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TeachingEnglish Young Learners Activity Book
Activities
Activity 29: Scrambled rhymes
Donatella Bergamaschi – Italy
Age: 7+ 15 –120 minutes Large classes? Yes Mixed level? Yes
Materials: Pieces of paper with one line from the rhymes on each piece.
Organisation: Pair work, group work, whole class.
Aim: To revise rhymes and songs, to practise stress and intonation, to develop reading skills,
to develop co-operative skills
Description: In this activity the children revise rhymes and songs they know and then read
them through a game.
Preparation: Choose two rhymes or songs that the children know quite well. Write each rhyme/
song onto a large piece of paper. Cut up the pieces of paper line by line. You should be able to
read the lines from some distance. Count the number of lines you have cut. This is the number
of pairs/groups you will need to form when you are in the classroom.
Procedure
1. Remind the children of the two rhymes or songs with the help of pictures and gestures.
2. Once the children are confident and you are sure most of them can remember both
rhymes /songs, divide the class into groups or pairs (the number of pairs/groups will
depend on the number of lines you have cut).
3. Give each group/pair a line folded up so they cannot read it. Tell them not to look at it.
4. Tell the class they have to find the correct order of the lines by co-operating with the
other groups /pairs.
5. Say, ‘ready, steady, go’. The children have to find groups/pairs that have the lines from
their rhyme/song and then they have to put the lines into the correct order.
6. Ask one child from pair/group to come to the front and to stand in the correct order,
holding up their line.
7. The children read out their lines in order. The other children judge if they are in the
correct order.
8. Award points to the teams according to the time taken, accuracy, autonomy, noise or
whatever criteria you choose.
Notes
You can put a time limit of two or three minutes on this, depending on how many lines there
are in the rhyme.
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© British Council 2012