Tuesday's Torch Story

We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors,

and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.

~ George Washington

I tried to preserve the good from last week's activity and discard the bad - and I think this week's activity was a success!

The good (the goal) was to design an activity that small groups could do independently, with a way to check their answers.

The bad was the overly complicated method of revealing the answers (here).

This week, the topic was forming questions and negatives, in present and past tenses. I selected some of the verbs we had already seen (both regular and irregular) and created tables that detailed the positive statement, negative statement and question associated with each pronoun.

Then I cut up post-it notes so that each one covered one square in my table. I numbered those post-it notes and made little slips of paper with those numbers on them. I put all those little slips of paper in a ziploc bag and mixed them up.

The idea was that students would take turns drawing a number. The number would tell them a verb, in a tense, conjugated to a pronoun - and they would have to generate the 3 phrases. Then they could remove the post-it note and check their work!

It worked! I am at least partially redeemed after the previous failed activity... ;)