Spot the difference

Although the objective of this lesson is to review/ use prepositions, its purpose is really just to get students talking to each other, something which is my personal goal in my school this year.  It begins with a simple review of prepositions, in which students fill in a worksheet.  Simple enough. 

Next, they choose a partner and sit opposite each other, with a book in the middle which blocks their view of the other student's work area.  They are each given one part of a spot the difference puzzle (see attached files).  In order to complete it, they must talk to each other and use prepositions to figure out what the differences are (e.g. 'I see a shark in the water, on the bottom left'.) To help them out, there is a diagram in the powerpoint which guides them through some helpful phrases to get them started.  I usually draw this on the board and elicit the labels from the students- I just included it to give you an idea of what I ask them.  I find that this helps the weakest students who like to refer to it.

If there's time, then there's another task which involves one student describing a picture (see ppt) to his partner.  This also makes an excellent and entertaining group task, and the drawings always get laughs.

Fell free to suggest any additions/ improvements.

P.S. in the prepositions review sheet, 'I' is missing from the picture...

I have the same goals as you for this semester - to increase the amount of time the students spend speaking. I blabber on enough in my daily life as it is.

This lesson seems like a winner, gonna use it this week. It might be a bit tricky to enforce a "no Korean" rule for some of my classes, but others I'm sure will do wonderfully. I have a feeling there won't be enough time to do the picture describing/drawing activity at the end after 4 or so pictures if we have a short class discussion about each picture so that students can speak to the class about what differences they found. If I cut that, there might be time. Hm...

If you're looking for more/different samples from xdavil2's files, a google image search of "spot the difference" yields some nice results.

Thanks for this, good work. Hopefully I'll hear students murmuring "재미있어" to each other after this one ;)

Although the objective of this lesson is to review/ use prepositions, its purpose is really just to get students talking to each other, something which is my personal goal in my school this year.  It begins with a simple review of prepositions, in which students fill in a worksheet.  Simple enough. 

Next, they choose a partner and sit opposite each other, with a book in the middle which blocks their view of the other student's work area.  They are each given one part of a spot the difference puzzle (see attached files).  In order to complete it, they must talk to each other and use prepositions to figure out what the differences are (e.g. 'I see a shark in the water, on the bottom left'.) To help them out, there is a diagram in the powerpoint which guides them through some helpful phrases to get them started.  I usually draw this on the board and elicit the labels from the students- I just included it to give you an idea of what I ask them.  I find that this helps the weakest students who like to refer to it.

If there's time, then there's another task which involves one student describing a picture (see ppt) to his partner.  This also makes an excellent and entertaining group task, and the drawings always get laughs.

Fell free to suggest any additions/ improvements.

P.S. in the prepositions review sheet, 'I' is missing from the picture...

Hi. Thanks for posting this. I was just wondering what kind of feedback you had from the lesson? Were there any bits that the kids found too easy or too difficult? Did the spot the difference task engage them?

I think I'm going to try it next week.

The feedback has actually been brilliant.  I've had even the weakest students accessing the language.  Some might not get further than the most basic directions and prepositions, but what is great is that with the right pictures, there's enough for the stronger students to be engaged as well as the weakest.  For example, the weak students might be saying things like 'bottom, left, paper? No paper?', but the stronger ones will be able to string this together as a complete sentence, and come up with much more advanced ways of communicating.  I also reward the students that I think have used the most teamwork.

I should also mention that I've now turned the final task on the powerpoint into a stand alone lesson in which we develop the language of the previous lesson further.  I'd say this task alone is by far one of the most effective and entertaining of any I've done so far.  In virtually every class, I've had all students speaking, which, in my exprience is really something to treasure.

Okay thanks for that. My co-t said it looked too difficult but I think it looks like a lot of fun. I might just try one picture in the first lesson and take it from there. Thanks for posting.

No worries.  I choose a different combo of pictures for each class, depending on what I think they can handle, and like Slurgi says, there are hundreds of spot the difference pictures out there.  The same is also true for the movie poster drawing task.

Yea this went brilliantly for me last week as well.

I started out the lesson with quick brainstorming session of locational prepositions. We made a long list on the board of phrases/words such as "under, on, over, between, above, left of" etc. It was nice because the students could look up at it if they'd forgotten about a word.

I ended up doing a small vocabulary bit after each picture, since I had a lot of students ask for the name for the same things (point at something and say "Teacher! This! What?") I think since they were so engaged they'll remember quite well, and it's a visual association so they'll be more easily able to recall the word in directly in English.

After instruction, getting them to move their desks, and all that, I only had time to do 3 pictures in each class without time for anything afterwards.

Thanks for the lesson :)

Hi. We're looking to do something like this for our 5th Graders. What grade did you use this with? Thanks!

Thanks for uploading this lesson! I've not tried it out yet but it's very refreshing to find an EFL lesson on here that actually introduces target language and then has follow-up speaking activities for the students to practise it. I doubt my school is unique in that the students seem to know a lot of nouns (e.g. mouse, dog, table) but wouldn't know how to tell you any more than that about these pictures! Great job in my opinion, thanks a lot!

It worked wonders with my higher-level high school students. Thanks.

Thank you for this, it just gave me my most successful camp day yet :D

I made a super easy spot the difference on ms paint so they could focus on sentence structure for that activity, then have more fun with the film posters. The differences are stripey cat, position of mouse, extra cloud, extra window, girl's clothes, guy's hat, missing football.