The first class back to school after the holidays can sometimes be a drag – students are often tired and not particularly motivated to jump straight back into the curriculum. So here is a fun activity you can use to get students back in the mood for English – using emoji in the classroom.
What are emoji?
As I’m sure you know already, emoji are small icons or images that can be used to express an emotion in digital communication – smiley faces, angry faces, food icons, etc. Students probably use them all the time already, but how can you use them in the classroom? Here’s one idea:
Back-to-school activity: talking about your holidays
On the first day back to class, talking about what students did in the holidays is a nice and easy activity to ease students back into English after the break. But it can be a bit stale. Using emoji can liven up this activity and motivate students to use their English to communicate with you and each other. And the activity can be used with students at A1+ level right up to C2 level learners.
Step 1: Preparation.
Think about what you did in the holidays and choose a few emoji to represent this. You can find emoji on websites such as http://www.copyandpasteemoji.com/ and http://getemoji.com/ . Copy the emoji onto a document and display the emoji you have chosen on the whiteboard using a projector, or alternatively, if you don’t have the technology, just print them out or draw them on the board! Here are mine – around 6 to 8 is probably enough.
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Step 2: Provide a model for the learners.
Students ask you questions to find out what you did during the holidays, e.g. Did you travel somewhere by car? Did you go to the beach? Did you go on holiday with your family? etc., and then ask one of the students to tell the story of what you did using the emoji and what they have found out through the questions. You can add any information and let them ask you more questions about what they are interested in.
Step 3: Students prepare.
Give students time to prepare their own emoji to represent their holiday. You can project the emoji onto the whiteboard, or if students are allowed to use phones, they can use their own phone to find the emoji they want. A class WhatsApp group is a great way of sharing the emoji with each other too.
Step 4: Share in pairs.
In pairs, one student shows their emoji to their partner (on their phone or drawn out), who asks questions and makes suggestions about what they think their partner did. After a few minutes, swap over and the other student shows their emoji while their partner asks questions.
You can repeat this stage again so that students swap partners and do the same activity with another person. Repeating speaking activities is a good way of helping students to perfect their language use as they can learn from what they did before and improve their communication skills.
Step 5: Share with the class.
Ask students to share their emoji with the class and then other students try to tell the story of what they did without any questions or more information. The student can say what they got right and what was wrong. This can lead to some very funny interpretations!
Follow up/Homework:
Students write a short article (100 to 130 words) for a competition in a student magazine about what they did in the holidays.
We hope you like this idea…more ideas about using emoji in the classroom will be published at a later date.