Today I'm going to give you some advice on how to use paper fortune tellers to teach English as a
second language to children.
I have found that these are a great icebreaker to use with small numbers of children, excellent for teaching specific vocabulary, useful to review vocabulary your students have difficulty with or just a fun game for advanced/bilingual students.
First, I've explained how to make one with pictures below. Otherwise there are loads of great tutorials on Youtube that you can watch, such as this one.
Unfold the triangle and fold a new triangle from the corners that haven't yet been folded to make a cross through the middle of the square of paper.
Then fold the paper in half one way, open up and fold in half the other way to make a cross through the middle of the square.
Fold each corner into the middle of the square.
Turn over and again, fold each corner into the middle of the square.
Fold the fortune teller.
To decorate the fortune teller, unfold it so it's flat.
Et voilà!
You can play with them in one of two ways. Either, have the children spell out the words
as they open and shut the fortune teller, or, have them count how many letters
are in the word and have them open and shut the fortune teller that many
times. Adapt the way you play with the
fortune teller according to their age and language ability.
I recommend making these with no more than 12 children at a
time as you will need to be on hand to help them with the folding and supervise
what they’re doing so that they don’t make any mistakes.
I don’t advise making
fortune tellers with children under the age of 6 as folding is a difficult
skill for children to grasp; even older children will need very clear
instructions and you will have to check their folds as they do them to make
sure the fortune teller can open and close at the end.
If you have a group of mixed ages, buddy up the younger
children with an older child who can do some of the supervision for you. Older children will probably have made one of
these before and remember how to make it once they get going.
However, go ahead and use a fortune teller you have made
with your younger students: just use pictures and numbers that they have to name instead of words and questions! You could even use pictures which represent something or someone they have to mime, such as animals:
To use your fortune teller as an ice-breaker, decorate it to ask basic questions and review basic vocabulary such as colours and numbers. Do this by writing colours on the outside of the fortune teller, numbers in the centre and basic questions such as “what’s your name?” under the flaps inside the fortune teller. When the children are confident at answering the questions you can hand over the task of asking the questions to them and role-reverse, or have children interacting with each other under your supervision.
For specific vocabulary:
Chose the topic you want the children to learn or
review. For example, the weather.
Use the seasons as the 4 options on the outside of the fortune teller, put weather vocabulary in the centre and put tasks such as "draw and umbrella" or "mime putting on a coat" inside the fortune teller, under the flaps.
To review difficult vocabulary:
Some words are hard to pronounce, some are hard to remember,
some phrases and questions are hard for children to understand (for example the
difference between “how are you?” and “how old are you?”)
These difficulties are really specific to each child or
group that you teach, so your ideas of how to use a fortune teller in this case
are going to be very specific to the needs of your students, but here’s the
idea of how fortune tellers can help:
Some children can be very self-critical or become shy when
they find something difficult, so finding fun ways of over-coming a language
obstacle is essential to help them get through their blockage. Playing with a fortune teller is a one-to-one
activity that you can have children do in pairs. This means they’re going to have an
opportunity to practise the vocabulary they find more difficult with fewer
pairs of eyes staring at them as they do so.
Also, most children love playing with fortune tellers and want to play
over and over again. This means they’re
repeating the difficult vocabulary a lot, and hearing difficult questions again
and again before gaining the confidence to try asking those same questions
themselves. Trust me, they will want to
role-reverse after they have answered the questions a few times.
Areas of language I've found my French students have
difficulty with are things such as:
Big numbers, and pronouncing certain numbers (I'm thinking
of you, fifteen), correctly, as well as pronouncing the teens and the tens in
different ways (“sixteen” “sixty”), getting the rhythm right with certain questions “how old are
you?” (Having a word starting with “h” followed by one starting with a vowel
seems to be a pitfall), asking longer questions: “how many brothers and sisters have
you got?” and making full sentences. (“I am 6 years old” instead of just
“I'm 6”).
Taking into account the challenges I've listed above, I
would then decide that I need to make a number specific fortune teller,
including some similar sounding numbers 18, 80, 14, 40, and the number 55.
Why? Because 55 helps the children to understand
that 15 sounds different to 5 with its two different sounds and gets them
practising both sounds in one go.
Remember language learning is about training the muscles in the mouth as well as the ear!
Remember language learning is about training the muscles in the mouth as well as the ear!
Inside I would write long and similar questions (how are
you? how old are you? what do you look like? what’s the weather like today? what
do you like? how many brothers and sisters have you got?
For bilingual and older children it’s a great writing
exercise too. Children often find the
writing and reading part of language learning the most boring. But when creating a game to play, it’s
suddenly a lot more fun! Bilingual
children can be creative in what vocabulary they choose to include in their
fortune teller, and why not make traditional fortune tellers with cute
predictions such as (you’re going to find some money). Let their imaginations run wild.
So will you be using fortune tellers in your class now? Let me know how it goes!
