Helena Tunysova was the winner of our Cambridge English Empower “How would you use this photograph” competition. In her entry, she suggested three different ideas for using the picture of a western motorcyclist meeting a group of Vietnamese women. In today’s post, she explains how the ideas she suggested in her prize-winning entry actually worked in the classroom.
Ideas are one thing, their realization another. But my three ideas really worked well in practice!
Activity #1 – Cutting the picture
Cut the picture into as many pieces as there are students. Give each student a piece, asking them not to show it to the others. They then walk around, talking to different students about their piece of the picture, but hiding the real picture all the time.
After about five minutes, ask the students to sit down and write down a description of this picture they have never seen, and that they know just bits and pieces about. Finally, ask them to put the pieces together to produce the real image.
We had a lot of fun creating the story of what might be in the picture. In fact, each of the fifteen students had a very different theory, and they were all surprised when they saw the whole picture.
Activity #2 – Speech bubbles
Take the picture, and make a speech bubble for the European tourist, and also for the Vietnamese ladies. Show your students the picture, and ask them to write the funnier comments into the speech bubbles. These might not be only speech, but also the person’s thoughts. You will be surprised at how imaginative your students might become.
Here are some of the funniest responses from my students.
Activity #3 – Bringing the real Vietnam into the classroom
I would say this activity is the most important for me – last, but definitely not least! Teaching both young students and adults in a small town where other nationalities are very rare, I have a Vietnamese student in one of my classes. This picture might serve as a wonderful icebreaker, giving her the opportunity to shine, and bringing real life into the classroom. Students might be asked to do a little research about Vietnam at home, and the family of our little girl might be even asked /if willing/ to come to school to give our students a little speech about their culture.
After completing the first two activities, we then moved the topic on to Vietnam and Vietnamese people. In the next session, our Vietnamese student brought in realia: pictures and so on from her country. Showing the class her home country helped make her more active and prominent in the classroom.
This was definitely the most helpful, the most powerful, and the most successful activity – not just for me, but for the whole class. I am convinced that they are going to look differently at this Vietnamese girl from now on. She was so proud to have a chance to be “the star“ for a while. It was a total success.
