Creative Chair

By Silvama Rampone—Italy
Age: 6-10
Times: 30 minutes 
Materials: A4 paper, felt tip pens, scissors, glue, dance music and equipment to play it on.
Organisation: Group work and whole class.
Aim: To practice speaking and writing.
Description: In this activity, children co-operate in drawing pictures, developing their creativity through collaborative work and also developing their communicative and thinking skills.
Preparation: You will need a piece of paper and a colored pen for each child.
Procedures

1. Ask the children to place their chairs in a circle. Give one sheet of A4 paper and a felt tip pen to each child. Use as many different colors as possible. Tell the children to write their names on the back of their piece of paper.
2. Tell the children to sit on their chairs and to draw anything they like on the piece of paper.
3. Tell the children that when they hear music, they have to start dancing around the chairs. When the music stops, the children should stop and stand behind the nearest chair and draw another picture on the paper on the chair they are standing behind. 
4. Start the music. 
5. When the music stops, the children go to the nearest chair (not their own) and add a drawing to the paper they find there. Continue this procedure until you see that the papers are quite full of drawings. 
6. Ask the children to go back to the chair they started from and look at the drawings. The children then take it in turns to hold up their pictures and describe what they see to the rest of the class. They can use the chunk ‘I can see...’ to introduce the pictures. You can help them with any new words they need. 
7. After describing their pictures, the children can then write a story, including as many of the pictures on the piece of paper as possible.

Notes
If you have a large class, you can organize the children into two or three circles.
Alternatives

1. You can extend this by asking all the children to hold up their pens. The child describing the picture can identify who did the drawings and say ‘This is Davide’s picture’ or ‘Davide drew this picture’ or ‘This was done by Davide’ or whatever phrase might be useful for your class to practise.
2.  The children hold up their pictures for the class. Play the game ‘I spy’. Children take it in turns to say ‘I spy with my little eye ...’ finishing the sentence with the names of objects in the pictures, for example, ‘I spy with my little eye a flower’. The other children have to find all the pictures with flowers in them and point to them.
3.  The children cut out the objects from their drawings. Place all the cut out pictures on the floor and ask the children to sort them out so that all drawings of the same object are together (flowers, houses, people etc).
4.  Put a large poster-size sheet of paper on the floor or on a desk and ask the children to stick the objects on it to make a display using singular and plural forms. Write on the poster (or ask the children to write) one flower six flowers (depending on how many there are on the poster). Draw the children’s attention to any irregular plurals and how they are formed.
5. Give each group a piece of poster-size paper. The children cut the objects out of their pictures and rearrange them on the poster, leaving some space at the bottom. When they’re happy with the layout, they can glue them onto the paper to make the new picture. The children can then colour the background, give their poster a title and write a short description of it at the bottom.
6. The children make an accordion book of their story by sticking the pictures in the right sequence. They then write short sentences for each stage of the story.

Reference
Crazy animals and other activities for teaching English to young learner book Download PDF