Scars

1. Tell the students your scar story. If it is about a scar of yours that is showable, let them see it.
2. Invite the group to think of how they got whatever scars they have. Give them a few minutes to bring their stories back to mind.
3. Ask a volunteer to tell his or her story. Help with words, and write any accident-related vocabulary up on the board, e.g. wound, bandage, stretcher, stitches, operate. Only write up words actually needed by the narrator.
4. Ask three or four more people to tell their scar stories to the whole class, and build up further vocabulary on the board.
5. If the class is a large one, now ask them to work in threes and continue telling scar stories, until everybody who wants to has told one.
6. Pair the students. Each student is silently to imagine a scar story for his or her partner. At this stage, remind them of the words on the board. Discourage them from writing.
7. Each student tells the partner the scar story about him or her.

Add a letter

1. Tell the students that they can form new words by adding or curtailing a word, e.g.: mile – smile.
2. Ask them to form as many new words as they can for 1 minute.

Things in common

1. Put students in pairs, tell them to talk to each other and try to find as many things as they can in common with one another in three minutes. These should not include things they can find out just by looking at one another, e.g. that they both have blue eyes or are wearing jeans; nor should they include more than two things beginning 'We both like...’ or ‘Neither of us…’
2. They should write down the things they find out they have in common in full sentences: We both have two brothers. Neither of us likes reading detective stories.
3. Then ask the pairs to describe their common features. Which pair found most?

I remember

1. Tell the students about an accident or an illness, starting most of your sentences with: I remember... ing...
2. Put these sentence starters up on the board: I think I remember ... ing; I'll never forget ... ing; I remember . . ing my...; I don't clearly remember … ing.
3. Ask the students to think back to an accident or illness of theirs and write half a dozen 'remember' and 'forget' sentences. Get the students to tell their stories.

SMS

1. Write a word on the blackboard.
2. Students should write SMS beginning each word with a letter from the word you wrote.

Mime your past

1. Ask students to prepare to do a mime based on some past experience.
2. One of the students does the mime, stopping after each action. Ask the other students to say what s/he did. Here they may be trying to describe something that is clear to them, or they may be hypothesizing about what the student intended to convey.
3. Pair the students and get A to mime the incident to B. Go round helping anyone who is stuck for words.
4. Now ask B to replay orally the scene described by A.

On the tape

1. One student goes out of the room.
2. The teacher records voices of other students on the tape.
3. The student comes into the room and tries to recognize each voice on the tape.