Sparking creativity in a classroom is like making a fire. You can attempt to control the various components, provide the necessary materials and be patient but there's never a 100% probability that it will catch.
One of the longest withstanding challenges I face is encouraging creativity and sparking imagination, a very popular topic in EFL right now. Most of my students (and the general population) are not particularly creative, at least according to commonly-accepted notions of creativity. I've had the rare student who from the first day acts as a catalyst for everyone else to put down their guards, lessen their 'performance' anxiety, start taking risks in language, essentially lowering their affective filters. In effect, once students feel comfortable enough with their classmates and with me to say what they really think/feel, imagination blossoms.
After asking my students to imagine themselves as a bunch of different people they aren't for a bunch of arbitrary roleplay activities, it occurred to me to use realia, something which I haven't taken full advantage of really. "Realia", or actual objects (or facsimiles) can be a powerful tool in providing a reference for meaning and aid in teaching various language points, or so I hear. People who label themselves as "uncreative" should be alleviated from the pressure of imagining because they no longer have to pretend.
So, peanuts.
Lesson plan: 3 Kinds of Peanuts
Aim: practice using comparatives and superlatives with adjectives and adverbs, after initial review of grammar form and function.
Materials: salted peanuts, honey-roasted peanuts, chocolate-covered peanuts (M&Ms), paper and pen.
1. Distribute/hand out one kind of peanut to each student, after asking about peanut allergies.
2. Elicit adjectives to describe each one in terms of colour, texture, size, and shape:
e.g. beige/tan, brown, blue/red/yellow, rough, smooth, bumpy, shiny, small/large, round, symmetrical/asymmetrical, spherical, irregular.
3. Elicit sentences or tell the students to write sentences (depending on their level, command of the structure, or energy level) to compare the peanuts with:
"adj. + '-er', '-ier'....than"
"More/less....than"
"as....as"
4. Elicit adjectives of flavour/taste:
E.g. tasty/delicious, sweet/sour, bitter, mild/bland, salty, spicy/hot, umami.
5. Ask students which words would apply to the peanuts at hand and ask them to choose three variables, for example:
sweet
salty
delicious
5. Taste test: students taste each peanut and rate them from 1-10 on 3 variables of taste.
6. Students compare answers to see if they're the same/different. If the students are at a higher level, they could work in groups of 2-3 and present their results as taste-testers of the three brands of peanut, first comparing peanuts A to B to C, and then the one that is the most delicious, the tastiest, the saltiest, etc. Students at a higher level could also compare their findings with their partners', e.g. "I think that the normal peanut is not as salty as the honey-roasted peanut, whereas my partner thinks that the honey-roasted peanut is the saltiest". The teacher could also ask for recommendations for the brands about what they could change in the cooking process, e.g. More honey? Darker chocolate? More sugar? Less Salt? etc.
Reflection:
Overall, the aim was achieved and all the students in the three classes practiced the language structures.
For my teens class (A2), they were much more excited about getting to eat the M&M's than talking about them and were not at a level of confidence to use the structures without written preparation. My FCE (B2) class needed more review of the grammar than I'd thought and were making "lower-level" errors, e.g. "The peanuts are more tastier than the M&M's", but at the same time had already learned the structures, "As....as", and "not so....as". The conclusion that I choose to draw from this experiment is that bringing taste into language learning is significantly more exciting and hopefully more effective in the fossilization of the comparative and superlative forms. I'll be doing this one again.
