Emoji Picture Story Retell

A few months ago, I wrote a post about using emojis as part of a Find the Sentence activity. Here is an extension activity which you can do with emojis and can be used following doing Find the Sentence. 

Today in my Latin 2 classes, I used emojis as a story picture retell. Yesterday, I had students do an emoji Find the Sentence with a Movie Talk reading which we had been doing for the past few days. Today, I gave students the story written in emojis (and some English words where there was no fitting emoji) and had them retell the story to each other in Latin in partners. The Movie Talk story itself was incredibly basic with lots of repetitions and limited vocabulary, so it seemed like a perfect story to "emoji-ize" and to experiment as a story picture retell.

Monsterbox

Observations

1. Because yesterday the class had done a Find the Sentence activity with these same emojis, students were already familiar with what Latin words these emojis represented, because meaning had already been established.
2. Because vocabulary was limited, it was a very easy story for students to retell relying only on the emojis. If the story had extensive vocabulary, I think that it would have been more difficult due to an overabundance of emojis.
3. Not every story lends itself to being "emoji-ized" due to not every vocabulary word having a matching emoji. As you can see in my story above, there are no emojis indicating size, so I had to write those words in English, as well as the verb want. 
4. As an extension, I had students then use the emoji story as a guide for a timed-write so that what they verbally expressed had a place to go.

Overall, using emojis in this way is a novel way to do a story picture retell, and it is definitely one that I will do again in the future. At the same time, however, it does have its drawbacks due to a limited emoji language.

Find the Sentence using Emojis

Recently, Kristy Placido posted on Twitter a Find the Sentence post-reading activity involving emojis, so last week, I decided to give it a try with my Latin 2 classes. We had been going over the Perseus story which deals with Andromeda and how Perseus rescues her, so using emojis was definitely a novel post-reading activity. It went quite well.

In order to do this activity, you will need to type emojis using a keyboard. See below how to do this using Windows 10.

Once you activate your emoji keyboard,

1. Take known sentences from a story which you have been reviewing, and emoji-ize them, i.e., write the sentence on a document using ONLY emojis. NOTE - most likely, the sentences will not be a true one-to-one with emojis, because there are a number of words for which there are no emojis. My goal was to get the gist of the sentence as closely as possible.
2. If you wish, scramble the emoji sentences so that they are not in order of the story.
3. Project the emoji sentences OR print them out for students.
4. Give students a copy of the passage from which the sentences come.
5. Students are to find the sentence which the emojis best communicate and to write down that sentence.
6. Review when students are done.

Extension activity - Give sentences from the story to students for them emoji-ize.

Here is the Emoji Find the Sentence activity which I did. I have included the Latin sentences and English translations for you.

Observations

1. This was definitely a novel way for students to review a story, because it forced them to re-read the story to find the sentence. 
2. Emojis are a great way to deliver additional comprehensible input. They are compelling and are already a "language" with which students use to communicate. 
3. Be aware that students are not familiar with every emoji out there. If you have students create their own sentences to emoji-ize, you may have to help them out finding emojis.
4. Unfortunately like when using pictures to deliver input, emojis can be interpreted differently by students. What seems obvious in meaning to one student is not always to another. It may be necessary to establish meaning for some of the emojis.
5. If you print your sentences in black/white (as I did), sometimes meaning is lost, since the original emojis are in color. You may want to project your emoji sentences instead or to print them in color.
6. For those students who did not have access to a smartphone, I had them use the classroom student computer and activate the emoji keyboard so that they could type out their sentences.