What did you do last weekend?

A language teacher staple for a Monday lesson is to ask students “What did you do last weekend?” It’s fine. Conversation is generated, you get to know the class better, there is target language input and output. Hopefully you would ask follow-up questions and show a genuine interest in the answers. Maybe you’ll get some new vocabulary out of it. All good. Let it go on as long as students are interested. You probably wouldn’t do it every week in that way because it would become too routine and predictable. 

So here are some low-prep variations you could use. I’m sure you have others!

To get the most students involved they would use notepaper or mini-whiteboards. For instance, every student would have to write down three things they did. (You could scaffold this with some verbs on the board.) You could then just ask around the class (hands up or not), or get the class into pairs and ask them to guess what their partner did.

Alternatively, with some classes you could put them in pairs and just say: “You each have to give a sentence about what you did last weekend. The first person who can’t say a sentence is the loser.” Allow them to make up absurd sentences to add a fun element, e.g. I ate my dog, I did my homework on the moon.

For very proficient classes, partners could time each other as they attempt to talk about their weekend for as long as possible without stopping. Once again you could give them the option of saying absurd things. The winner in each pair would be the student who talks the longer.

You use the topic differently. One way is to turn it into a listening task. In this case, you tell the class about your weekend as they take notes in L1 or L2, or you display a set of statements, some of which are true, some false. The class have to report back what you said or to identify the true ones from your account.

You might, instead, give your account as the class takes notes. Then make some statements, some of which are true, some false. The class identify which are which.

Another listening task would be to read a set of statements in the 2nd person, e.g. You played football. You went shopping. You went online. Students make a mark for every statement that applies to them. Then from memory they tell a partner what they did, using what they have just heard to help them.

Or how about ‘Find someone who...’. Students write on paper or on their whiteboard three things they did. They then circulate, seeking out students who did the same thing. Each time they find a matching statement, they cross it out and move on until all three statements have been matched. (Use more than three if necessary.)

Or you could use the ‘One lie’ listening task, whereby you give ten statements about what you did, one of which is false. The class identify the false one. You could ask students to translate each one to ensure they are all busy thinking. How obvious you make the lie depends on the class.

Another alternative is to get the class to ask you yes/no questions about your weekend. Every time they receive a positive answer, they get a point. (How about splitting the class in two and making it competitive?) They would ask questions like:

Did you watch TV?

Did you go to the pub?

Did you eat a pizza?

Did you go to a restaurant?

Did you go for a walk?

And so on. Note that the class gets to use yes/no question forms and to use the 2nd person (formal) of the verb, an opportunity which can be hard to generate day to day.

As a written fluency task you could simply give the class a five minute time limit to write as much as they can about what they did. Students could then read aloud what they wrote to a partner. You could add an element of urgency and competition by declaring the winner to be the person who wrote the most words. The priority would be fluency over accuracy here.

By the way, if you are working within an EPI/MARS EARS framework, as some readers may be doing, then all of these activities are really late in the sequence (S =Spontaneity). If you scaffold tasks heavily, they become more controlled and might be classified more as Automatisation or Routinisation (of past tense chunks).

If you have your own variations, feel free to leave them in the comments.