In this "murder mystery" activity, a beloved professor has been murdered in his mansion. The students have to take on the roles of different characters and, using Portuguese past verb tenses and relevant vocabulary, solve the mystery.
This is an activity for Lioudmila Zaitseva's Elementary Russian class. She goes through a floor plan illustration on the board and calls on volunteers to label the parts, then place a corresponding image in the specific zone of the plan. This is a fun way for students to remember their vocabulary, basic verbs, and basically conduct a general review.
In her classes, Professor Judith Ryan uses (or encourages her TFs to use) little strips of paper with words from a literary text in order to get students to explore the functions of individual words in text.
Students are asked to write down a weird or random fact about themselves on a sticky note and to pass it to the person to their left. Each student is then asked to brainstorm logically possible explanations of the fact he or she has received. Through this activity, students learn to distinguish the best or most likely explanations from all the logically possible ones.
For Andrew Gray's intermediate Spanish course, students complete an activity using Spanish sayings to improve knowledge of the language and popular oral culture.
