The Skit Kit is an activity for creating skits, creating stories or creating dialogues. Students are given an envelope with the Skit Kit cards. In groups students have to

make up a story, make up a dialogue or make up a skit

. It's pretty simple but fun and effective for teaching English in real situation and for teaching real English.

Here are the Skit Kit cards:

If you already have MES flashcards printed out, you can use those. You can use any flashcards really, but I didn't want to break up my sets, so I made new cards for the Skit Kits. If you don't want backings, you can print out some cards using the Tools for Educators handout maker.

The activity:

- Break the cards up with one or two of each of the cards in an envelope. If you print all the sets, you should be able to make 10-12 sets with 12-15 cards in one envelope.

- Distribute one set to each group of students (2-5 per group.)

- To start have the students take just a few cards out of the envelope and explain that they will need to make a story using all of the vocabulary.

- Allow the students time to make a story and encourage them to add characters or themselves to the story.

- Once they get the hang of it, have them take a few more cards out and make a new story or build upon the previous one. (Eventually building up to all of the cards in the envelope but you can advance to the next step at any point.)

Step 2: Our story is made. Now, have the students become the actors in the story.

- Explain that the students will be acting out the story.

- Help the students change the story to a dialogue, with or without a narrator. You may choose to make them include all of the vocabulary in the dialog or just stick to the story and leave the vocabulary at this point.

- Use props where possible and act out the story from the Skit Kit.

That's it really. But you can help direct students initially by guiding them with these 3 questions: Who are you? Where are you? What do you want? Those ought to get the story ball rolling.

Options:

- allow students to discard/remove one of the cards

- let students create the story, dialog, or skit for another group to perform

- add objectives to the dialogues: 'You have to buy something.' 'You have to ask where something is.' 'You have to borrow something from another character.' anything that fits with what you are doing in class at the time.