In this unit we are going to continue to look at a number of effects which I have adapted to the English language classroom. We will compare the “classroom” versions of the tricks to the originals, and at the end of the unit we will finish with a mini-challenge in which you have to find an existing magic trick online- or take one of the tricks from this course- and adapt it to your classroom.
After looking at tricks using playing cards (substituted for flashcards) in the last unit, we are now going to look at ways of adapting to the classroom other kinds of magic effects which incorporate other concepts and use other instruments- such as the svengali principle, equivocation, or gimmicked envelopes- into a performance. In this unit we are going to continue to look at a…
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- The Svengali Notepad
- First of all, the Svengali Notepad, in which you give a student a notepad which has a different word written on each page. Your student chooses one of the words… and you know what word he chose!
- Six Envelopes
- This is one of the most versatile tricks on the course; you can use it to practice anything from vocabulary to grammar or even concepts and ideas… anything that you can fit on a small piece of paper. The two concepts that this trick uses- gimmicked envelopes and equivocation- will appear in other tricks in this chapter.
- VISA
- VISA is a great trick which will give you lots of opportunities to practice the topic of shopping with your students, in VISA a pupil chooses something to buy from a selection… and it turns out that you were going to buy that exact same thing! In the explanation video we’ll also see ways of changing the trick further and adapting it to new needs and scenarios, including using the gimmicked envelope concept behind The Six Envelopes trick to perform the reveal.
- Prediction 10
- Both Six Envelopes and VISA take advantage of a concept called equivocation or “Magician’s Choice”, where a magician gives an audience member an apparently free choice, but frames the next stage of the trick in such a way that each choice has the same end result. Equivocation is also the basis for this trick, in which you correctly predict the word that your students are going to make from 10 randomly selected letters.
- Liar Liar
- This is a very engaging magic effect, which takes advantage of a notion similar to the mathematical “odd + odd = even & even + even = even” concept, and which I use in my English classes to practice the interrogative.
- What’s my Chore?
- This is a simple trick in which you ask multiple volunteers to imagine they are doing a chore, and you are able to read their minds and know what chore they are thinking of, but it can very easily be adapted to other areas.
- The Cluedo Effect
- You know what card your student selected from a deck of any number of cards. Again, in this video we will also see examples of how you can change and improve this trick, and how you can adapt it depending on your students’ needs or the contents you wish to practice. We will finish this last trick with a “real case scenario” that puts into practice a one of the adaptations of this trick, and which also integrates two concepts which we will see in the next chapter; “forcing” and “cheating“
- The Svengali Notepad
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Next part, “Cheating and Forcing” >>