Helping young learner's spell can be made fun by introducing music into the mix. This simple dictation exercise builds on the idea of musical chairs.
Aim: Dictation, improving spelling skills, improving listening skills, review recent grammar and vocabulary work
Activity: Musical Dictation
Level: All levels
Outline:
- Choose a piece of music that you are sure students are sure to enjoy.
- Have students break up into groups of three or four students each.
- Explain the rules to the class:
- Take a pen and quickly pass it to each other as the music plays.
- When the music stops, the student who has just received the pen needs to write down what the teacher says.
- Students get a point for each correctly word, or correctly written sentence.
- The team with the most points at the end of the dictation wins.
- Put the music on and go! Here is a suggestion for how to build up the difficulty of the dictation.
- Start with single words
- Build to short phrases
- Expand to full sentences
- Review English by using grammar forms or vocabulary that you have just been working on in class.
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Variation:
Get your students to write phrases to use in a class contest. When you read a phrase written by one group, that groups sits out and receives three bonus points if no other team manages to write the phrase correctly.
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