Activity Idea #1: Verb Practice

Because my Arabic class consists of adult learners (including a former teacher), we have a good idea about how we learn best, and we often suggest activities to our teachers that we think would be helpful. I will continue to post some of our most useful activities, in case other Arabic students want to employ these ideas in their own classes.

As I was reviewing old vocabulary this week, I realized that I'd probably never spoken 2/3 of the verbs I've learned in real sentences. It's easy to fall back on the same verbs all the time--going, eating, arriving, taking--but it takes a lot more intentionality to use verbs like accompanying, decreasing, or cooperating. As the months go by I feel like I'm falling farther and farther behind with my verbs. Even when I can recall a verb perfectly as it appears on my flash cards, I can't quickly conjugate it and use it in a sentence on-the-fly.

To address this problem, I decided to initiate a new activity in class. I used RapidRote to print flash cards of every verb we have learned in the course so far (several hundred). I put them in a bag on my desk. Each of the four students in my section drew a verb before class started. Their goal was to use that particular verb in a sentence (as naturally as possible) during class. As soon as they used their verb, they drew a different one. There was aspect of competition involved--who could use the most verbs?--but the real goal was simply practicing verbs we rarely use. The exercise worked well. We each used eight or nine verbs in a three-hour period. We had to stretch to make some verbs work in relevant sentences, but we had fun and most of our teachers seemed to appreciate the effort to learn.

This is an easy exercise to set up, and it runs in the background--there's no need to devote class time to it. Simply integrate it into your day. We plan to continue this exercise as long as we're finding it helpful.