It Works in Practice 35.3

The 3-min express

Anna, Ireland

Do you love surprising your learners with new, engaging ideas? If you say yes, you must try ‘The 3-min express’ activity. I have created this short, personalised, brain-friendly exercise for sessions with Young Learners to spark their joy for learning, provide an opportunity to create short stories and practise their writing skills on the go. It is now loved by all neurodiverse minds. Not only does it boost learners’ imagination and creativity, but it also strengthens their working memory, fosters communication skills and helps with time management and organisation – all this within 3 minutes! It can be used as a brief ice-breaker, a quick mood regulator (raising dopamine and oxytocin levels), a Monday morning starter or as part of the continuous formative assessment. Great fun guaranteed!

1. Prepare a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. Work in pairs. Student A and Student B come up with five random key words for each other. The goal is to write a short story that contains all five words given by the partner.
2. Each story has to be told in five sentences only. The key words can be repeated in the story and used in any order.
3. Students personalise their stories adding three characters. The characters can be people or animals. If one of the key words given is already a character (e.g. a clown or a dog), they add just two more characters.
4. Students need to write their story within 3 minutes. The teacher can display a timer on the board and signal to students when 2 minutes, then 1 minute is left. The timer helps learners to stay on track and speed up, if necessary.
5. When the time is up, students stop writing; they are allowed to finish the last sentence they have started.
6. Finally, each student reads their story to their partner. Then, they give their peer feedback on the story and correct any spelling and grammar mistakes together.

Students put the stories into their folders to keep track of their progress.

‘The 3-min express’ activity is ideal for a mixed-ability class, a skills workshop, a writing competition or a free-time game played with friends or family at home. Enjoy!

Activities to practise like / likes with Young Learners or low levels

James, Spain

Presentation stage

Ask several students to come to the front. If possible, choose a male and female student. You sit in the middle and the students sit at either side. You say ‘I like apples’ and you ask the students on either side to whisper to you what they like. One might say ‘I like pears’ and the other might say ‘I like burgers’.

You then report it to the class by saying: I like apples, he likes pears and she likes burgers.

Choose several students and repeat the same procedure several times so they can be exposed to the target language. Then divide the students into groups of threes and ask them to repeat the same procedure, getting students to rotate so everybody gets the chance to become a ‘teacher’.

I have done this with like / likes but you could use it with any verb to practise the third person singular in present simple: I have . . . for lunch;
he/she has . . . for lunch (for dinner); I play tennis; he/ she plays . . .)

Controlled practice

Write on the board:

Sergio Sarah

Show pictures with a cross or tick:

Elicit from the students:

Sergio / He likes mangoes; he likes cake; he doesn’t like bread.

Do it several times changing the pictures and the ✘s and ✔s until the students can produce the target language correctly.

Ask students to do the same in their notebooks and ask them to exchange notebooks with a partner and to do the activity as a speaking activity.

Freer practice

A follow up activity could be to have an image of a female and a male character. Ask students to come up with a name for those characters. Let them guess the name of the character: Is his name Peter? Is her name Martha?

You keep them guessing until they guess that the only names you will accept are those that begin with ‘S’– Sam, Sally, Sergio, Sarah, for example, all are possible. Remind them that ‘S’ is the magic letter and they must make an effort to remember this.

Write this text on the board:

Sam likes mangoes and apples but he doesn’t like strawberries.

Sarah likes cake, sandwiches, fish but she doesn’t like cherries.

Students come up to the board (or write the text in their notebooks) and circle all the S’s.

They then are asked to create a similar text with other imaginary characters whose names must also begin with the magic S.