What is Behind the Door?

Here is a great 5-10 minute activity to use in class to reinforce vocabulary and structures (and even to preview vocabulary). It is a simple but very engaging prediction activity. I have seen Haiyun Lu demo this many times as part of her live online Mandarin session for ABC Camp, and then I saw Elicia Cardenas do this in-person at this summer/s Acquisition Academy in Dallas. Last week at the Fluency Matters Conference in Denver, I saw Haiyun demo this live again in one of her presentations. Although I had never done this activity before as a teacher in my own classroom, I decided to implement it in the adult participant Beginning Latin language class which I was teaching there, and it went really well! When I told Haiyun that I was using her activity, she told me that she had gotten it from Laurie Clarcq!

The activity is called "What is Behind the Door?" 

1. It does involve creating a slide presentation with images of vocabulary and animation, of which one of the images must be a door. There is an image "behind" the door. You need to layer it so that the vocabulary image is set as "back" behind the door.
   
2. Ask students to predict one of two choices behind the door by holding up a number using their fingers- either #1 or #2.
3. Using the slide animation to make the door disappear, you reveal what is "behind" the door.
4. Proceed to the next slide, and repeat.

   

Observations

1. Oh my gosh, adults can do this activity forever, so I can only imagine how much students would enjoy this! Janet Holzer told me, "People like it, because it is like betting!"
2. Although "What is Behind the Door?" is highly engaging, I would only do it for around 10 minutes at most to preserve the novelty and to keep students wanting to do it in the future.
3. I like that I can use it with single vocabulary words, phrases, and full sentences depending on what I want to target.
4. Extension activities - You can easily extend this into becoming a more communicative activity. In her demo, Haiyun says that it is a good way to get in exposure of numbers, because she can count aloud in Mandarin how many students say "#1" vs "#2. You can also use the images then as a springboard for a Picture Talk.