Poems & love

Since this was a very special day (Saint Valentine), the theme of our session was “love”.
As usual, we started with a warm-up activity, a very funny one: as we were sitting, we put our hands on the table, and we hit the table with one hand, one person after another. Then some changes were introduced, since we had to change the order. If one person hit the table twice, we had to go the other way round, and so, it was quite difficult to know when our turn was.
Then, Tim showed us some words using the OHP. He told us it was a whole text, but some words had been left out. We had to find out what the text was about and which the missing words were. Of course, the theme of the text was love, and he had used a poem by J. Joseph.
Having done this, we moved on to an ordering activity. Tim suggested some words and we had to stand in a line according to whether we liked that thing or we hated it. We used words like “sobrasada, dancing or reading”.
We came back to poems, and we used one by Ogden Nash. The final word of a line had been left out, and we had to find out which this word was. This was a funny poem in which the author expressed his love for someone using metaphors “I love you as much as a shipwrecked sailor hates sharks” and so on.
The following activity was quite a difficult one. Tim gave us a page with 47 empty spaces: each empty space had to be filled with a word, so that we would get a whole text in the end. He gave us some words “as a present”, and then, in teams of 3 or 4 people, we had to guess the others. We made a list of possible words, and Tim told us whether they were right or wrong. In the end, we got a poem by F. Bourdillon.
Then, we moved out to songs. The first song, “Let’s do it” by Cole Porter, was used as follows: we had some blank spaces and after hearing the song, we had to write the missing words. Then, we put the missing capital letters in the lyrics, since there were none of them
In the second song Tim got us to sing. He divided the class in two teams. The first team sang a line, and the second one repeated it as a chorus. We had a great time and, surprisingly, it didn’t rain that day!
After that, we did a “running dictation”. We worked in couples. Tim placed a text (a love poem) outside the class. One person in the team had to walk (NOT run!) outside and read the text. Then, he had to come inside and dictate what he could remember to the other member in the group. There was hard competition, and we had some laughs.
Finally, Tim told us what mini-sagas are. They are “big stories in an incredibly short space”, as he put it. We read some examples, and Tim told us to write one for the next session, which is to take place on Tuesday, 21st. The only orders that we were given were that we had to write about love and use EXACTLY 50 words, so we will see what we get.

Nydia García