The topic last week at the Pre-School was "Things Around the Home".
One of the activities I designed involved this worksheet:
In class, each student got a worksheet. Together we discussed and listed-up the things they could see in the picture.
I wrote their observations on the whiteboard as they said them, confirming the reading of each written word one by one, and all of them again at the end.
With students' color pencils now open on their tables, I circled one of the words in the middle of the list, and said "Let's color this one".
This action generated within the students a genuine need to read the English. The students employed one of two strategies: either they tried to remember the order of each item as it was originally written on the whiteboard to try and guess what it said, or they employed basic phonics rules to read the item: "the flowers". With the latter strategy being by far the mnore efficient, the students genuinely made an effort to read.
The students could of course have easily chosen their own colors to color the flowers, but this I felt would have made the need to communicate minimal. So instead I asked the students to color the flowers the same color as Rie's flowers (Japanese assistant teacher) at home. This then generated the question:
"Rie, what color are your flowers?"
And so on it went - an item on the whiteboard was circled, the tudents made an attempt to read it, and then they asked Rie "What color is your _____?"
It was a simple enough activity that had students read English for a purpose, and ask questions for a purpose.