SUBMITTED BY: Anonymous     EDITED BY: まだ

15-30 min.   5 votes: 3.5-star

Materials Needed:

• RudolphQAndA 
  attachment: Includes Q&A cards, example cards and a picture of Santa and Rudolph.

Detailed Explanation:

1. Write, "I don't know. Ask someone else," on the board and have students repeat.
2.  
   Ask a student a question they understand but don't know the answer to: "How old is President Obama?" He/She responds with, "I don't know. Ask someone else." Say, "Oh, ask someone else? Ok, ..." then ask another student. Repeat a few times until they get the meaning of the phrase.
3. Introduce the activity with pictures of Santa and Rudolph (last page of attachment) asking, "Who is this? (Santa) What is this? (sleigh) What are these? (reindeer) Who is this? (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) Rudolph guides Santa's sleigh. He is the first one. He tells the reindeer where to fly.
4. Have two students come up and demo the activity with the example cards. Person A asks Person C, "Who is Rudolph?" Person C doesn't have the answer to that question so he says, "I don't know. Ask someone else." Then Person A asks Person B, who does have the answer: "Rudolph is a reindeer with a red nose." Continue until all three questions are answered. Emphasize that the students must find the answer that matches their question.
5. Give one card to each student. If you have twenty students, make 2 copies of each card (I only made 10 different cards).
6. Students ask each other their questions and find the answers.
7. After a few minutes have the students return to their seats and go over the answers. One student reads his/her question, and whoever has the answer reads it. Then, one of the students who read the answer reads the question from their card.  Rinse and repeat.

Teaching Suggestions:

• Follow this activity with listening to the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer song, using the Cloze and/or the Rudolph skit from Rudolph Skit & Cloze.
•  
  This activity introduces the story of Rudolph so that when the students later listen to the song much of it will be familiar and easier to understand.
• This activity is appropriate for JHS/SH.

Comments:

• (Dec 14, 2011) David said: This was a good idea, but some of the questions were too hard for my JHS 3-nensei. If I did it again I would probably rewrite the questions to be simpler. For the example cards it helps to make 3 big example cards so everybody can see what's going on. Thanks for the activity!
• (Dec 7, 2011) Alex said: So far this is the only real cultural Christmas lesson I could find on web, I'm going to use it for my JHS kids next week, Thanks for posting.