Parkour in the Park (with links)

As is usual, when somebody shares a video on Facebook or Twitter, I automatically wonder whether I could use it in class. This particular video seemed ideal - the theme is relevant and motivating to teenagers and lots of language work could emerge from it. The video shows a group of young men doing parkour or freerunning. Despite the title of this post, the term parkour does not come from the word park but from the French parcours which means route or course. Parkour is a way of moving around a city by the shortest route possible, including jumping over walls, doing forward and backward flips and so on. It is a phenomenon that is taking the world of teenage boys by storm. It has possibly replaced skateboarding as the thing to do in the streets and I have actually seen lads on the street practising jumps from high walls. I plan to show the video to my teenage FCE group to start with, and possibly with a couple of other classes that may find it interesting. Below are some of the activities I have thought of doing.

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First, I plan to show the first 45 seconds, where the men are in the garage getting into their car. I want the students to discuss what kind of people they are, where they think they are going and what they are going to do. There is no indication at this point that they are going to do parkour, in fact, they look more likely to be on their way to rob a petrol station! 

Then the expression "Storm Freerun" comes up on the screen. What do they think it refers to? Have they heard this term before?

I may tell the students to write down the actions that they see in the clip while they are watching.

We will brainstorm obstacles that you can find in a city (walls, railings etc) and verbs of movement. This is a good opportunity to check student's knowledge of verbs of movement and preposition combinations, such as jump over, run through, climb over and more unusual verbs such as crouch, squat, leap, drop, crawl, land. We can then move on to nouns such as somersault, backflip, twist, body roll.

An activity that I thought they may enjoy and get to practise some of the vocabulary we looked at in previous activities is to get them design a route suitable for a freerun. They would draw a plan of a part of a city, including buildings, walls, fences, steps, railings etc or any other obstacles. They would then have to describe the sequence of movements of the runner. 

Another task, since they are an FCE group, could be to write a story about a freerunner describing his thoughts during a run. It could be written in first or third person and could be told in the present or in the past, as a dream or memory.

Oh, and one final point to make would be "Don't try this at home!" We could discuss the dangers of this type of hobby and possible consequences if safety measures are not taken.

Here is the link to the worksheet  I made for my FCE group.

I have also uploaded a magazine article kindly shared by Ceri Jones about local teenagers doing "tricks" in Cádiz, Sothern Spain here, which I hope can be downloaded and printed off in a decent size.

You are welcome to download, edit and use these materials in your own lessons. Enjoy!

Don't Shoot the Bear!

Don't Shoot the Bear is an interactive commercial for the brand of error correction products Tipp-Ex. Watch it:









I have used it today with a group of ten year olds and a group of thirteen year olds, and I am now going to use it with my Advanced class.

With the younger ones, I got them to write a list of action verbs on a piece of paper. I had not told them anything about the video. I then wrote on the board "A hunter shoots a bear", and elicited its meaning. I went on to rub out "shoots" and asked them if any of the verbs in their lists could go in its place. I told them that if necessary, they could add "with" so that the sentence would make sense, for example: A hunter plays with a bear. They then had to tick the verbs on their list that would be suitable in the sentence in question.

I then played the video and asked them for verbs with which to complete the sentence. It's really good fun and it gets them practising 3rd person singular "s" (although the sentence does not need to be grammatically correct for the videos to work). It also activates vocabulary as they try to think of as many different actions as possible to try out.

With the advanced students, I'm hopefully going to get something a bit more complex out of them. I will only accept grammatically correct sentences, and demand synonyms of really basic words. Maybe we could hypothesise about what will happen. We can discuss why the same video comes up when different verbs have been entered. We can look up different and alternative meanings in the dictionary. I haven't really decided exactly what we are going to do, I thought I would see what they came up with first.

I do think that this video has endless classroom possibilities though. It could be used as a stimulus for speaking or writing, the students could create a collaborative story about the hunter and the bear. Surely there must be plenty more ways in which we could use this video, so please add your ideas to the comments section to share with us all.

And whatever you do, DON'T SHOOT THE BEAR!

Young Learners Video Challenge!

As everyone seems to be busy completing various challenges (see Jason's Wandrous Whiteboard  and Karenne's Dogme Challenges ) I thought I would come up with my own!

One of my classes is a group of ten year olds who have been in our school for approximately two years.
Over the past couple of lessons we have been looking at different sports and their characteristics as well as how to express likes and dislikes. They wrote about their favourite sports, but I wanted them to practise speaking too, so I asked them if they would like to appear in a video that other children in different countries could see. This particular group are quite outgoing and very enthusiastic, and they love doing drama activities and projects to supplement the course book.

I wrote some prompts on the board to help them remember what kind of things they could say, such as:
I like... I don't like ... Most popular sport etc. They practised their speeches without the camera first, and most of them needed a couple of tries with the webcam recording as they got nervous and started laughing.

Here is the merged video:

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

They really enjoyed seeing themselves speak in English and I have suggested they try it at home too, so they can listen to their pronunciation.

What I would like to suggest is for those of you who teach young learners to do something similar. All you need is a computer or laptop with a webcam. I used the basic software that came with the webcam and then merged the videos online with a free application which does not allow editing or downloading but offers the HTML code for you to embed the video into your blog, and a link you can email to students, as well as being able to upload to youtube if you wish.

My students would love to see other children talking about their favourite sports. If you do decide to record your students, send me a link to the video and I will show it to my class. This could be a great collaborative project!