Those pesky emails are now done!
Trying to find fun stuff to practice emailling in class is one of the banes* of my life, so I think I deserve a little smugness on having come up with a new idea on how to do so. You can see the results on the page “Worksheet- Email error game” on the right. Click now! No, not later, now!
Was it good for you?
As an extra treat, will try to summarize what can make emailing lessons fun:
The fun emailing lessons magical formula
- Make it competitive
- Give time limits
- Have teams
- Give points
- Make first reading tasks quick and easy
- Make writing tasks interactive (students read and respond to each others’ emails, e.g. deciding if the advice written in it is good or not)
- Cut it up into bits of paper, and if possible get them to shuffle them around
- Turn over the sheets during some of the activities to vary the interactions
- Test their memories, e.g. by having an email on the board that disappears word by word
- Test their logical powers, e.g. by asking them to solve a murder mystery where the clues are all emails
- Use pictures for the arty ones, such as covering emoticons
- Introduce language that is totally inappropriate for business emails too (e.g. What’s up dudes!!), to lighten things up and show them what they can’t do
- Get them moving, e.g. standing in a line in the same order as the cut up paragraphs of the email they are holding or showing thumbs up and thumbs down in response to emails you show them
- Er, that’s it…
Any more hints? Any requests? Am confident I can come up with at least one more fun lesson, or at least more confident about that than I am about ever working out how to give you access to said lessons in an easier to use format (Sorry!)
*What on earth is a “bane”??
