This is a new technique for me, and I don't believe this method was widely used abroad (i.e. in the CELTA and Delta methodologies in which I was trained up in.) But, as always, it could just have been a personal blind spot. Let me know if you've used this method before.
Although it's new to me, it's not new, and there are lots of webpages out there describing (see here, here, here and others). But I will also try to describe it below as my mentor explained it to me.
You start out by projecting a picture onto the whiteboard. Then, eliciting vocabulary from the students, you help the class to label as many things in the picture as they can. The teacher supplies the vocabulary as necessary, but ideally most of it should come from the class.
Then, once all the concrete objects in the picture have been labelled (i.e. all the nouns), then the teacher encourages students to think about appropriate adjectives for these nouns. What color are they? Are they big or small? Et cetera.
Then, the teacher encourages students to think of verbs associated with these nouns. What are the things doing?
Finally, the teacher guides the students to making full sentences with these words. The teacher writes it up on the board, and then the students copy it into the notebooks.
As my mentor demonstrated it, this then lead into independent student work. After the teacher had demonstrated how to write sentences on the board, the students discussed with partners, and continued to write their own sentences.
Then, at the end of the class, some of the students read back to the class some of the sentences they have written. As my mentor pointed out, this technique incorporates all the skills or reading, writing and speaking. (And perhaps listening as well, if the students have to listen to the their classmates' sentences.)
This activity can be used in some classes as just a general language fluency building activity. But, it can also be used to introduce and practice a certain vocabulary set, if you have a picture that goes with that vocabulary set.
I'm currently using Oxford Picture Dictionary Content Areas for Kids and Oxford Picture Dictionary for the Content Areas in my class, and these work great for they have a big picture for each topic which shows all the key vocabulary words in one picture.
But of course, these days you can just as easily use AI to create the perfect image, if you need to fit all the vocabulary into one picture.
I suppose this activity could also be used for practicing certain grammar points, with the right picture. In this respect, it would be similar to the "Describe a Picture" activity I mentioned in this previous post.
