During many lessons the structure makes sense: You do a short recap, give an instruction somewhere, students do some work etc. But that is not what you during the final lesson for a test right? 

At the end of the chapter you simply want to rehearse and make sure students really get it, without having to explain everything again.

Allow me to share three activities that do just that: make sure students are learning and making sure they are still motivated to learn despite rehearsing things.

Recognize this?

• Final paragraph done: check
• Finished all of the important tasks of the chapter: check
• One or two more lessons to rehearse things: check

Now what?

Those one or two rehearsal lessons allow for more freedom, but also require you to think about how to engage your students in a way they are still motivated.

All of them. Not just the ones that have questions.

I don't know about you, but I always find these lessons to be quite challenging because some students really understand the chapter and others, well, don't.

To make sure all students are still engaged and learning, I selected a few CLIL activities I think work really well in these situaties.

And obviously, I have tried them in my lessons as well!

Okay, without further ado, let's have a look at the three activities I think work great:

This activity has many different names, but the most important part is:

You allow your students to create problems for each other. 

So, how does this work?

First, the student instruction

After the instruction, students started creating the problems for each other. Because the students had to answer the questions themselves first, they had to make sure they really understand the tasks.

Absolutely amazing!

I did not have to do anything for 15 minutes in a row, as I noticed students walking around, asking each other questions (in English), discussing answers they did not agree with and asking me for more problems.

Just an idea: you can ask students to create 2 problems. That gives you a little freedom when handing out new problems.

Other ways this activity can be implement can be:

Again, a CLIL activity you might already know, but works wonders (when used carefully). Whenever I used this activity, I can walk out of the room, knowing the students are working.

The main reason this activity works so well, is because students are responsible for the learning of others (much like my group leader system).

If they know others depend on them, and they can be asked to explain things, they are more motivated to work.

Just a quick note: make sure the students are numbered in a way the groups are not more than 5 people. Otherwise too many people might not do anything.

Also, I assume students are already in groups. If not, you have to start with groups they will go back to later one.

Many different websites offer ways to turn phrases of words into puzzles, like puzzlemaker.com.

Using these tools, you can easily create puzzles students can use to rehearse topics from the chapter.

However, it gets even more interesting once students have to do this themselves for each other.

This is an activity that could easily take 30 minutes if your students take it seriously. However, you do need to scaffold this activity carefully, for example by providing a framework to be filled in. 

I was amazed by the enthusiasm students worked on this activity, spending more time creating it than actually solving the other ones.

Some other ways this activity can be implemented:

Credits: Image by Freepik