Vocabulary activity... plus anecdote

Here’s another little nugget of material I use from time to time. It’s from my dead set favourite book 700 Classroom Activities. Although sounding like the shittiest text book in the world, it is, in fact, brilliant.

‘Odd one out’ is, as you can see, a food oriented activity, but with minimal tweaking, is one that you can use on any topic. If you’re careful which words you choose, it can be appropriate for any level of language learner.

The main reason I wanted to post about this activity in particular is because of a very endearing student I have in my class at the moment. His name – for argument’s sake – will be Mamoru. Because that’s his name.

Anyway, we’d almost finished this activity and were feeding back as a class. Characteristically, Mamoru had not contributed much in front of the others and had sat quietly puzzling over the words in the lists. When we got to the last four, however, he became more animated.

“Which one’s the odd one out?” I asked. “Slice, chop, mince, mash?”

There were a few answers they came up with. ‘Slice, because it’s the only one you do with cheese’, ‘mash, because it’s the only one you don’t use a blade with’ and so on. I could see Mamoru had something to say so I asked him the same question.

After a lot of aaahh-ing and ummm-ing he said: “Mince is odd one out.”

“Why, Mamoru?”

“Mince is only one which is person,” he nodded.

“A person,” I stared at him. “What do you mean?”

A lot more umming and moustache stroking (of course he’s got a moustache).

“Homo… homosexual,” he stammered.

It took me a while to stop laughing. I’m not sure if he meant it to be funny, but bloody hell, it was.