Writing a school trip diary

This is a neat little exercise that I've done with my 5th year class to work on their speaking skills and then to follow on with their writing skills.

We went on a school trip to visit 3 local sites linked to the St James Highway, Eunate, Viana and Los Arcos. The children had worksheets to complete as they visited the different sites and while we were there I took lots of photos.

In class when we return, I show the photos and we brainstorm other words and verbs and put them into a wordcloud. Then the children have to select 8 photos and write sentences about their day.



It's an excelent exercise as they want to talk about what they did, it's far more real and relevant than exercises from a book.

As a demostration, I've put some of these into a ppt and created a word cloud with sample key vocabulary and past tense verbs they will need to describe their day out. I've loaded the ppt and wordcloud into slideshare and embedded it below.

School trip

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Lifeboats and Icy Sea

Although this class actually works better in ESO, we can ask high level students to watch the video and then give their opinions about people who work at sea, using some of the words that appear in the word cloud. This is basically a speaking activity that allows the teacher to help with pronunciation.

It can be done in an even simpler way where the students have to describe what they say and say how it would feel to be in any of the boats in the video. A new word cloud can be created with key vocabulary that has been brainstormed.

This new word cloud can then be the basis for writing work where the students have to use at least 50% of the words to write a short text summarising the class discussion (guidelines for the written text: min 75 words, max 250 depending on student ability).