Awarene: activities IIL5 From puzzle to punishment, GRAMMAR: Past perfect, past simple passive LEVEL: Intermediate ‘TIME 45—60 minutes MATERIALS: Non In class 1 Dictate the following: Crime and punishment A man got on the train and sat down in a compartment which was empty except for one lady. She took her glov's off. A few hours later the man was arrested by the police. They heli! him for 24 hours and were then logically forced to let him go free. GARDEN LOVER 30 YEARS VANISH JALL > Tell the students that the two paragraphs above and the key words all come from a mystery story and they have to act she detective and question you. You only wer YES or NO. Solution Thirty years before, the gloved lady had been married to the man on the train. She and her lover had disappeare¢ and left the country. Before vanishing they had cut off the two middle fingers of her left hand and buried them in the garden. The police found the fingers while investigating her disappearance and a.cused the man of murdering his wife and burying the rest of hes elsewhere, He was jailed for 30 years for a crime he had not committed. He did not recognise her at first on the train. When she took off her gloves he did, He killed her. The police had to release him as he had served his life sentence before committing the crime it was for. 106From puzzle to punishment If the students need help in their questioning give them more clues. Once they establish the root of the problem as 30 years before the moment in the train it will be natural for thém to need to ask questions in the past perfect. Give the students a couple of instances of times you were punished as a child, using this kind of pattern: ‘Iwas beaten by my father for pulling the hearts out of young cabbages when I was six.’ Give real personal examples. Ask them to write four or five sentences on the same model, describing things they got punished for as children. Ask them to include the agent and their age at the time. Now tell them of a time you were punished for something you did not do Ask them to write a paragraph describing when this happened to them. Finally ask them to write a few lines about a time when they were not punished for something they should have been punished for. Put the students in small groups to reac! out their sentences and paragraphs Encourage them to say more. 407V.5 Memory tricks GRAMMAR: Past simple LEVEL: Lower-intermediat. TIME 30 minutes MATERIALS: Story (for your use only) In class 1 Send four of your better students out of the room with an exercise they can do outside in about 15 minutes. 2 Dictate a story to the others. The story should be fairly easy for the language level of the class, e.g. at lower-intermediate level: Story ‘The time: about 200 years ago in’ Paris. The streets were full of people. ‘They were angry. They broke shop windows, they burned down houses, they were rioting. A colonel came to clear a square. His soldiers raised their guns. ‘There was silence. ‘The colonel stood on a wall. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he shouted, ‘I have orders to fire on the mob. I can see only good, hones: people. I want all the good, honest people to leave the square, because I want to fire on the mob!” ‘Two minutes later the square was empty. 3. Make sure they understand all :he words in the story. 4 Explain that one student in the :roup is to prepare to read the story aloud to one of the four who have gore out. Then this student will be allowed to ask two questions about the story. ‘The second ‘outside’ student wi!! be brought back in, and the first one will tell the story he or she heard to the second one. During this telling the * group are to note down how the story gets changed using these three categories: Things added Things left out Things changed 135