Five-Minute Activities for Young Learners

6.8 My birthday party
Level
**
Language focus
Invitation, interrogatives and modals
Skills focus
Reading: language in context
Thinking focus
Predicting
Teaching approach
Promote accuracy – correct errors
Interaction
Whole class work, suitable for large classes
Preparation
Write the whole text onto a transparency or large poster.
Have some small pieces of sticky paper handy to cover some
of the words.
Procedure
1 Together read the birthday invitation.
2 Jointly construct the details for the gaps, e.g. the date of the party. Write
these into the invitation.
3 Using pieces of sticky paper, cover the words would, when, where, can.
These are the key words you want to focus on in this activity.
4 Now, as a class, start to read the invitation again. Choose children to give
the missing words, all the time encouraging discussion about why this
word would be most suitable. When the word has been correctly
identified, remove the sticky paper and read the text together.
Follow-up
• This activity is called a ‘progressive cloze’. You can use this technique
with any short text. Progressively cover more and more words in the text.
Choose words that you want to focus on in your teaching. These may be
verbs like is, prepositions such as on, or new vocabulary.
• Encourage the children to create their own birthday invitations and
decorate them.
• Display the birthday invitation template in the classroom, so that the
children can use it for their own invitations.
• For other cards, letters and emails, see Activities 2.12, 4.8, 5.11, 5.15.
Five-Minute Activities for Young Learners
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About me
133