Write Draw Pass is fast becoming one of my favorite activities for stories, and there is no end to the possibilities.It seems like I have a new revelation of a better way to use the Write, Draw, Pass activity each time I use it!
Today, I realized when using it as a story review activity that it can be an INPUT activity instead of an OUTPUT activity. Since we know that learners acquire language through exposure to input that they understand–and NOT by practicing output (speaking or writing), I try to focus my class activities on INPUT as much as possible.
Here’s how I made Write, Draw, Pass into an input activity: our class had read a story together. Instead of turning off my project and having students write down a sentence from the story from memory, I left the story projected on the board. I told students to copy down one sentence from the story into the top box on their form (click here). As they read the story and searched for the sentence they wanted to use, they were receiving input and processing the language.
Then, when it came time to play the game– I encouraged students to reference the projected story when guessing what the pictures were. The students are getting loads of comprehensible input by reading through the story each time they were passed a new paper.
When I pull some of the pictures tomorrow for this extension, the sentences will not have errors in them because they were copied from the board. Wahoo!!
I like the improved version! You can’t go wrong with added INPUT.
I did something similar to this last week. After reading a chapter in one of the beginning Spanish readers, I gave to different students a sentence to sketch that was directly from the chapter. I put the sketches at different places around the room and students used their book to find the sentence that the sketch depicted. I wrote the page number on the sketch to help them out since it was the first time we did it. They were reading AND they were up and moving around.
Nice!!! I love that activity for reading a novel. I’ll add it to my repertoire 🙂
It is a great idea!! And Martina, thank you not only for sharing your ideas, but how you revisit activities and tweak them!! with love, Laurie
I love this idea and cannot wait to try it with my classes! Thank you so much for sharing your ideas, it makes me excited to teach!
You’re welcome! It’s so fun!
I used this activity for the first time today, and I used it to review a story, as suggested here. The kids enjoyed it over all, but I learned a valuable lesson for next time. Instead of just letting the kids pick the sentence (I had about 5 kids pick the same sentence in one class–and there are only 15 students in the class!), I will have the sentences pre-written on a piece of paper and each student will draw one out of a hat. That way we have few, if any, duplicates. I think this also will push students to choose students that are a little more complex.
Here’s a challenging variation for upper-level students:
– Each student gets an entire sheet of paper (instead of cutting down the middle).
– Students write 2 sentences before folding; one from the story, and one with a detail changed.
– Students draw 2 different pictures before folding; one from the story, and one FALSELY depicting the story.
Caveat…students should not always begin with the correct sentence/drawing on the left side of the sheet.
For the extension activity, include some of those “non-examples” from the story on the paper(s) given to the pairs to cut up and put in order.