Karen Saxby provides some ideas for using pictures as a way to prepare primary pupils for the Starters, Movers and Flyers tests.
I seem to always be thinking of stories for our young learners or writing them, but this last week, I’ve been planning the webinar. The aim of the webinar is to offer some advice about how to help your young learners to prepare for the reading/writing and speaking story-based tasks including those that will be in the revised tests next year. As I was preparing the slides, I realised that there is a very basic resource that can help prepare young learners for all these tasks (in different ways). What is it? It’s a picture – a funny, colourful, detailed picture.
Choose a picture that you know your class will be interested in. It should be attractive and relevant enough for the age group. We want them to feel motivated to write or talk about it.
Here’s a good example that comes from Fun for Flyers.
How you use the picture is up to you, but here are some ideas. Flyers could do any of these. Movers could do most of them. Starters could do some of them. I’ve added in brackets which parts of the test the picture activity most directly relates to.
Ideas for the classroom
- Starters speaking + read/write part 5: Elicit and write on the board any key words, eg: ‘street’, ‘shop’, ‘car’, ‘bike’, ‘people’, ‘dog’, ‘shoes’. You could ask the class for spellings of key words or ask them to write these on their own or in pairs. How many key words can they think of?
- Starters speaking + read/write part 5, Movers speaking + read/write part 6: Write on the board Wh/How questions. Answers can be real or imagined eg: How many people can you see? What colour is the dog? What’s the woman in the yellow coat carrying? Where is the girl on the bike going? Learners could tell the class their answers or perhaps write their answers in pairs (one/two words or complete sentences).
- Starters read/write part 5, Movers read/write part 6, Flyers read/write part 5: Write on the board incomplete sentences about the picture (or you can ask pairs to write these and then swap with other pairs). Learners then write 1 – 5 words to complete the sentence, eg: A girl is riding a ……. . A boy is listening to ….. .
- Movers speaking and read/write part 6: Tell learners that this is the middle picture in a story. In groups, learners then imagine two more pictures – one that came before and one that came afterwards. They could even draw these! The groups then tell or write the story by describing each picture in turn in the present continuous. Learners should just focus on one of the characters to keep things simple.
- Flyers speaking + read/write parts 5 and 7: Ask learners to imagine what was happening just before this picture and what will happen next. Groups discuss and then tell the class or write their short story. Encourage learners to use simple linking words like ‘but‘ or ‘because‘ and perhaps to just focus on one or two of the characters in the picture to keep things simple.
Ideas for creative and communicative practise
Now for a few more creative and communicative ideas to practise speaking and/or writing skills. You can use these in open class or organise learners to work in closed pairs or groups and then ask for their answers in open class.
- Learners imagine they are in this street. What can they see if they look left and right or up to the sky? What can they hear or feel? What’s the weather like?
- Learners imagine why they are in this street. What do they want to do? Who are they with? How are they feeling? Excited? Frightened? Pleased? Worried? How far away do they live from this street? How did they travel there? Can they see anything unusual? A mouse? A strange bird?
- Learners imagine that one of these people is their best friend or a relative. They want to send that person a text. What’s the message? What’s their reply? Ask pupils to write the dialogue.
- In pairs, pupils write true/false sentences about the picture for other pairs to then correct or write yes/no answers.
- You tell (or write on the board) the beginning of a story. The picture illustrates the start of the story. Learners help you to continue telling or writing the story. Try to involve everyone by prompting learners with questions if necessary. Congratulate learners at the end for their help. Encourage learners and keep things fun and stress free. We want learners to enjoy the story tasks, not to be afraid of them – no one is expecting them to be the next J K Rowling!
To watch Karen’s webinar on this topic, please visit: Storytelling and story-making for Cambridge English: Young Learners