This is an idea I learned when I first started teaching and still use to this day. The main focus of the activity is on developing writing skills, but it’s also good for developing listening and reading skills and also for practising past tenses and descriptive vocabulary.
The activity should work at most levels above elementary, as long as your students have some knowledge of past tenses, but it works best when they also know past continuous / progressive too. All you need to get things started is a sheet of plain paper for each pair of students.
The listening part comes first:
- Ask the students to draw the face of a person in the top right-hand corner of the page.
- Once they’ve done this ask them to give the person a name.
- Then on the top left of the page ask them to write five adjectives to describe the person’s appearance.
- Next ask them to write five more adjectives to describe the person’s character.
- After they’ve done this ask the students to write three things that the person likes doing.
- Then ask them to write who the person lives with.