Task Based Learning Activity to Teach a Story!

Topic: Amar was late to school.

Class: 5th grade (Primary)

Skills: Speaking and reading.

Material: Picture cards and Story Slips.

                              Task-based learning is one of the best methods to develop reading and writing skills. Students learn the language informally and it leads to diverse thinking from known to unknown. In this activity, you can observe how my students interacted to understand a story on their own. My aim was that students should have read and understood the reading part on their own to develop the four language skills. Later I extended this activity to teach adverbs and I will post it soon.    

                             I started this activity by pasting 4 picture story cards of the lesson in random order on the blackboard. When I drew the pictures I focused on the lesson topic and vocabulary that I wanted to elicit. I also drew them in such a way that the sentences would be easy to understand and to support the children to do the matching activity later. I asked my children to look at the pictures and respond. I asked many questions in order to elicit the maximum vocabulary. They gave their responses and explained what was happening in every picture. I wrote all the responses they gave and did not correct any grammar mistakes. Then I asked them to guess the correct sequence of the cards. 

                                 Next, I divided my students into two groups, gave them story slips and asked them to match the slips to the picture cards on the wall (there were 2 sets of picture cards in 2 different corners of the room). They read and discussed in their groups for 2 minutes and then started pasting those slips under the picture cards. The elicited vocabulary helped them to identify the relevant picture even though they were unable to read the entire sentence. 

                              Once they had pasted all slips, I went to each corner along with the two groups. One group reads the slips and the other group checked if they were correct or wrong. I helped them to read the sentences in a meaningful way using pause, stress, and intonation to understand the meaning of the sentences. I changed the group roles for each picture card to give everyone a chance to read. Once they had re-read all the slips carefully, they found some mismatches which they corrected by changing the slips.

                                 They worked collaboratively and pasted all the slips correctly under the pictures. Then I asked my students to guess the correct order of the sentences which they pasted under the each picture to check how far they understood the story. They guessed the correct order very easily and understood the story very well. Finally, I asked my students to read the story and explain. Later I used these picture cards to teach adverbs and to develop writing skills. In my next post, I will explain that activity.