Extra Time at the End of the Lesson? ⏳ Activities For Serious Students

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There’s seven minutes left and your student has already finished the lesson. 😱 You know this student takes classes very seriously and wants every minute to be packed with learning. Have no fear! Here’s a list of activities to keep even your most serious students occupied during those agonizing final moments of class.

Targeted Practice

During the lesson, you probably pointed out the students’ mistakes, but couldn’t spend much time elaborating. When there’s extra time, you can help your student focus on their weaknesses.

For example, let’s say you noticed during the lesson that your student has trouble saying contractions like “I’ll.” Whenever they see “I’ll,” they pronounce it “I will” no matter how many times you correct them.

If they are interested in working on this weakness, you can help them practice it at the end of the lesson and then give them a list of related contractions (“we’ll” “he’ll” and “they’ll”) to practice as well.

Then, once they master the contractions, try having them make sentences with their newly-mastered skill to ensure they can apply it to new contexts. If they can’t think of any, encourage them to talk about an easy topic. In this case, future plans could work (“I think I’ll/she’ll/they’ll get a new job.”).

Review & Preview Activities

If the student completely aced the lesson, you can preview the next lesson in the series. As one tutor (🇵🇭) shared, “serious students often finish grammar or conversation materials in under 25 minutes, so we can preview the next lesson together.”

Other students may want to review vocabulary and grammar from the lesson you’ve just finished to be extra sure they’ve mastered it. You can do that by:

defining vocabulary together
making sentences with the vocabulary
acting out the vocabulary
having a conversation using the vocabulary or grammar

You can also make simple problems for the student to solve. Our tutors suggested the following types of problems:

You can also play review games, such as the following:

Twenty Questions: You pick a word and let your student guess by asking you up to twenty yes-no questions (“Is it a noun?” “Is it related to animals?”)
Vocab Showdown: Compete with your student to see who can use the most vocabulary words in a sentence. Let’s say the vocabulary list includes the words: "cotton" "shirt" and "bed.” You may be able to use all of them in one sentence: “I put on a cotton shirt before I go to bed.” The person who uses the most words in one sentence wins. (This one is my personal favorite.)
Continue the Story: This is a cooperative game in which you and your student make sentences that follow each other logically. For instance, if your word is ‘challenging,’ you can say, ‘That test was challenging.’ Then if the student’s word is ‘unacceptable,’ they may say, ‘This test was challenging, but failing would have been unacceptable.’”

If you’re with a regular student, you can even include vocabulary, expressions, and grammar from previous lessons! Many of our students don’t set aside extra time to review past material, so they’ll appreciate the help!

Extension Tasks

Extension tasks help students venture deeper into the content covered in the lesson.

For example, you can stick to the same topic covered in the lesson, but “extend” it beyond the lesson material. For instance, if you’ve had a Daily News lesson on flying cars, scroll to the bottom and pick a related article to start:

With topic extension, your student can immediately apply the knowledge and vocabulary gained from the lesson to another lesson.

Alternatively, you can do vocabulary extension exercises. If a student is interested in learning more about the vocabulary, the two of you can find other usage examples from our materials. For instance, if the student is curious about the word “spectacular,” search the Daily News website to see what other contexts it appears in:

Finally, you can do extension exercises for grammar or sentence patterns covered in the lesson as well. For example, if the student has just learned the sentence pattern, “I heard that…,” go over related expressions, such as “I saw that…” or “I noticed that….”

📌 Takeaways

So if we have extra time at the end of a lesson with a serious student, we can do the following together:

Targeted Practice that tackles weak spots
Review & Preview Activities such as previewing the next lesson, doing exercises (Correct the Mistake, Multiple Choice, Transformation) and playing games (20 Questions, Vocab Showdown, Continue the Story)
Extension Tasks such as starting another material on the same topic, finding out how a vocabulary word or grammar pattern is used in a different material, and learning related sentence patterns.

Hopefully, this gives you plenty of ideas for the next time you tutor a serious student!