This lesson is a lot simplier than the cooking one, and turned out to be a lot funnier than I thought it would be. What you do is you take a bunch of strips of paper and write various roles on them. Like 'Police Officer', 'Teacher', 'Child', 'Angry Person' etc etc. Flip them over and put them on your desk.
Tell your students to get into groups of 2-4, than to come up (one group at a time) and pick a role. Whatever that role is, that is what they have to be. Give them 20 minutes or so to write a short skit where all those roles have to interact with one another. This pushes them to be creative, increases their vocabulary and helps them work on their conversational English. While they wrote, I walked around and helped them figure out their roles and fixed errors in their dialouges as I saw them.
In my freshmen classes (where I tried this lesson), it was like watching amateur improv comedians.
There was one group that got the roles "Barrack Obama," "Taxi Driver," and "Crazy Person." I thought this one would be hilarious (in my American mind, it had to be) but it was kind of 'meh.' Standard stuff. The group that had 'Doctor' and 'Sad Person' was hilarious simply because of the amount of acting both students put into their characters. Its pretty great when the Chinese sense of humor and the American sense of humor meet somewhere.
I took notes while watching the skits and than at the end of the skits, I briefly went over points I saw (how to improv, mistakes I saw a lot of people make etc) and by that point, class was basically over. Fun way to spend an afternoon.
A variant of this activity is where the groups have to keep their roles a secret from other groups, and at the end of each performance, the class has to guess who had what role (there was some success in this).
Some of the role papers!
Utilizing props! Woo!
The attentive audience!
Good times,
- Andrew
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