Surnames ONLY!

When teaching my ISSOS Pre-IB students about referencing and in text citations (MLA) I decided that throughout the lesson we would only refer to each other by our surnames, as when citing an author via the MLA referencing convention all you state is the Surname of the author and the page number!

So, I first got all the students to, on a folded piece of paper that made a plaque, write their surname. Then, to ensure the pronunciation of the surnames was accurate we went round the class and said our surnames. This in itself was quite challenging for some surnames and I was quite particular about us all getting the pronunciations right so nobody was offended by our lack of annunciation.

After this I played a game with the class where we all quoted each other. I started with the person on the far right of the class this time and got them to state something about themselves. Then, the next person on the right of the class had to quote this person and give a statement about themselves. The next person then quoted the previous two people and then gave a statement themselves etc etc until the last person (me) had quoted every person's statement before giving mine.

So, for example the 2nd person said Smith states 'I like swimming' and I like collecting football cards. The 3rd person would then say Smith states 'I like swimming', Robertson explains 'I like collecting football cards and I like Diet Coke.

During the game I had a series of reporting verbs on the board that we had collated as a class to use in the game. This sped things up a bit.

The most difficult part of the game, apart from remembering what everyone had said, was to ensure that each person had quoted the original person correctly, and hadn't changed the statement i.e. for above instead of quoting Smith as saying 'I like swimming' saying Smith suggests 'he likes swimming' would have been wrongly quoted. Other than this it was quite interesting, especially further in, how much each person could remember and which people's statements were forgotten. Strangely, it was the last person they had to quote that they forgot (the last person to have given their statement before the next person quoted everyone prior to them).