Practices: observation, descriptive language, past tense
- Explain the concept of a photo safari to the class. How much do your students know about safaris? Most often, the word safari is used to refer to a journey to Africa. In past times, a safari was a hunting trip in which men and women pursued big game, animals that were not available to hunt in their native locations. Today, however, the concept of a safari has shifted from hunting to observation. Many people take trips each year to observe big game animals in their natural habitats and take pictures of them rather than hunt them. In this sense, a photo safari is a trip to take pictures of unusual snippets of life that a person would otherwise not have exposure to. Since many ESL students have travelled from overseas in their pursuit of the language, their trip has some resemblance to a safari. They are in a foreign environment seeing life in totally new ways. As students study English in a foreign country, they will inevitably experience culture and life in different ways from those they are used to. You can encourage your students to take a “photo safari” of their overseas experience as they go through a day or two in their lives. Start by giving them some background on what a photo safari is and what purpose it has. You may also want your students to do some research on this type of trip either by watching videos that tourists have posted (there are many available on YouTube.com) or reading blogs or informational articles on photo safaris.
- Once your students have some understanding of a photo safari, ask each person to document his or her daily life though photographs, similar to what tourists would do on a safari. Each person should take as many pictures as he or she would like as long as each part of the day is recorded. After a day or two of this documentation, take some class time to examine the photographs. You may want to have willing students share information about the pictures they took. Point out that they should generally use past tenses when they share their information.
- Afterwards, have each student use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast his personal journalistic photos with what participants in a photo safari might have recorded. Finally, ask each person to write a short piece explaining whether or not he would like to participate in a photo safari and why.