58 Quick Activities that don’t need a Photocopier

A collection of activities that will prove indispensable to new teachers, and make life a little easier for the more experienced.

Author: Ekaterina and Saul Pope
Components: Teachers’ Resource Book

There are some days when even the most experienced teacher’s brain just isn’t working properly; and then, faced with a ten minute hole in the lesson plan, inspiration non-existent, fists banging on the table in frustration at not being able to locate a decent activity, what is one to do? If only someone had bothered to write down all those activities that everyone knows works just fine and requires the minimum of preparation. Well, thankfully Ekaterina and Saul Pope have done just that.

When I first skimmed through this small pamphlet of 58 standard activities, I arrogantly dismissed it as something I could’ve written in an afternoon. The problem is I didn’t. The activities in this book will largely be things that most teachers will have tried in one form or another before, but how easy it is to forget them, and so how useful this book is certain to be! New teachers will probably find 58 Activities that don’t need a Photocopier an incredibly useful resource: a stock of tried and tested activities that can be adapted and re-structured, and above all, are simple to set-up and carry out.

Activities like Expanding Texts (making an example sentence as long as possible, stretching the students grammar and vocabulary, and useful for error correction) and Shrinking Sentence (a fun way to drill sentence stress, and hammer home a grammar point) may seem like bread and butter to teachers who have been around the block more than once, but think how long it took to mentally collect all these activities in the first place, and then think how easier it would’ve been to have them all collected in one place from the very beginning. And what about role-plays and dramas like Dating Agency and Health Centre? Two old favourites for getting students up and about and recycling language.

Teachers who are looking for fresh and original ideas should be warned that the ideas in this book are no more cutting-edge than those mentioned above – in fact all of the activities, as the writers acknowledge, can be found in well established Teachers’ Books, and there is nothing here that a teacher wouldn’t normally pick up over time; and one also wonders why the authors decided to stop at 58

However, this is not really the point of 58 Activities that don’t need a Photocopier. The point is that someone has bothered to produce a book of activities that don’t pertain to stretch the imagination of the students, or recreate authentic language experiences; instead the focus is on sharing activities that work, which is surely all that any teacher, especially new ones, could ask for.