The following is a guest post that I invited Rich Madel to write after he mentioned this activity on twitter.

All world language teachers focused on providing rich, compelling, and comprehensible input to their students know the struggle: How can we mask the repetition of the same information, vocabulary, and structures in such a way that it seems novel and interesting and our students feel authentically compelled to engage with making meaning of the input?

We all know the value of repetition of vocabulary and structures embedded in strategies such as PQA (personalized questions and answers), TPRS, Movie Talk, and more. Today, leveled readers are written with this very focus in mind, often telling a compelling story by recycling little more than the same 150 words (in the case of some novice-level readers).

Telling the story is only one opportunity for input, however. What we do before the story and what we do after are critical opportunities to provide quality interactions with target language vocabulary and structures. One such strategy often used as a post-storytelling activity is for students to place scrambled events in their appropriate chronological order.

Working to order scrambled events from a story is a time-tested task that serves a dual purpose: it reinforces key moments from the plot that aides in comprehension and creates an opportunity for the teacher to repeat and reuse communicatively-embedded input. But let’s be honest, it’s not always the most exciting.

To that end, I present an event reorder challenge that takes the activity we all know and love and injects it with steroids. The end result is a whole class challenge that is exciting, promotes collaboration and communication, and vastly increases the repetition of the key events. Let’s call it, Rally Reorder! Below are the steps to prepare and conduct the activity. Continue reading →