Activities for all 5

C’s During Small

Group Centers

Activity Ideas

Interpersonal (two-way conversations)

Interpretive (listening/reading/watching)

Presentational (creating a final product)

Culture

Connections

Comparisons

Communities

The 5 C’s Centers

Interpersonal Skills

person-to-person

speaking

Interpersonal Skills

Teacher Table

Having simple conversations about personal information

Talking about likes, dislikes, or opinions

Playing “Go Fish” or a variation

Describing a series of pictures

Talking about a holiday with picture support

Role-playing with puppets or animals (even older students!)

Introducing or using situation cards

Hints: Always ask “push” questions

Have a class list, rubric copy, or laptop for recording scores and making notes

Interpersonal Skills

Student Centers

Practicing a situation card or known

dialogue

Learning new content with vocabulary,

hint sheets, dictionaries or computer

kiosks

Using puppets, old cell-phones, or

walkie- talkies to make it fun

Recording with laptops, digital recorder,

iPods, flip camera, or cassette player

Interpersonal Skills

Student Center Games

Hangman

“Guess who?” or Eggspert games with a

designated leader

Teacher-created games with dice

Candyland or Chutes and Ladders (no

English!)

Go Fish

Culturally authentic games

Online games with one student as

“Vanna White”

one student as “leader”

Interpretive Skills

listening and reading for a purpose

Listening Center • Books

• Songs

• Conversations

• Poetry

• Speeches

• Listen for a certain word and count instances

• Teacher-created listening test with questions

• Fill in the missing words – works great for songs!

• Match what you hear to pictures

• Listen and put book pictures in order (great if you

have a children’s book on tape)

• Put words in order (on sentence strips or copies)

• Tapes

• iPods

• Laptops

Watching Center

• Cartoon

• Song video

• Conversation video

• Drama

• Other YouTube find!

• Put written sentences describing scenes in order

• Match pictures from story to written sentences

• Answer main idea questions

• Answer comprehension questions

• Listen for the number of times they hear a certain word.

• Write a sentence about different scenes or characters

• VCR

• Laptop

Reading Center • Books

• Poetry

• Articles

• Advertisements

• Cartoons

• Read an article and answer comprehension questions.

•Read an article and count how many times they find different

words or “find the cognates.”

• Put cut-up sentences in order

• Choose best sentence to describe character, main idea,

problem, solution.

• Do a word sort with cards and then transfer to a paper with

columns.

Authentic Materials

Reading Center

Teacher-created Materials

• Matching words to pictures

•Matching words to definitions

• Draw illustrations for words or paragraphs

• Word fill-in with sentences

Presentational Skills

one-way presentational

speaking and writing

final drafts, well-

practiced

Presentational Speaking

Partners work with situation cards and prepare

skit for performance later

Practice a short dialogue

Readers-theater: read story, decide how to act

out, practice with props, act out later

Use laptops or iPads to record their voices into PPT,

VoiceThread, or any other Web 2.0 presentation app)

Peer-score and peer-coach using rubrics

Record practice OR final product with digital recorder,

laptop, iPod, flip camera, or cassette.

Presentational Writing

Centers

Write an acrostic poem in the target language.

Label a picture or pictures

Write a story about a picture prompt

Write poetry, stories, etc.

Create a construction paper organizer

Teacher has pre-made PPT of pictures on laptop –

students write sentences to go with pictures on each

page

Send a text or email to the teacher!Options:

dictionaries or not

word lists or not

Culture Skills

exploring the relationship

between the products,

practices, and perspectives of

the target culture

Culture-Based Centers

interacting with realia

doing money rubbings

learning about and practicing specific

customs

playing culturally authentic games

accessing websites in the target language

viewing cultural topic videos

eating, drinking something from culture

creating models of food or art from clay or

other medium

Art-Based Culture Centers

match an art piece to sentence or paragraph that describes it

brainstorm words or phrases about each art piece

write a paragraph or story about art piece

one partner describes, other points to the art piece

do “color-by-number” of art piece,

1 = rojo 2 = verde

Connections

• to other subject areas

• to content only available in the target language

Connections: Math Centers

one student reads number card, others use

straws, base 10 rods, blocks, etc. to create

number

measuring various objects in Metric and British

writing greater than/less than sentences

monetary conversions and websites

Sudoku (characters or written words)

Written word math (cinco x cinco = ___)

Connections: Science Centers

What in the room is magnetic? (room is labeled - list up in target language)

What in the room is metal, wood, etc.?

Classifying animals by various characteristics and creating chart

Putting together life-cycle pictures for plants, animals, etc.

Listening to a YouTube video explaining simple science concept in target language

Connections:

Art, Music and PE

Make a target culture craft

Draw a scene to be labeled later

Compare 2 target culture songs for

various characteristics

Write a few sentences about why one

song is better.

Learn a dance step or dance

from written directions, video, etc.

Comparisons

of languages and cultures

Comparisons-based Centers

Creating Venn diagrams (written or pictures) or other graphic organizers.

Writing about own family, home, etc. versus target culture family, home, studied (perhaps English)

Investigating written work in both languages (ex. same picture book in two languages) and answering questions about similarities/differences

Looking at maps from different countries and answering comparison questions or highlighting countries.

Communities

The Ultimate Center!

Communities-based Centers

Native-speaker visitor(s) as the center (be sure to give task or games!)

Reading, listening to or writing pen pal letters

Looking at video from pen pals

Looking at YouTube video of peers

Constructing an email, letter, picture, etc. to share with native speakers

Creating something in target language to be shared with the school or home for the purpose of language sharing/teaching