Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Students Write Their Own Version

(TESOL Ideas--Interesting Input plus Production Prompts)

Sample Input: docs, pub

Production Prompts: docs, pub (comic book paper HERE)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (online here or here). Note: This can be copied onto a word document and printed--example HERE (select 4 pages per sheet when printing).  Or it can be read online.  It’s not necessary to read the whole thing.  Some of it will give the flavor.

Discuss the similarities and differences with Vietnamese schools. Then students write the Vietnamese version of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”.  (They can also do this as a comic book).

This is another entry for my Interesting Input plus Production Prompts project.

I had previously written about how popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid is here in Vietnam.  So I was guessing my teen student would react well to it, and they did.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid can be found on the Internet in several places.  It can be found at esl-bits at this link HERE.  Or the audio book can be found on Youtube HERE.  

(These links may go dead at some point in the future, but you can probably find other versions online easily enough.)

I copied some of Diary of a Wimpy Kid onto handouts in my class, but it wasn't necessary to do more than a few pages for them to get the idea. (I played the audio book for them a bit longer, but not much longer.)

For production, I discussed with the students briefly which parts of this book were unique to American schools, and which parts applied to Vietnam.  (I'm currently teaching in Vietnam, but obviously you can change the context to wherever you happen to be teaching.)
Students then put some similarities or differences into the table on the handout.  Students then had the production prompt: "Imagine you are writing a diary about what it’s like to be a kid in Vietnamese middle school.  What could you say?"  They could do this either as a written story or as drawing a comic book.

https://youtu.be/wf0D82bBsJY?si=7vCZXF6V_Ftsq3jO

https://esl-bits.org/ESL.English.Learning.Audiobooks/Wimpy.Kid/contenido.html

What things are the same as middle school in Vietnam?	What things are different from middle school in Vietnam?

Imagine you are writing a diary about what it’s like to be a kid in Vietnamese middle school.  What could you say?

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