How can we as teachers adapt our activities to make them cooperative? The answer is pretty simple when you already know the principles of cooperative learning. Today, I decided to bring you 2 easy activities you can use with your students in order to foster cooperation, interaction, and learning. Remember that you only have to consider every student value and assign them a role in their groups, or let them decide the roles by playing games or by recognizing each other talents!
To create a cooperative task, activity or game all of your students should be participating, helping each other, and working on the task proposed. You just have to keep in mind the five elements of cooperative learning and everything would be easier. If you do not know them, I invite you to read one of my previous posts related to these particular and relevant aspects of CL.
Exquisite
drawing
Without further ado, the first activity I have for you is called “exquisite drawing”. I am sure you already heard about the original activity “exquisite corpse”, but this time it is different. This activity is useful for reviewing vocabulary and enhancing your students’ creativity.
The first thing you have to do is to form your groups, you decide the number of students based on the topic and the drawing you want them to make. Each of your students will have to draw a piece of the drawing. If the topic is animals (for example), each group will have a little bag with several animals. It is easy to divide the drawing into 3 or four parts; top, middle, bottom/head, torso, legs, and feet (according to your needs). Then, the piece of paper you are going to provide for each group should be divided into three or four, accordingly.
After deciding which person is going to draw which part of the animal/person/object. One student is going to pick an animal from the bag, e.g. the student in charge to draw to top part of the animal chooses lion (this person is going to draw a lion head, while their partners wait with their eyes cover) It is important that the other students do not look at their partners drawings until the end. After the first person is done with the drawing, he/she is going to fold and hide the drawing, leaving a hint to his partner to continue (some lines where the neck ends would be helpful). Then, the first student covers his/her eyes and passes it to the person in charge of the middle part, this person is going to do exactly the same, but choosing another animal from the bag. At the end you will have something like this:
Maybe not as professional, but you are going to have a unique drawing that your students did cooperatively. Besides, they can also share their drawings in the classroom and make comments towards their partners’ pieces of art.
Keep the
balloon up
This famous game can be adapted to any class and lesson. You can use it to learn vocabulary, the ABC, numbers, etc. For paying, make sure that you have an outdoor space or a big classroom. You can do this activity with all your students as a group or in small groups the only thing you need is balloons. Your students’ job will be to make sure the balloon does not touch the floor, they can use their heads, hand, legs, feet to pass it to their partners. While they are working together not letting the balloon to touch the ground, they might be also counting how many times they have passed it without dropping it. They can also try to say al the letters of the alphabet or simply say the vocabulary they know. Your students will have a lot of fun while learning and working together.
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