Revising clothes vocabulary with a Scratch challenge

/ A1, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Vocabulary training, Young Learners

Talking about clothes is always a great opportunity to revise not only vocabulary linked to fashion, colours and shades, but also to recap the word order ‘adjective + noun’. Last but not least, it is also a great opportunity to play. In this post, I’d like to show you one Scratch animation and one follow-up activity for both, online and classroom lessons.

The animation (Scratch challenge):

Instruction: Click onto the green flag and after a while stop the animation with the red button (or the space key). Describe what Daisy is wearing.

For Teachers:

You can play this game with your class opening the website on the interactive whiteboard, on a TV connected to a computer or on a simple laptop. You can control the changes or give a turn to some of your students.

As for vocabulary you need: hat, cap, T-shirt, shorts, pants/trousers, scarfs, glasses, bowtie, bow, shoes, boots, trainers and rollerblades, plus colours. You might want to add light and dark (maybe also bright) to distinguish between different shades of the same colour. You might want to brainstorm these at the beginning of your lesson. You decide in what depth you wish to teach the topic, adding patterns (striped, dotted, etc.) or decorative elements (bow, string, ribbon).

The exercise helps students practice the correct word order in a noun phrase:

(a/an) + adjective + (singular/)plural noun

Example: Daisy is wearing yellow shorts and a purple T-shirt.

Follow-up (in classroom):

You can play ‘Guess who’ after some practice with the animation: you describe the outfit of one student (naming him/her ‘this student’ makes it harder to understand whether it is a boy or a girl) and the students need to guess which of their classmates you are describing.
Add 1: To make it even more challenging, you can ask one student to turn their back to the class and – while listening to the description – try to remember which classmate is dressed in the same way.
Add 2: If you want to reinforce question formation, students can ask questions: Is this student wearing a cap?

Have fun!

For Scratch coders:

If you work with Scratch (why not to try now), you could recreate, remake or reinterpret this animation (find the LINK HERE).

This animation works with costumes, every clothing item has 4-10 different costumes and they repeat the same code: switching to the next costume. In order to get different outfits, you need to set different frequency of changes in every sprite (0.2-1 second). Easy peasy to make it, feel free to change it.

Follow-up (in Scratch):

A nice follow-up exercise could be a picture dictation, like this: Today I saw Daisy, she was wearing a yellow dress with brown boots and a baseball cap. The students need to create this picture in Scratch and compare their final project with yours (which you show to them at the end of the given time). Did they understand your description?
Add 1: You can add actions, backdrops to your story, as you wish.
Add 2: Finally, you can ask all students to create their Scratch avatar using one sprite and dress it up and share their screen. This way you can play the game I described above for classrooms (‘Guess who) on the screen.

Good coding!

ELT-TUTOR SHOP: CHECK OUT THESE TEACHING MATERIALS

ESL ACTIVITY BOOK – CLOTHES

Activity Book - Clothes

an over 30-page activity book for YL classes

You might also like to read:

Scratch challenge for Cambridge Movers – Speaking Part 3
Online English lessons and coding with YL (Part One)

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO NOW?

Share this Post