Update on Rory's Story Cubes.

Today, I finally got around to using my Rory's Story Cubes with my year 12 French class. I bought them recently and blogged about my excitement here.

I used them at the beginning of the lesson as a warm up exercise to get the students speaking.

Today there were only 9 students in my lesson so I made 3 groups and gave each group 3 cubes each to play with.

We played three games.

In the first game the students had to roll one dice and say a sentence in French relating to the picture. For example, if the picture was the apple, the student could have said "J'adore les pommes mais je n'aime pas les bananes"

In the second game the students had to throw the 3 cubes. They had to pick up a dice quickly and come up with a sentence relating to the image. This left less of a choice for the other 2 students who would have been left with pictures which made them think much more.

At times, I allowed them to make connections with the pictures when they didn't know the vocabulary. One student was left with the "L" plate image and said, "Je voudrais une voiture."

In the 3rd game we played they rolled the 3 cubes and had to make a sentence using as many of the pictures as possible. For example: one student rolled the pyramid, the tent and the book. His sentence could have been: "L'année dernière j'ai fait du camping en Égypte et j'ai acheté un livre."

Fairly basic, I admit, but the students had very little thinking time.

For a first attempt it was quite a success and I shall be using them again soon and, as time goes on, I shall introducing more cubes to increase the challenge.