Postcards

If you are a subscriber to Spotlight, then you will have probably built up a little collection of Travelogs — the small-format travel pull-out that comes with each magazine — and as a good teacher, you've probably already started thinking about how to use them in your lessons. Here's one simple idea.

Who it's for:
All levels 

What it's for:
Writing practice, holiday vocabulary

What you need:
A number of Travelogs, enough for one per student or per pair of students; blank postcards or pieces of thick paper about the same size

What you do:
Spread the Travelogs out on a table and get each student or pair to pick one that looks appealing. 

Let them take the booklet back to their seats. Give them just a minute to look through it — enough time to see the pictures and check a map, but not much more.

Tell the students that they are visiting the place featured in the Travelogs while on holiday, and have bought this picture as a postcard. Perhaps they have only just arrived, but know that the post is quite slow and want to send it now. First they should think of the person they want to send the postcard to. Give them a few seconds to discuss this if they are working in pairs.

Now tell the students to compose their postcard in rough, using the Travelogs cover as inspiration. The text needs only to be two or three sentences long, but should either contain some reference to the picture or at least be appropriate to the place that is being visited.

While they are writing, hand out the pieces of card or the postcard and get students to transfer their notes on to these.

When everybody has written something, assign each postcard a number and "post" it on one wall. Collect the Travelogs and display them on a pinboard or table. Get students to mingle and to decide which postcard matches which picture.

For homework, students could take home a Travelogs to read through. In the next lesson, students can take it in turns to be a friend/family member returning from a holiday and the recipient of one of the postcards from the previous lesson.

*The next Try It Out will appear on 4 July 2011.