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.

      • Read your volunteer’s mind.
      • This is one of the most versatile effects on this course, and you can use it to practice anything that you can write on a small piece of paper and put into an envelope.
      • Skills: Listening & speaking (interaction)
      • For practicing: Anything!

Demonstration & Explanation

 

Real Case Scenario

In this real case scenario the pre-prepared time expressions that I already had in the gimmicked envelopes were “in 2017”, “on the 24th of January” and “at christmas” in order to practice time expressions with ON, AT and IN.

Try to notice especially how I manage to force my three pre-prepared time expressions.  In the case of IN, with so many options available, I had to straight out say “let’s make 2017 the other time expression” to avoid anyone saying anything different. In the case of ON, I asked them to tell me the date, so they told me what time expression to write on the board. In the case of AT, I got lucky when someone said “at christmas” although we had just come back from christmas holiday so it was easy to predict that someone was going to say that rather than “at easter”.

 

Next trick: “VISA” >>