Locating where they live
Website address
Description
The Case of the Empty Fripple House is a sample of the material
produced by Edmark, an IBM company that develops and publishes children's
educational software. Students use textual clues and logic to decide which 'fripples' live
in different rooms of a house. They then drag them to the correct rooms. There are 14
levels of difficulty that students can choose from, or work through in order. Hints are
available in the form of extra information and partial answers.
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Technical requirements
The game is played online and no download is required. You need the Shockwave for Director (version 5 or higher) plug-in
from Macromedia. It is also recommended that you
use the most recently released version of Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet
Explorer.
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Objectives
| 1. |
To revise and extend vocabulary for colours and physical descriptions. |
| 2. |
To revise and extend descriptions of location. |
| 3. |
To encourage students to develop the ability to think logically.
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Language focus 
| Vocabulary: |
Colours  |
| Grammar: |
Using prepositions / prepositional phrases to describe
things
Using prepositions / prepositional phrases to indicate position |
Things to do before the activity
| 1. |
Look at the website and try the activity to see if it is appropriate for
your students.
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| 2. |
Make sure that students are already familiar
with vocabulary related to colours, descriptions and locations. If necessary, briefly recap
the vocabulary.
Pre-teach the following to students: twin, roommate, everyone, no
one.
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| 3. |
Demonstrate the activity on the board: draw a simple six-room house and
stick six figures to the board. Provide simple instructions to help students work out
which one lives where. To make this easier for yourself, you could use the first level of
the website activity. This also provides a further check on the vocabulary.
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Things to do after the activity
| 1. |
Ask students to work in groups. Get them to design a similar activity with
clues to work out which floor six people live on in a six-storey Hong Kong apartment
block. This provides an opportunity to introduce/revise ordinal numbers  .
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| 2. |
Collect students' work and make sure that their problems can
be solved.
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| 3. |
In the next lesson, redistribute students' work so that each group can
solve another group's puzzle.
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Related activities
If you have ideas or suggestions about related
activities that would be useful for your students, please let us know by
clicking on the Comments
button.
Pop-up notes
All the pop-up screens from this PrimeTeach file have
been copied here so that you can print them out easily.
| Note: |
The website uses American English so some of the vocabulary and spellings
may seem unusual to your students:
American English
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British English |
| neighbor |
neighbour |
| first floor |
ground floor |
| second floor |
first floor
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| Example: |
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| Example: |
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with spots |
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with stripes
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| Example: |
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above |
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in the corner |
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on the first floor |
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on the Westside
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Things to do before the activity
| 2. |
Note: |
There are a number of different techniques you could use to check that
students remember the vocabulary:
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Draw simple sketches on the board (a hat). |
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Use real objects in the classroom (a pair of sunglasses,
something red). |
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Use questions (Who is sitting in the corner
of the classroom?).
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Things to do after the activity
| 1. |
Glossary: |
Ordinal numbers are words
such as first, second, tenth, which tell you where in a sequence
items come. Cardinal numbers, such as
one, two and
ten, tell you how many things there are in a
group but not what order they are in.
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Grammar notes
For more information on using prepositions indicating location, look at the following in PrimeGram:
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Grammar: Word classes: Prepositions: Indicating place (in) |
Click to go directly to the website:
