Short film story puzzle!

One of my most fully-integrative lesson, and also one which I was very happy with, was this activity I did several months ago with my pre-intermediate adult class, which merges "Running Dictation" with film watching and puzzle-solving. Students are put in groups of three or four; there is one writer and two or three runners for each team. During the first round, runners are instructed to go outside in the hall where there are fragmented pieces of a story stuck all over the walls. Each fragmented piece of the text consists of a short sentence or two, and is accompanied by an identifying letter. Students have to dictate all of the texts by memory to their "writer", along with the corresponding letter, running back and forth between the texts and the writer, until all is written down. At the end of this round, each team would have all of the parts of one story, but all in disorder.

In round two, I play a short animation for the class. The short animation film I chose is called "La luna" (which I found on youtube) and there are no spoken words, just sounds. Students have to watch the short film and pay attention to the actions. As they watch, they pay attention to events in the film and try to put in order the parts of the story which they had copied down. The film just keeps on replaying, giving students a chance to put the whole story in order. To win, the team has to put all the letters corresponding to the texts in the right order, creating the right "code" of letters. The first team to do so wins.

This activity was very engaging as well as challenging for the students. It involved all the areas of language learning- reading, writing, speaking, listening, language comprehension- as well as many skillsets - communication, problem-solving, teamwork... It was fun because students utilized their language skills and had to apply them successfully in order to solve a meticulous problem. On top, the animation was interesting in itself!