Odd One Out

Yesterday I was reminded about the Thinking Skills strategies that I used to use in the secondary classroom (here are some Spanish examples, and here some French ones).

In the very early years of this century (!) I was part of a local authority working group which investigated how to use thinking skills strategies in the language classroom.  Thinking Skills were to become part of the Key Stage 3 Strategy and were used effectively in the humanities at the time.

The strategies encourage students to look for patterns and rules in the language, and to articulate their understanding and their findings using "technical" terminology.  When I first started to use these strategies, the expectation was that language lessons should be carried out in the target language, but the resulting discussions of these strategies really has to happen in English.  It seemed like cheating almost to be using English in the classroom, but the students were discussing the language so it could be justified.

One of my favourites of these strategies is Odd One Out, of which you can see an example at the top of this post.  Odd One Out encourages students to examine the characteristics of words, to think about the meanings, similarities and differences.  Students are expected to use grammatical, technical language to explain and justify the choice that they have made.  It's also ideal for pair or group work.  One of the best lessons I ever had was a thinking skills lesson.  A group of four Year 9 girls had a stand-up argument about the solution to the thinking skills mystery we were working on in the lesson.  (It was better than I've maybe made it sound!)

Odd One Out activities are easy to produce, although to make a really good one you need to make it so that there is more than one possible answer.  Encourage students to look beyond the "it's the only one without an A" or "it's the only one with an accent on" type of answer.  Sometimes they manage to find an odd one out that you hadn't even seen, but as long as they can explain why it's an odd one out, they're right!  I always include the "why?" box for students to write in their reasoning.

Odd One Out can be set up using pictures, single words, sentences.....  There is a possibility to suit all learners.

Can you find the odd ones out here?  Why are they the odd ones out?  There is often more than one correct answer!