DIY find someone who

A DIY find someone who activity can be used to practice and activate almost any grammatical structure in both affirmative, negative and question forms. It is a variation of a find someone who activity which is student-centered and which provides controlled and free practice in two separate stages of the same activity. The following example illustrates how it can be used to practice future forms:

Preparation

 * Students will need a sheet of paper and a pen(cil)
 * The teacher will need to pre-teach the uses of the future forms on the following table:

Procedure

 * Brainstorm future time phrases on the board e.g. next year, when I retire, on New Year`s Eve, before I die, on my next Birthday, after class, this weekend, tomorrow, on Saturday night etc.
 * Instruct students to tear their sheet of paper into 6 squares.
 * Show students the above table containing the future forms.
 * Ask a student to choose a number from 1-6, whichever number s/he chooses, the corresponding future form on the tabel is to be used.
 * On the word "go", each student writes a true sentence about themselves onto one of the squares of paper in one minute. They must use the selected future form, yet they can choose any of the time phrases to go with it e.g. "I`m planning to go to a gig on Saturday night", or "I`m starting college next year""
 * After the minute is up, another form is randomly chosen and the activity is repeated. This goes on until each student has written a sentence on each square of paper in each future form. During this stage the teacher monitors, eliciting and noting any errors.
 * On completion, delayed error correction takes place and students self-correct any that occur in their own work.
 * The teacher collects and shuffles the squares of paper, then redistributes them so that each student has six new sentences.
 * The students then mill around the class, asking each other questions in order to find the people who wrote the sentences e.g. "Are you plannning to go to a gig on Saturday night'?" or "Are you starting college next year?".'' On finding someone whose information matches a square, a student hands them the square and the activity continues.
 * Class feedback and error correction follows.

Variation

 * This can be played as a dice game: groups of three to four play and on throwing a number, a student`s team mates have one minute to write a sentence about him/her. A point is awarded for the funniest or truest sentence.