Thursday, January 5, 2012

My Students' Collaborative Writing Game

First week of my school's winter camp is finished and I hope my students had fun. Yawning is a good sign, right? 

The first day was a bit chaotic, the second graders didn't really listen to my instructions, left trash on the ground, among other disruptive things. I nipped this in the bud the next day by enlisting the help of one of my co-teachers who went in and told them something along the lines of 'Oh, I'm so disappointed in you. Lee is an amazing teacher. How can you do this to the golden jewel of the British Isles?' - he told them in Korean, but I'm pretty sure that is what he said.

Once they decided to behave themselves, I realised that they were actually better at English than they let on... The shy, quiet girls were better than expected, anyway - I always knew the boys to be relatively decent at English because of the random stuff they blurt out in class.

With this in mind, I decided to play a collaborative writing game with them to finish off the week. 

What I did was split the class into three teams of four. I then gave two pieces of paper to each team. The paper had a sentence written on the top that I had typed prior to the lesson. I lined the paper into eight sections in which they had to write whatever they wanted to continue the story. They then had to fold over the previous sentence so that the person they passed it onto could only see what they had written and not the whole story. They passed both papers around their team with each member writing on the paper until the sheet was full.

I thought it might be a bit challenging for two reasons:

1. Korean students are not used to being given creative control over the English they use, i.e. they mostly take the form of 'I'm fine, thanks. And you?' robots that freak out and literally run away when anything that doesn't fit the textbook template is thrown at them.

2. Some of them might struggle with forming any sentences at all because even though most of them were high level, some simply did not have a big enough vocabulary bank to draw upon when we did these kind of activities. To counter this, I let them used their phone dictionary (all Koreans have Korean-English-Korean dictionaries on their phones). A downside to letting them use their dictionaries were sentences like this one one of my girls wrote today: 'to be born destiny' - no one knows what it means.

Anyway, here is a choice selection of their final stories (the text in bold is what I wrote to start them off and all spelling and grammar is left how they wrote it), see if you can find any themes...:

First story
The man was looking out of the window.
Oh! Bird is die!!! I'm sad ㅠㅠ I have to eat!! Oh~ deliciouse!!
"Mother! What do you eat?"
I am eating your finger.
And I am eating your toe.

Second story
The scary dog looked very angry at me.
I killed a dog.
But the dog didn't die.
Because the dog is phoenix.
However, the dog is dying.
Suddenly, vet come and save a dog.
But he is killer.
The dog said "What is happen?"

Third story
Super Mario got a 0 (zero) on his English test.
Oh! No~ So, I eat English test paper, because my mom very angry.
So I go to bathroom. And I poo.
It smell is very dilicious.
And, I eat poo.
Oh! It's deliciouse!
I will eat them every day~
So I have stomach ache but I'm happy.
I'm die.

Fourth story
Oh, no! That whale just ate that chicken!
Chicken said "I'm not delicious!" in the whale's stomach.
Actually chicken was prince of chicken world.
But his bad uncle killed the chicken prince and destroyed the chicken world.
So chickens leave their world.
But whale try to eat chickens again!
Then chickens explode!!!
People eat the chickens.

Fifth story
The woman put socks on her hands.
She making a snowman.
but, There was no snow.
There was stone, That was beautiful! I will to eat The Stone~ It's delicious!
But I have stomach ake.

I'm not sure if this is a good example of creativity or just the scribblings of oddball teenagers. Probably a bit of both. Clutching at straws a bit, but I actually like the story about the whale and the chicken prince... The one about cannibalism made me feel a bit ill. 

I really hope that the one about pooping out an English test and eating it everyday isn't a metaphor for my English camp... ㅠㅠ

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