / brushes (are used for painting) glass / cement (are made from sand) newspapers / magazines (are made from paper / bought at the newsagents) stamps / airletters (are sold at the post office)

Change the room

This physical game for beginners is quite fun and will not leave anyone indifferent. It is easy to adapt to the present or past times. Divide students into two teams. Choose one member from each team and ask them to go out of the classroom. Meanwhile, students rearrange furniture or objects in the classroom. Invite students to return to class. They must describe in English everything that has changed. Set a time limit. The one who names the most correct sentences wins. Here's what students can say: "The table has been moved," "The board has been cleaned," "The window has been closed," and so on.

Passive Voice Quizzes

Everyone loves quizzes. Therefore, it is a great way to practice the use of passive structures, especially when there are so many variations. Active Passive True-False Quiz Coffee Quiz Guess the Country Name three Another interesting kind of quizzes needs a little time to prepare, but it is very interesting. Write the words on strips of paper. For example: 65% of Greenland / cover / ice. Divide students into 2 teams. Each team receives different prompts. Their task is to compose a sentence using Passive Voice. For example, “65% of Greenland is covered with ice”. For each correct statement the team receives a point. The team's answer should be as close as possible to the correct one. In this case, the correct answer is 85%. So if another team said, "65% of Greenland is covered with ice," that's the answer you'd count. Or, for example: Seals / eat / by crocodile (false > polar bears) Spain / visit / by the highest number of tourists in the world every year (false  > France) We hope that you and your students will like the activities :) And….we have more opportunities for your professional development to offer! From Grade Center

Teaching Passive Voice: ideas for your classes (Part 1)

 

Students find some grammar structures easier, others - more difficult. One of the reasons why this happens is that there is no such grammatical structure in the students' native language, and they cannot associate it with anything. Passive Voice is one of them because, for example, the Ukrainian language avoids passive constructions. Naturally, in our language, "the workers repair the house" or "the singer performs a song", or "a friend invites you to a birthday party", not "the house is repaired by workers", "the song is performed by a singer", or "you are invited by a friend to a birthday party".  Although Passive Voice is less frequently used in English, students have to be able to use it especially if they intend to take Cambridge exams, ZNO or EVI, or to be able to write academic texts for IELTS or write formal correspondence or speak in formal situations, etc. Of course, in order to learn to use this grammatical construction correctly, you need a lot of controlled practice. At this stage, students will learn to use the Passive Voice in a limited context by doing gapfills, multiple choice,  grammar code activities, or correcting mistakes, etc. However, it is necessary to give them the opportunity to use this grammatical structure more freely, in a relaxing atmosphere and in situations close to real communication. We have selected some interesting activities you can do with your students. These are ideas that can be easily adapted to your students’ needs and the teaching context.

Describing a process

Passive Voice is most often used in English to describe various processes, for example, in production, in IT, at the airport, and in hospitals, services, and so on. This grammar structure will be needed if you teach business English, for example, and the task itself does not require any prep. First, ask students to make a drawing of a process and then describe it. The topic should match the topic of the lesson. You can also choose the tense or aspect you need: present, past or future, simple, perfect, progressive or perfect progressive. For example, here is how IT specialists could describe “Online transactions”; The order is placed by the customer. The availability of the product is confirmed by the seller’s service, and the response is sent. After that, the payment request is sent to the customer.

Information Gap Speaking Activity

Information gaps is a favourite type of task for many colleagues because it can be adapted to almost any topic in vocabulary or grammar as well as performed both online and in the regular classroom. Students are divided into pairs A and B. Each is given the appropriate worksheet: Student A and Student B. They must fill in the blanks in the table. To do this, they need to ask questions to their partner using Passive Voice. When all the blanks are filled, students compare the answers with each other. Again, the topics can be different depending on what you are teaching. For, example: Famous Artists Inventions One of the alternatives of the Information gap is a task in which students have to spot the differences in pictures. For example, you can describe what has changed in a particular area, room, and so on. From Grade Center

Board games for teaching and learning English

 

Students have always loved board games that have their special romance. Playing “Alias” with the whole class or “UNO” face-to-face, “Snakes and Ladders” with YL or teens are great ways to create good memories, aren’t they? 

Nowadays, the market offers such a wide variety of board games that you can easily get stuck when choosing the "only one". We decided to help you a little with the right choice and made a selection of games that can be used to improve and maintain the level of English as well as for teaching. They are all universal, not limited to one language and purely educational purposes. Let's get started! :)

Ekivoki

This game provides the opportunity to use different ways of explaining words. The cube specifies how you need to do it. It may be:

a song that contains this word;

a picture;

the word to be pronounced backward;

answering yes/no questions about the word ;

a dance;

making a word out of plasticine;

using the root words;

explaining the word without using it.

Most interestingly, the map on which the game takes place depicts a house with a large number of rooms, and the goal of the game is to be in the attic! This game can be used when teaching the topic “Housing” or you can create your own list of words or phrases for guessing.

Ekivoki is perfect for both children and adults. You can adjust the playing time yourself by setting any room on the map as a goal.

Imagine

The game can become a great discovery for you because of its variability. The set includes transparent cards with geometric images and cards with words and phrases.

Transparent cards are laid out in a circle, as in the video, and then the player who will show the word picks up a card with words, and the one who guesses calls a random number of the words – and the game begin

The player who shows can use any geometric shapes on the transparent cards and combine them as he or she wants so that the word can be guessed. Here is an example: the word – the Statue of Liberty – and this is what the player has created from the figure

Not only one person can take part in the guessing, but also the whole group. The scores are given to the one who guessed and the one who showed if the word or phrase was guessed correctly

The game is a great way to recycle vocabulary in both pairs and groups. Students work with both the meaning of the word and the pronunciation, that’s why the cards can be used for whole phrases, for creating stories using certain grammar, and most importantly, for memorizing, because the game develops associative thinkin

Imagine can be played with any set of words. The game can last from 5 to 30 minutes, or even a whole lesson. Depending on the lesson aims, you can prepare from 1 to 5 activities with this game. It takes up little space, so you can take it with you on a trip and engage with children, repeating words or geometric shape

This or That

This board game is suitable for debates or heated discussions, so it is a great option for speaking clubs. The game consists of 68 cards that offer very contradictory statements. Everyone has the opportunity to be a leader. To do this, you need to pull out a card and read, for example: "Would you prefer to get an answer to any question or get the opportunity to read other people's thoughts for a month." After the question, you must make a choice in favour of one of the options and justify it. Other participants can also take part in the discussion of their choice, agree or deny it. The main task is to support the choice with arguments, and the goal is to reassure the facilitator of the correctness of your choice. The main thing is not to quarrel :

As a teacher, you can add your own options, change them, or set certain conditions under which students can use certain phrases or word

Story Cubes

 This game can literally fit in your pocket :). The set includes 9 cubes with different images on the faces. You can use cubes to recycle and use grammar in different contexts: it perfectly develops associative and abstract thinking. Adding cubes can make the game more challenging, but we advise you to start with 3: they are enough for a story of 3-6 sentences.

The cubes come in different thematic sets: travel, mysticism, fantasy, myths, unpredictable situations, superpowers, prehistoric era, supernatural, alien invasion, etc. That is why they can be used to create different stories using the new vocabulary and recycling the old one both at the beginning of the lesson to warm up the students and at the end as a conversational activity.

Just One/The only word

Another budget game that is somewhat reminiscent of Dixit. Here you are provided with cards with a set of words of different complexity in English / Russian / Ukrainian. Each player must move their top card slightly to make the numbers in the upper right corner of the second card visible. These numbers will indicate the word numbers from the first card for which the player will need to create an association.

The player must name these words in one word. In this game, everyone has only one attempt to guess the word. If not all words have been guessed correctly, the facilitator can name the number of correctly guessed words to make the game easier for those who guess. The one who wins gets rid of all his cards first!

It’s a great game for developing associative thinking, learning, or recycling new words. The teacher can also change the lists of words in the cards and change them depending on the needs.

The nice thing is that this is a fairly budget game. And there are compact versions that you can carry with you.

Use this game to recycle the learned material. It can become your assistant during summer.

From Grade Center

 camps and for project work, where the task can be to create your own map :)

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