Today my mid-level classes we practicing the "Have and Has" grammatical structure. Nothing is more boring that repetitive grammar, so I went and found some relatively fun activities for the students to do that practiced using the English without making them write endlessly. I found a really good lesson in a book I used at my first school made copies, and set about organizing it.
The unit was a writing, coloring, and drawing style worksheet focusing on facial features, parts of the body, and size. For example the students had to follow the directions and complete the drawing of a clown, adding the appropriate number of teeth, drawing the correct size nose, or coloring the correct color hair. This is fun for them as they don’t have to write, "He has a big nose." Instead, they get to draw just how big it is. We went through the activity, drawing clowns, aliens, and eventually, I handed the students a mirror and let them draw themselves.
The only thing was, since the activity involved aliens and strangely colored clowns to practice exaggerated features, the students felt that I was trying to make them draw only weird things. One of the girls ran over to the dictionary, looked up a few words, then asked me, "Why is everything we draw so….creepy? Why is the clown….fleshcrawling?"
I didn’t tell them to draw scary things. That’s just the natural result of drawing clowns. Clowns are naturally terrifying. The pictures where the students looked in the mirror to draw often came out terrifying as well, since they would use comic book or animation style features on a realtively normally proportioned head. Perhaps the next time I do this activity, it should be around Halloween so that they can make scary pictures intentionally. The students worked through six pages of material total and never complained. That’s some sort of record for both classes. I think they might have even learned something in the process.
