“POST IT YOUR KNOWLEDGE”

According to EDU Order 362/2015 from 4th May, one compulsory content shared by
the 4 blocks is the general and daily oral and written lexicon embedded within the
discursive syntactic structure. (¿qué te parece la intro??). For this reason, I have
outlined this activity, whose goal is to activate my students´ prior knowledge. Let´s see
how it works:
For this activity, 3 mixed ability groups of fives are organized and named A, B and C.
Each group is given two sets of 6 post-its each like these ones (y se las enseño): as you
may notice,the yellow ones have some words on the topic of ---------------- , related to
the lesson plan we are about to start and the pink ones have their correspondent
definitions. Clearly enough, what they have to do is to match the words with their
definitions; as some of these words are unknown for them, they count on Jose
Luis´assistance. The choice of this pupil is not random; on the contrary, I have noticed
that he feels demotivated because of his low proficency level ; Thus, I want to boost
his self-confidence by giving him some responsibility and, for that reason ,he has the
mastercopy with the answers. When the group finishes the matching, Jose Luis is in
charge of saying if it is correct or not. He can also give each group some clues but only
after two failed attempts.
As soon as Jose Luis checks the vocabulary, the groups are now in charge of making
up and writing a gap filling exercise where to insert the intended words; they mustn´t
forget to give the key to Jose Luis, the expert today.
The time comes to swap both post-its, and exercises, from group A to group B, from B
to group C and from C to group A ; now, their mission is to fill in the gaps whereas Jose
Luis´ goal is to check if their guesses are correct.
In order to motivate my pupils, I have previously told them that some of these fill in
the gap sentences will take part of the next test.