My personal take on the "Comparative Shopping" Activity https://www.altopedia.net/activities/201-comparative-shopping
Materials:
Shopping list
Store inventory list
Fake money
Food cards/fake food (optional)
Explanation:
1. Give half the students a shopping list and half the students an inventory list. There are two kinds of each.
2. Distribute fake money to shoppers, food/food cards to stores.
3. Shopkeepers remain seated, shoppers go around and request items one at a time on their shopping list. I built this around the New Horizons 5 Unit 6 dialogue, but you can modify the interaction in any way.
Sample dialogue:
"What would you like?"
"I'd like___."
"___is __ yen." OR "Sorry"
"Here you go."
"Thank you."
4. If the shopkeeper doesn't have an item, the shopper must go to a different shop.
5. The shoppers must race to complete their shopping list in a certain amount of time.
6. Switch the roles and lists around, play again.
Notes:
1. I found it very helpful to use fake money. The students had a lot of fun with just that.
2. I didn't use food cards because I wasn't sure how to implement them, but I made some that are included in the file. Feel free to use them if you can.
-it was sometimes a challenge to keep track of what they already bought; I ended up having them make a mark on the sheet, but that made it a little harder to reuse the sheets.
3. You can do a 50/50 shopkeepers to shopper ratio, but I found it worked better to have less shopkeepers.
4. It was helpful to demonstrate the interaction with the JTE, and write the dialogue out on the board.
5. The students tend to slip into Japanese, so make sure they do the whole thing in English.
6. My students were all able to finish in about 5 minutes. To make it harder you can give them less time.