5 Minute Activities
What are 5 minute activities?
I like to call them as 5 minute activities as they take not more than 5 minutes. They are small, fast, interesting and exciting to get your students’ attention and focus instantly.
The 5 minute activities come in all varieties with endless tasks. These 5 minutes will make your students ask for more.
These can be done in the beginning or the end of the class. They can be used to pep up sagging interest.
Any topic can be introduced and revised, any concept revisited and strengthened.
5 minute activities can be done as individual, pair or group work.
Seize those 5 minutes of your class to make the most of every class.
Also read : 5 minute activities : Riddles
5 minute activity – CRYPTOGRAMS
Cryptograms have
fascinated men and women since time immemorial.
Originally cryptograms were used by the military to convey messages and
pass information in a secretive manner. They have evolved to be great
entertainers as they challenge people to go beyond their comfort level and
think hard to break the ciphers and code.
There are many interesting coding and decoding techniques. I have used the popular and easy substitution technique where an alphabet is substituted with another and so on.
Challenging,
interesting and highly stimulating, cryptograms are a great teaching tool in an
English language classroom.
This
5 minute activity is sure to challenge students into thinking really hard to
unravel the encrypted proverbs.
Once
the encryption code is revealed, decoding is a cake walk. As the students get
the hang of encoding and decoding, this 5 minute activity can be a regular
feature in any class room.
Students
may create their own codes with numbers, figures or any other interesting
technique to challenge their peers and learning can happen in a happy and
joyous way.
Variations of this 5 minute activity can be:
* Use words from a theme.
For example
- Authors
- Books by a particular author
- Poetic devices with examples
- Paragraphs with gaps to be filled with adjectives/ adverbs
- Collective nouns
- Vocabulary related to specific theme/topic
* Use a particular block
of text.
For example :
- a stanza from a poem / a paragraph from a text as an introduction
In this post I have used 15 proverbs which the students can decode.
- meanings of these proverbs can be discussed
- using these proverbs in sentences and context
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