SPICE UP your LESSONS with a hotel reception BELL!

23/4/2016

Want to make your ‘dull’ grammar lessons more exciting? All you need is a hotel reception bell.

Last week I wanted to practise verbs followed by prepositions in an exciting way so I sat a group of adults around a hotel reception bell and projected sentences with the preposition after the verb missing. As they saw and heard me reading the sentence there was a rush to ping the bell and answer!

I would never have believed that a group of middle-aged adults could get so excited about ringing a bell to answer a question!

However, if they ring the bell and get it wrong a point is deducted. This stops them from ringing the bell and guessing.

Any exercise can be spiced up in this way. My next endeavour is to find where they sell more bells (this one I had at home) so I can make teams in bigger classes. Let me know your students’ reaction if you try it out! Mine loved it!

I hope you like this suggestion.
Susan
a traditional lesson?

4 Comments

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Author

My name is Susan Brodar, born in London into a multilingual family and brought up bilingual English / Italian.

I went to school in London until 15 when we moved to Germany where I finished my British education at Munich International School. I started teaching Italian at evening classes aged only 17 and studied Mass Communications and Journalism at Munich University.

I continued teaching parallel to interpreting at trade fairs and business meetings as well doing translations. After working at the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade for a year I married my Italian globetrotting companion in 1983 and we set up our home near Venice, Italy where we continue to live with our two teenaged children.

Having taken my British High School-leaving ‘A’ Level exams in English, Italian, French & German I am completely fluent in all four languages and am taking a DELE certification in Spanish to complement them.

ENGLISH (native)
ITALIAN (native)
GERMAN (C2)
FRENCH (C2)
SPANISH (B2)

Cleona Patterson link

24/4/2016 10:52:29 am

What fun!
I have to think of a way to do this with online groups.
Each have to get there own bell......or maybe there is another way?

Susan Brodar link

24/4/2016 11:39:58 am

Glad you like it!
I don't know if one can make a 'computer buzzer' maybe each with a different sound so you can distinguish which online student buzzed first?
But the bell is really fun!

Lusine

27/4/2016 06:50:48 am

Sounds Great!
Thank you,hope my kids will gave a real fun

Valeria

25/4/2022 05:26:08 am

Thanks for this! After having read this post, I´ve recently tried it with one of my groups of secondary students, and will continue using your idea in different activities with different students. I had had this in mind from that time up to now, so, after 6 years, i´m glad that I put this into practice! Thanks a lot!

Regards, from Argentina