Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty
Posted: April 10, 2012 Filed under: Animation, lesson plan | Tags: Granny O'Grimm, listening, Sleeping Beauty, speaking, translation, word cloud, YouTube 2 Comments »“Gritting my toothless gums in seething RAGE is what keeps my skin taut.”
“That’s what really annoys me about Twitter. Can’t do the disappointed sigh and the threatening silence just becomes – silence”
“In the grand World Cup of life, I am of course in the group of death”.
These are just a few of the things Granny O’Grimm has to say on her Twitter page . So when she reads Sleeping Beauty to her granddaughter, you can probably guess that it isn’t going to be the traditional take on the story.
In this lesson, students talk about some traditional fairy tales before watching the Oscar-nominated Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty. They then use their imagination (and / or memory) to fill part of the story with adjectives before retelling in the style of Granny O’Grimm. Finally, they write the subtitles in their own language. If their language is Spanish, they can compare their version with one that has already been put on YouTube, and if not, they could go to overstream to subtitle the clip in their L1.
Click here for detailed Teacher’s Notes
For more about Granny O’Grimm, see her website . Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty was written by Kathleen O’Rourke , directed by Nicky Phelan, and produced by brownbagfilms.
Pigeon Impossible
Posted: August 1, 2011 Filed under: Animation, lesson plan | Tags: speaking, vocabulary, YouTube 1 Comment »I love activities which really push students’ vocabulary skills to the limit and help make them more aware of what exactly they can and can’t do. With that in mind, this kind of back-to-back viewing activity in pairs is a great example and can be done with almost any piece of film. But of course it’s better if it’s action-packed or funny or, in this case, both….
Pigeon Impossible Teacher’s Notes
Blind Date
Posted: May 12, 2011 Filed under: Animation, lesson plan | Tags: Aardman, Blind Date, food, observation, ordering, speaking, storytelling, vocabulary, YouTube Leave a comment »This activity is based on the beautifully animated Aardman clip Blind Date. Apart from finding or downloading the clip, there’s no preparation required. The activity starts off with a vocabulary game and finishes with storytelling. Between the two, students watch the clip, order the vocabulary and predict the ending. I’ve done this activity with several classes over the last few months and they’ve all really enjoyed it.
