Organise students in pairs. Each child turns to recount to their partner a time when they were in-volved in a race, either as a competitor or as a spectator. Encourage the students to use between three and five complete sentences.

Pair talking tasks: Word play

Organise students to complete the tasks below in pairs, groups or as a whole class, as appropriate.

• • How many words can you think of that rhyme with ‘race’? (e.g. race, face, lace, brace, grace, chase, place, trace, case, base, etc.) Each partner in turn contributes a word. The winning pair is the pair that generates most rhyming words. Draw students’s attention to the fact that sometimes the sound is represented with a ‘c’ and sometimes with an ‘s’.
• • How many words can we make using some of the letters in the word ‘race’? (e.g. ear, ace, car, are, arc, era)
• • What other meanings are there for the word ‘race’? (A group of people who share similar characteristics, e.g. physical, cultural, language, history. Human race – all of the living humans on Earth; we are all members of the human race)
• • Can you think of idioms containing the word ‘race’? (e.g. a race against time – to try to accomplish something in a very short time; one horse race – where one of the compet-itors is vastly superior and most likely to win; slow and steady wins the race – if you work slowly and methodically you are more likely to succeed than if you rush – from Aesop’s The Tortoise and the Hare fable)

Pair/Group talking task (Oral recount): Space race sequence

Ask students to look closely at the images on the poster. Decide together, as a class, on the se-quence of events in the space race. Number the images about the space race in sequence – which picture comes first, next, then, after, etc.

Organise students in pairs or groups. Within their pairs or groups, students must prepare to recount the story of the space race to someone who doesn’t know about it in just four or five sentences.

Encourage the students to combine some of the images into one complex sentence (e.g. Not only was the Soviet Union the first country in the world to launch an animal into space successfully, they also succeeded in putting the first human, Yuri Gagarin into space as well as the first woman). Pairs or groups then present their recounts to another group, class, or teacher.