Eyes shut orawman: Present perfect uve: Elementary to intermediate "TE: 15-25 minutes Mareniais: None In class 1 Puta selection of irregular verbs up on the board, e. buy bought bought begin began begun give gave given lend lent lent lose lost lost see saw seen sell sold sold Make sure the meanings of the verbs are clear to everybody. 2 Group the students in seated circles of about ten. Explain that they are going to play a concentration game, with eyes shut. The first student will make a present perfect sentence about herself, using one of the verbs given or another of her choice, e.g. ‘P've sold my bike’, These sentences may be either true or false. Everybody shuts their eyes. The student to her right then repeats her sentence, in the first person and adds her own, eg. ‘I've sold my bike, I've begun trampolining’. Student 3, going round the circle, repeats the first two sentences and adds hers etc. 3 Tell the students to have a good look round their circles before they shut their eyes. Get the game going. (Some groups manage to go round the circle more than once, so there are 15, 20, 25 present perfect sentences being remembered.) 4 Allow the students time to guess which sentences were true, RATIONALE Blind exercises are very useful in language learning for drawing people who may not be primarily auditory into the world of sound. They also allow auditorily excellent students some of the ‘lime-sound’ (limelight). ‘ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ‘We learnt this Stanislavski exercise from Grigori Dityatkovsky.