Magic Pine Football Boots

Wherever possible, I try and use the same lesson plan for all my classes, regardless of age or ability. This works more often than it doesn't, partly because I get the chance to tinker and improve on things, in mainly obvious ways that for no good reason failed to occur to me the first time around. Today's classes (and tomorrow's and the day after's no doubt) got the Noun Bag. I imagine it's an idea that has been used half a million times before: I wrote down forty or so nouns of as wide and random a selection I could think of, including objects, places, people and so on. I split the first few classes into groups and got them each to pull four or five nouns out of the bag, and then try to think of a story to fit. The results were very encouraging. By my last class I realized that it would work better to have the class split into groups and to each separately try and come up with their own stories for the same selection of nouns.

My favourite story of the day came from a selection that included teacher, football, pine tree, Ferrari, camera and waitress. It went something like this:

A teacher loves football and is due to play in a big competition. One night in his dreams, a wizard tells him to go to a certain pine tree in the forest and make a pair of football boots from the wood. So he wakes up, does so, and indeed goes ahead and wins the match. The prize is a Ferrari, with which he impresses a waitress: they fall in love; and he buys her a camera.