As we move well away from summer it’s nice to rekindle motivation with a few fun and games related to Halloween but leading onto compound nouns, since, after all, Halloween is a compound. The image above shows the Word Magnet board I recently made to do a warmer in class:
1. Students elicit theme from picture;
2. Students reconstruct text;
3. As a whole class we look at the components of Halloween and have a quick discussion about the origins of the word. This is followed by a hot potatoes matching activity where students match other parts of halloween related compounds, such as ghost train, ghost writer etc.
This was particularly useful to ny students as we had been talking about collocation and the difference between collocations and compounds were not so clear. So, this activity was both fun and useful: a memorable way of looking at compounds. For the activities themselves visit my wiki page “Fun and Games”.
Incidentally, we did this work after Halloween, so it’s not too late 
