JUAN ENRIQUE LABAJOS

 TITLE OF THE ACTIVITY: SENSUOUS GIFTS

DESCRIPTION:

Each student imagines they are giving five presents to a person they love and five to a person they hate. The five presents to a person they love will be pleasant experiences – not things but experiences like for example the sound of a string quartet or the taste of chocolate, they’re giving them an experience for each of their senses.

The main objective is to use sensual imagery for lively and personal description.

The final output task will be to write a love or hatred poem.

The students will work in small groups of four participants. The distribution of the groups will be done mixing students with different levels, so collaborative work will be a must.

With regard to the material, some pieces of paper and sellotape or post-it stickers are needed.

PROCEDURE:

*First session:

As a warming-up activity, students are handed-in photos showing people giving and receiving gifts. They have to look at them and speculate about different aspects of gift giving such as people's emotions and feelings. Adjectives ending in - ING/-ED will be elicited.

Next, they read some statements with expressions or collocations including the word gift like:

-"A gift horse does not look at the tooth". -"The heart of the giver makes the gift dear and precious". -"Take this gift as a pledge of our friendship"- - "Shall I take my host family a gift?" -"Love is always my love to you. Happy Birthday!" - "Your gift will make room for you". They have to try to guess their meaning and match it with some of the photos if possible. Once they have read them, they have to decide whether they agree or disagree with them, providing examples. After that, they will also practice their listening skills by watching a video clip from “Friends”. After watching, they need to share their experience of giving and receiving gifts. The class is divided into groups of four students and they brainstorm experiences they really dislike. *Second session: They try to connect their considered experiences to the five senses. It is important that at the end of this stage there is at least one experience related to each one of the five senses.

Then they do the same with experiences they like very much or love. Again it is important that all five senses are represented.

The whole class brainstorm collective terms, which can be fairly everyday (e.g. a handful of, a lorry load of, tons of, etc.) or rather imaginative (e.g. a nostril full of, a breath of, a morning full of, etc). These are written on small pieces of paper and hung up all over the classroom. *Third Session:

Using the collective terms they find appealing and the nice experiences, they will write a love poem, and with the nasty experiences, a hatred poem. The speaker of each group will read out the poems and let the other groups know for follow-up discussion.