The first day of class can be tough to plan for, whether its an exam class or not. There’s a delicate balance between doing too much and scaring off your new wide-eyed students and not doing enough for them to think they will learn in your class. The first day of exam class is no different. In fact, it’s worse. You might get students in there who are expecting the world from their expert exam teacher. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, you might get students who haven’t even realised what type of course they’ve signed up for. My way to organise the first day of exam class is to do some fun get to know you activities before helping the students get to know the exam and what they’ve got themselves into.
For the get to know you part, teachers normally have a trick or two up their sleeves. My personal favourite is 3 Truths and 2 Lies which gets the students to speculate about you before they have a go. However, the get to know the exam activity can be a bit tougher to make interesting and communicative.
The Materials
With these materials your students can get to know the details of the Cambridge exam they are studying for. There is an activity for Preliminary (PET), First (FCE) and Advanced (CAE). With this, they’ll get a general idea of the format and can leave the first day of exam class feeling like they’ve learnt something useful. Depending on how intensive your course is (or how intense of a teacher you are), you might want to follow this by looking at an example exam or even trying out a couple of questions/tasks.
EXAM PART: All
EXAM SKILLS: Understanding the exam format
TIME: 20-30 minutes
PREPARATION: One copy of the worksheet per student
PROCEDURE:
- Ask students what they already know about the exam.
- Put students in pairs and give them matching student letters. Student A with student A. B with B. C with C.
- Students work together to try to complete the sentences.
- After a few minutes, switch your students and have them work in groups of 3. Students A, B and C together.
- Display the word cloud with the answers.
- Students work together with their new partners to decide which answers go with their sentences.
- Students share their sentences about the exam during and after looking at the answers.
- Following the activity, ask students if they have any more questions or what they were surprised/interested by.
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