Linguistic intelligence

Since language is the dominant element in our teaching environment, it's always necessary to come up with new ideas to stimulate student interest.

1. Use learning techniques that aid students' memory like mnemonics. (A cat can order many mushrooms or devour any truffle in our nightstand -> accommodation) You can also try using spoonerisms (eg. pairy tale) in actual texts where students will have to identify the "spoonered" words. If you decide to take this activity to the next level, ask students to create their own Spoonered fairy tales. If you are reluctant to introduce spoonerism in the class, present your students with rewritten fairy tales (such as The Donkey Prince (1970) by Angela Carter or The Paper Bag Princess (1982) by Robert Munsch) and ask them to write their own version of them.
2. Search for topic-based articles (eg. food) that contain ambiguous titles (eg. CHILDREN MAKE DELICIOUS SANDWICHES) Introduce the notion of ambiguity and let students create their own ambiguous titles for any text they want.
3. Make two vocabulary bags (one with adjectives and one with nouns). Students will be blindfolded and they will then be asked to choose 1 item from each bag. Once they do so, they have to combine the two words (eg. confident bear) and mime the final combination to the rest of the class.
4. A variation of the previous activity is to use the same bags in order to introduce creative writing techniques. Instead of miming the combination, students will have to use the words in their own writing.
5. Play a "Clothes in bags" game. One student is given instructions such as "Find and wear the green T-shirt". Another student has to wear everything the first student tells him.
6. Introduce vocabulary through the use of oxymorons (create flash cards of such expressions where each part of speech is represented by a different colour eg. simply difficult, original copy, found missing.Give out coloring pages and ask them to color the expressions properly.