Why I didn't think of this before, I'll never know...but I realized this week while playing Write, Draw, Pass with my students that I can get lots of reps and stories out of what they've written--duh! I tell students to write simple, amusing, short sentences. This means that I end up with a lot of things like, "Un muchacho come un perro" (A boy eats a dog). When we've finished the activity and are looking over the finished products on the doc cam, it's so easy to ask for details and create a story: Who is the boy? Why is he eating the dog? Whose dog is it? What happens after he eats it? Then, it's funny to continue along through each of the pictures that were drawn and sentences that were interpreted on the sheet because it creates twists in your story. For example, one sentence yesterday was "Wary rides a cat to school". The picture was illustrated in box #2, but the person that described the image in box #3 identified the person as Ryan, not Wary. So then we had to change our whole story and figure out why it wasn't Wary, but Ryan, riding the cat. My students LOVE this activity because they like to see what funny things they can write about their classmates. Each one has some kind of an ulterior motive with the activity, too--one student always wants to make his best friend do something embarrassing, so he changes every character to his best friend's name. Another girl always tries to write about someone farting. They end up purposefully manipulating the interpretations, but it makes it much more engaging to review them! After reading Michele's most recent post and thinking that I need to remind my students of why we do the repetitions of our structures, I think that I will require that students use target structures in their sentences the next time we play the game, and then do her 'goal of 30' reps on a structure while reviewing the finished papers with the class before we move on to a new paper. Thanks Michele!
