Reading Activities

What's the Story??

I asked the class to predict the content of a topical news item from today's issue of The Guardian Online.
I copy pasted the words from the article into a word-cloud making site called Word It Out.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/royal-mail-strike-ballot-privatisation

Then we played bingo with the words in the word cloud.  I read out parts of the text and everyone crossed out the word if it was the same as what they had written in one of the 9 boxes as seen in the example below.

We played the first round for a straight line, and the second time was for a 'full house'.

Baby Prince George Alexander Louis

An online reading text from BBC News on the names of new-born baby Prince George Alexander Louis could be preceded by a Tagxedo word cloud such as the following:

The English Blog has some great news items concerning Prince George and we looked at a few cartoons from the British press.

Some useful sites mentioned by the group included the following:

ESL Printables: http://eslprintables.com/

Breaking News English: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/

Busy Teacher : http://busyteacher.org/

One Stop English has some free esl reading materials, although you have to pay to become a member and receive over 8,000 printable lessons.

I mentioned a lesson on chickens that was created by special request by Sean Banville.

http://www.listenaminute.com/c/chickens.html

Below Frederick the cockerel who keeps his beady eye on me ...

Finally after a very intensive day of activities, we finished off by creating a word cloud with whatever was in teachers' minds at the time.