How To Turn Your Lesson Into a Quest in 15 Minutes

Today I decided to add more fun to our usual small competitions and unite all the exercises under one topic. We had an Adventure Islands Quest. You can see our route on the right. As you see, it takes not more then just a picture on the board.
As we were doing it I thought that I could have made a paper boat so that it would travel for real. That would have added some interactivity, you now.
This quest can be planned in advance and have some special points, tasks and so on or can be included into your lesson without any special preparation.

When to use it at the lesson:

1) As a HW-check activity if you had at least 3-4 exercises. Plus you can always add some extra practice to the topics assigned for HW and here you go - already about 6 exercises, which is good number for any quest.

2) As a New Topic journey. You can arrange the stages in accordance with grammar-vocab-use of english-listening-writing-.. scheme. Or plan the stages as introduction-let's come up with the rule-drilling-freer practice-etc.

3) As an activity that will go through the whole lesson. In this case a more profound background story is probably required, so that it unites different parts of the lesson. Or you can just have stages (e.g. HW-check, new material, practice) and substages at each of the major stage.

How you can prepare such an activity in 15 minutes before the lesson:

1) Choose a topic. The easiest way is to go with some journey - islands, space, town, country, etc.

2) Count how many exercises you have in your plan today (or how many HW exercises you have if you decide to make it as a HW-check activity).

3) Draw stages in accordance with the number of the exercises (e.g. 5 HW exercises mean 5 islands). Set some ultimate goal at the last stage - find a treasure, rescue your friend, catch a thieve, collect all the puzzle pieces to make a picture, etc.

(optional - 4) Draw some extra stuff/characters/surroundings/etc. It will take you not more than 60 seconds, but will add significantly to the atmosphere.

(quite optional - 5) Take a magnet and put it at the first stage to mark the beginning. Move the magnet as your group conquers the quest.

6) Copy all the exercises from the textbook and cut them out so that they look like some cards (it takes about 3-4 mins, but kids will love them more than just regular Open textbook page blah-blah exercise blah-blah).

(optional - 7) You can also stick these cards to the stages so that kids can come up to the board and grab them - the more they move the better.

It's as simple as that! I tried these Adventure Islads with both teenager Elementary and Young Learner's groups and it worked just great!

I hoppe your kids will love it too=)

Wish you fun and effective lessons ;)

Sherlock Holmes Quest

Today was our last lesson in this semester and I'm really excited right now about strating the new Intermediate textbook in two weeks with my elder students!
I hope that all of them will stay in the group, we'll add couple new faces and start fresh and kickng right away!

I would like to share with you ideas and materials I used for our last lesson. We always try to make it special - prepare a quest or some game. Last lesson I offered them 4 topics to choose from and everybody agreed on Sherlock Holmes.

So that's how our Sherlock Quest lesson went today:

1) Find the next clue. Children teamed up into 2 groups (I have only 5 students in this group) and ad to run around the Educational Centre to find the clues of their team colour which would lead them to new clues and so on till they found the last ones that had secret words written on them. Some of the clues contained not only directions, but also small tasks like find out how to say hello, bye and thank you in German (that was in a German classroom, the teacher of which agreed to help me) and find out the EC manager's name.

2) Create your own Detective Agency. Children had 10 minutes, lots of markers and a piece of paper for each group to create a symbol, a moto and come up with a name for their Detective Agency.

3) Meeting the victim. The Agencies received their first calls. It was an old lady who had been robbed. She told her story where she and her cat Mr.Whiskers were drinking tea when the accident happened. What she saw was only a black figure climbing out of her living room window. There was only her neighbour with a baby walking down the street, the gardner who must have been doing his work in the backyard and no other witnesses. So the detectives decided to go to the gardner first.

4) Witness number 1. The gardner was a lonely old man living with his owl. He didn't want to say anything till somebody played the Story game with him while drinking 5 o'clock tea. I found this game at the EC and it's designed to spur children's imagination and develop storytelling skills. It's called Rory's Story Cubes and you can buy them either "in flash" or purchase an app, which is three times cheaper. The real dice feel great in your hands though. So the thing is that each side of the dice (there are nine of them in the box) has a picture on it. Player rolls nine dice and gets nine pictures. He needs to make up a story that will contain all of those words now.
After having played the game the gardner decided to share some info.

5) Wintess number 2. The young lady that was wallking down the street with her baby in hands that night was very nice and agreed to answer all the detectives' questions. She only needed some time to run to the grocery's and buy some milk for the baby. Meanwhile she asked the detective to look after her chiled and play sharades with him. Here I took some words from the units we studied this semester, wrote them on cards and put either S, T or D at the bottom of which card. S is for show, T is for Talk, D is for Draw, so now guys needed to take turns to get the card and either mime, explain or draw the words.
When the lady came she answered all the questions and the detectives found out that her husband saw Mrs.White's husband 1 week ago, which was really strange because Mr.White left the town 2 years ago when he and Mrs.White got divorced.

6) Witness number 3. The neighbour's house was at his workplace and worked really hard to catch up with his deadlines so he didn't really have time to talk to the detectives. The detectives decided to help him to write the articles (this man was a journalist) and therefore save him some time to talk to them. Here are the topics that I offered to my students (they had 15 minutes to write 1-2 paragraph stories):

• You are building a sand castle and suddenly notice that the sea has brought something to the beach from its deep waters. You come closer and see that it’s a bottle with some sheet of paper inside. You open it and here is what the paper says:
• You are walking the streets and at some point an old man and an old lady approach you. It turns out that it’s exactly you who they need for one secret mission…
• You are walking the streets and arrive at a narrow one. All the houses there have dirty grey walls, doors and windows except for one house that stands at the very end of the street. It’s bright blue and has a yellow roof. Who lives in this house?
• Write a story where you will mention a girl with a pot with honey, a bear, a street lamp
• You and your friends are camping in a forest. It’s an early morning and you and your best friend decide to have a walk. You find a tree with a nest on it. The nest is full of golden eggs. One of the eggs is opening….
• “That’s where the rainbow ends!” – Lilly cheerfully cried out loud. It was a very interesting place indeed….
• And all over the room there were… pancakes! Here is how it happened.

After having helped the man they learned that he saw Mr.White at the Glade's Bar last week. Mr.White was talking to some tall skinny blonde guy and was pretty nervous.

7) Witness number 4. At first detectives had to find the right person at the bar buy matching pictures of young men and appearance descriptions. Once done, they started asking the tall blonde buddy questions to which he was reluctant however. He wanted to gamble with them at first. Cluedo game was very popular in that bar and the guy agreed to tell them everything he knew only if they win this game. So we played cluedo (there were 6 of us all together, so it went perfectly). Here is the Amazon link to the game in case you don't know it. I was lucky to have it at my EC, but I think you can make one yourself (I'm planning to, because it's rather expensive).
The gambler told the detectives that Mr.White discussed theft with him and ask for advice. The gambler however didn't know where to find Mr.White.

8) Witness number 5. When the detectives were leaving the bar a girl approached and said she heard them speaking and could take them to Mr.White. She showed them the house and in order to thank her detectives decided to play with her. Any game you find funny at useful at the same time would fit this step. It would be great if the game was active as well because after playing Cluedo children get tired sitting and want to move around.

9) The Mansion. So detectives arrived at the mension. It has three floors and 16 windows + 1 window on the roof. Mr.White is in the attick so to get to that roof window children need to go through those 16 first. Each window (as you can see on the picture) has a sticker on it. Some stickers tell you that you earn 2-5 extra points, some tell you that you loose 1-3 points, some give you small tasks like sing your fav English song and get 5 points, say these three tongue twisters in a raw without any mistakes and get 7 points, and some imply completing a worksheet on one of the topics of the semester.

10) The arrest. You got that old evil man! Now to finish up your quest in a fun way act like poor Mr.White, make couple jokes, say something funny, thank the detectives on behalf of Mrs. White and even draw a cell on the Mr.White's picture.

Some extras you need to/may apply:

• Don't forget to score. Give points (and reason the number of points given) for each task. Calculate all the points at the end and reveal the winner;
• Act out the characters. Take up the roles of the witnesses and make it fun. I printed out pictures of each witness and their house/room/office and added some character pecularities to each. For example, my gardner had an owl that he was always talking to; the gambler was stupid and talked with his mouth full; baby's mother was too energetic and active, wouldn't stop talking and so on;
• Give useful prizes for the winners (e.g. copybook for foreign words, small English proverbs dictionary);
• Play Sherlock Holmes OST music in the beginning and then put on some music when children work on tasks and worksheets.

I hope that some of this information will prove useful to you :) you are very welcome to try out these ideas at your lessonsand leave a comment about how it all went.

Thank you very much for reading and do not hesitate to share!

When substitution becomes an adventure. Part 2

So the second part of my substitution day today was devoted to Elementary group a list of which consisted of 7 people. However only two showed up at the lesson and I must say that the rest five would have defenitely regreted their decision if they had seen the Harry Potter game prepared for them. Other 4 teachers that work at that educational centre prepared a very nice quest for their groups, which my kids and I were offered to join. In no way I intend to take at least the smallest part of the glory of their project, I just want to note it down here so that it may inspire someone, help out with the topic or whateverelse. I must confess I would love to arrange something similar, with the same HP topic, for my kids at the last lesson. I will probably take the HP topic as a base as it's magical and fun although as it turned out some kids didn't even watch a single movie needless to say read a book.

For those who might find it useful and/or inspiring (and for myself aswell) I will shortly describe how the game went.

0) Do some lead-in, familirize students with the topic vocab they might need, arrange a small-talk on the topic, a lot of things might be used as a lead-in (I sometimes think that the way craftsmen collect and keep every little thing to use later as material, teachers do the same thing for lead-ins and ice-breakers/warmers with different kinds of music, videos, games, cards, whatever).

1) Divide all the students into four Houses. Be the hat. Ask questiones and depending on the answer divide students into for equal parts. You can do it with 2-3 students at a time to save time.

1.2) If your students are from different groups (like in the game I took part in today), play a get-to-know activity with each House, so that they can get acquainted and brake the ice a bit.

1.3) Give each house a paper to design their emblem and moto. About 10-15 minutes to draw and then 2-3 minutes to prepare presentation of their House infront of other groups.

2) First task. Real quest. All teams are given the first clues. They need to follow the lead and move around the whole room/building to find the next clue and so on. Here they can be given points/small prize/special items that will allow them to procede with further excercises.

They are in Hogwarts now, they need to attend lessons. So four groups go to different classes where different teachers and subjects are awaiting.

3) Potion challenge. About 10 differrent bottles with liquids of different colour are infront of students. They are given a riddle, a logical one. It has about 5-7 sentences and describes where which potion is. There 3 types of potions: killers, 1 potion that lets you move forward in the game, harmless liquids like juice or water. Students need to solve the riddle and find the potion that will let them continue their journey. If they guess it right they get 8 points. If they guess it right + tell which are killers and which are harmless, they get 10 points. If they drink a killer you can take points away from them.

4) Deal with Cerberus. You need to make the three-headed dog fall asleep by singing to it. Students are given fill-in-the-gaps song worksheet. They listen to the song 2 times filling the gaps. Check their answers with the teacher and then sing the right version all together. In this case it was a funny song about Harry Potter's story.

5) Vocabulary lesson. It was a stage filled with different wordsearches/quizzes/speaking activities/sharades/matching games. All of them were short activities so that children had a chance to play about 5 games in 20 minutes or so.

6) Wake up your senses/Potion lesson. Here students at first talked about senses and their importance. Then they were offered four cups, one at a time, filled with some mixtures of unknown ingridients. Just by smelling and/or tasting it they needed to guess the ingridients.

At each of these stages the teams could get maximum 10 points. So when they finished going through all of them they united all together in one hall again and teachers summed up their results. All the children got candys, The winning House got an additional prize. It all finished with a group photo.


Some of the children found this activity more interesting, some - less, of course. But it defenitely was a great last lesson where they had a chance to use different skills, apply knowledge, built a team spirit and have fun.

I am really glad that I could take part and watch this whole game being carried out.