Five-Minute Activities for Young Learners

Box 61
Goldilocks: problem-solving grid
Character
Problems
Solutions
Your suggestions
Goldilocks
She was hungry.
She ate Baby Bear’s
You should not go
porridge.
into a stranger’s 
She was tired.
She sat on Baby 
house. You should
Bear’s chair and 
not eat other
broke it.
people’s food. You
She went to sleep in
should not break
Baby Bear’s bed.
other people’s
She was
She ran away.
things. You should
frightened of
sleep in your own
the bears.
bed. You should
write a note and
apologise to the
bears.
Follow-up
• Ask the children to write a note from Goldilocks to the bears apologising
for her poor behaviour.
• This activity could be done with any narrative which is familiar to the
children. For other on-line stories, check the Website appendix on page
149.
• For other narratives, see Activities 2.16, 3.5, 3.13, 3.18, 4.10, 5.1, 6.18.
Fantasy and adventure
71

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3.15 Fortune telling
Level
***
Language focus
Conversation, future tense, adjectives
Skills focus
Speaking
Thinking focus
Imagining and inventing
Teaching approach
Promote creativity – accept errors
Interaction
Pairwork, suitable for large classes
Preparation
On the board, write the headings from Box 62, along with the
sentence stems You are going to . . . and I will . . .
Procedure
1 Most children know about fortune telling either through palm reading,
or the reading of cards or tea leaves, or simply gazing into a crystal ball.
Tell the class that they are going to become fortune tellers.
2 Ask the children to add vocabulary to the grid on the board. Encourage
the children to draw on their own vocabulary knowledge, using the
headings as a guide.
3 Put the children into pairs. One person will be the fortune teller, and the
other will respond to their predictions. Encourage the children to be
imaginative as they invent scary scenarios and their corresponding plans
for action.
4 The fortune teller chooses vocabulary from the grid to build a sentence
following the pattern You are going to . . .
5 The partner replies by telling the fortune teller what he/she is going to do.
Refer the children to the sentence stems on the board. See Box 63 for
some possible answers.
6 Call on some of the pairs to share their conversation with the class.