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You Are What You Eat

March 9, 2012

This excellent activity comes to you from Kyra Rice via my awesome ex-maternity sub B.Lo. (Today is my first official day back--a planning/grading day, thank the Lord!) Kyra called it "You Are What You Eat", but it can be modified to suit just about anything; B.Lo. used it to present likes (foods, music, activities, etc.) and called it "Yo soy original" (I am original). Have students use pictures (hand-drawn or clip-art) of their favorite foods (or favorite activities...or whatever else you want to use) to form a person's body; presumably, themselves. You can have the students label each item, as B.Lo. did (although as you can see, this student used English for most of the labels...oops!), or just have them draw the picture without labels. Ideally, this would be done as homework so that classmates cannot see who drew what. Otherwise, try to keep some secrecy about it--put up binders to use as blinders from seatmates or something. Make sure that students do NOT write their names on the front of the paper! Once students have completed their figures, the fun begins! Hold up a picture and ask (in the target language), "What does this person like?" or "What does this person eat?" or whatever question matches your activity. As students describe the picture, have them begin guessing who in the class the person might be. You can get some great CI out of it by comparing students--if someone guesses "Bob" because s/he knows that Bob likes baseball, but it's not Bob, you can ask him to confirm. "Do you like baseball" "Yes" "Well do you like hockey?" "No" So it can't be Bob. Bob likes baseball, but he doesn't like hockey. Who in the class likes baseball AND hockey? etc etc etc. This is a great activity to have students complete and then keep filed away so that you can pull out one or two when you have five minutes left at the end of class that need to be filled. You can extend the activity by having students switch papers and asking them to either write or speak about the person--they should tell a story about the person based on whatever is included in their object-body. You could also leave this as an activity for students to complete when they have a substitute early on in the year, so that they are ready to go when you want to discuss them!

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