This after reading project page, in an Oxford Read & Imagine level 2 graded reader (The Big Storm), was all about personalising the background story to the adventure > going for a picnic. Sub-topics here recycle vocabulary sets of food (likes & dislikes), friends (physical descriptions), weather, places to go around town...we all love recycling language! (This is approx CEFR A1; 450 Headwords at this level, 689 words in this title)
As with all young learners, some love drawing & in Japan, have ninja-like skills - others (like me) have a complete phobia about blank drawing spaces and will produce the bare minimum as quickly as possible (and only after considerable cajoling!). NB This was not an arts/crafts lesson - rather, get us some content to work off, with the writing aspect my targetted outcome. (As with any open-ended task like this in my classroom in Japan, I try hard to minimise the use of erasers...a quick correction or fine tune is fine; rubbing out/erasing 20 minutes-worth of work & starting over is not!).
Regardless of artistic skills, we all needed encouragement to look back through the book to get 'more' ideas...and the same applied to finding the words we subsequently 'needed' to produce the written output. Importantly, don't cramp the artwork with this 'news' in advance (otherwise you'll end with carefully chosen/limited drawings!)...so then to find the words/structures we need to describe our work. From the story already (quizlet set of the glossary here by the way!)
