Idiom Ideographs

The ESL class will be divided into groups of three students. Each group will be given one idiom and three sentence clues in which the idiom is used. All assigned idioms will be posted on the whiteboard.

Students in each group will discuss the meaning of their assigned idiom. Students may request additional clues from the teacher, if necessary. Students in each group will be asked to create a new sentence featuring the assigned idiom and to dramatize the idiom in a skit. Each skit will be filmed.

Then, a spokesman from each group will introduce the idiom and the sentence. After the presentations are completed, students will view all the filmed skits and identify the idiom that is being enacted.

Each student will be assigned another idiom to research. The student may discuss the meaning of the idiom with other teachers or students. The student must create a sentence including the idiom in its correct context and an audio, pictorial or dramatic illustration of the idiom.

Audio-visual representations will be assessed by a rubric, created by the ESL teacher. Students will be encouraged to work cooperatively on individual assignments.