Every Picture Tells a Story

... And Some Are Harder to Explain Than Others!

I'm super busy preparing for IATEFL Brighton at the moment, but one of the sites I stumbled on this morning while I was busy procrastinating and drinking coffee instead of working has so much potential for generating fun classroom activities that I couldn't resist the temptation to knock up a quick blog post about it :-)

ExplainThisImage.com is a site that invites visitors to explain the story behind pictures people have uploaded, which don't make any sense!

Ideas for Using The Site in Lessons:

Activity 1 - Jackanory

Can't remember where & when I picked this classroom activity up (lost in the mists of time, I'm afraid!) but it's good fun!

Step 1

Divide learners into three or more roughly equal groups, and give each group a copy of the same picture.

Ask students to discuss the picture with the other members of their group, and give them five to ten minutes to create a fictional backstory for it. Tell them their stories can be as imaginative, as implausible, as silly or as wild as they like.

Step 2

Each group nominates a member to stand up and explain their version of the story behind the picture. Award bonus points to any student who can manage to keep a straight face while presenting a story on behalf of their group.

Step 3

When all the groups have presented their stories, students vote to decide which group's version was the best.

Activity 2 - Write a Newspaper Report

Put learners in groups, and ask each group to select one of the images you have chosen, and then write a fictional newspaper report about where and when the picture was taken and the story behind it.

To add an extra level of difficulty for more advanced students, you could restrict them to using a particular genre, e.g. "In The Style of Hello Magazine", "In the Style of The Guardian", etc.

Activity 3 - Caption Contest

Put learners in pairs or groups, give each group an image, and ask them to write a funny caption to go with it.

Get more mileage from the activity by saving the pictures and the captions that your learners have written to use for a matching activity with a different class.

Teaching Tip:

As the site is user generated and some of the images people upload may be innapropriate for use in class, I recommend letting learners choose from images that you have pre-selected, rather than giving them free reign to pick an image from the site.

Any more ideas for using this site in class? I'd love to hear them!

Please feel free to add your thoughts.

Sue :-)