Retrieval grids

 You've probably come across grids with words and phrases in like the one below.

I was thinking about the concept of "do-nows", those starter activities used by many teachers for when students enter the room, perhaps in dribs and drabs, and who benefit from a task to settle into straight away. Doug Lemov has championed these as one means to limit the waste of time in lessons. They also, clearly, serve to bring back in material covered in previous lessons, so serve the purpose of a retrieval practice starter. I must say firstly that I have reservations about them. This is mainly because I prefer the idea of all students entering together and the lesson beginning with a snappy, often teacher-led activity. I feel that this sets the tone and can give that famous "flying start" to a lesson. But teachers have told me they work well. I guess it depends on the nature of the task, its quality, including level of challenge.

Now, the type of grid you can see above can be used as a do-now. You might simply tell students to write down as many sentences as they can by combining elements from each box. To add challenge you could ask them to add their own elements. Although partly a copying exercise, the students are having to retrieve vocabulary and show some lexical and grammatical skill. Once all the  lass have done some examples, they could compare their sentences with partners or you could listen to some read aloud.

But the same grid could be used in a umber of other ways, whether as a starter, filler, plenary, or just as part of a lesson plan. Note, in passing, the similarity with a sentence builder, in that both use a mixture of chunked language and individual words, and both invite a sort of 'fill the slot' idea of building sentences.

So here are some ideas you might use to exploit a simple grid like this.

• Students take turns in pairs to make up sentences. The first who cannot speak is the loser. With some classes you can ask them (as mentioned above) to make add their own sentence elements.
• "How many sentences can you write in five minutes?"
• In pairs, each student makes up a sentence. It might be logical or not. The other partner must judge and suggest an improvement.
• In pairs, one student gives an L1 (English in this case) sentence for the partner to translate. Or do the same from L2 to L1.
• After working with the grid for a while, do a transcription task such as delayed dictation (the grid is not visible) or gap-fill.
• Again, with the grid hidden, do a "translate-transcribe" task, where you give a sentence in L1 for them to translate.
• Play an EPI-style game such as Sentence Chaos, using sentences produced from the grid. Write up and number ten sentences as a list. In groups of three, one student (the "referee") reads out the list in a different order. The other two students take turns to try and recreate the same order, reading aloud each sentence. They get five attempts each. The winner is the student who gets closes to the referee's order. (The referee will probably have to read the list more than once, including during the game.)
• Play a "mind reader" ("Guess my sentence") game, whereby the teacher thinks of a sentence the class must guess. Or the same carried out in pairs.
• Imagine the grid is a written text. Ask questions to elicit answers, e.g. "What did you sell?"; "What did you lose? Where?" Students could do the same in pairs.
• In pairs, each student writes down 5 imaginary items they lost or sold. Partners must use yes/no questions to guess the items. "Did you lose a ...?" "Did you sell a...?"
• "Correct my sentence". In pairs, one student gives a sentence with a deliberately wrong element. The partner has to correct.
• Do "aural gap-fill" where you start a sentence which students must finish (orally, on paper or on a mini-whiteboard). This could be done with the grid visible (easier) or not (harder).
• If the class has enough prior vocab knowledge, move away from the grid a bit by brainstorming things students have lost or sold. This could be a useful vocab building activity anyway.
• Play the EPI game Sentence Stealer. I probably don't need to explain this as it's so well known.
• Make a short paragraph based on the grid and use it as a basis for Running Dictation, another well-known pair activity.
• Write sentences on post-its, stick one on every student's forehead, students mill around, say sentences while a partner just gives a yes/no response. (Thanks to @MFLDerek on Twitter).
• For fun, get students to read aloud sentences in a different voice (e.g. a celebrity). (Thanks to @marriedtothehead on Twitter.)
• Do an intonation-based task, e.g. read aloud sentences from the grid and ask students to mark in with lines what the pitch of the voice is doing. They could mark stress points too. For this, students would need written copies of the sentences in front of them.

With your creative language teacher hat on, I'm sure you can come up with other ways to exploit this simple resource. With my own teacher trainer hat on, I would just urge that whenever you do reading aloud-style activities, just make sure the quality of pronunciation is good. There are opportunities for phonology and phonics practice here - little moments when you can practise or correct common mispronunciation issues. As I often mention, teaching accurate pronunciation is not just about clear communication, it's about having accurate phonological memory for words and chunks. This means they should be easier to identify in the stream of speech when students are listening.

For retrieval starters, I recommend this.

I have been making lots of grids like the above for my frenchteacher.net site.