How to make a spinner

Being a real professional teacher, tutor or educator means being creative and open to experiments, new didactic discoveries. Teachers can develop their creativity in the classroom by offering their students different useful things like a spinner, for example. Such spinners can be used for vocabulary work, grammar practice and entertainment purposes.

Watch my colleague describing in English how to make a spinner. But first learn some useful words to understand the native speaker better:

Useful Vocabulary

• cardboard — pasteboard or stiff paper
• to glue — fasten
• flat — smooth and even
• arbitrary — based on random choice
• pointed — having a sharpened or tapered tip or end
• paper clip — a piece of bent wire or plastic used for holding several sheets of paper together
• to bend — shape or force (something straight) into a curve or angle
• to poke — jab or prod (someone or something), especially with one’s finger
• a bead — a small piece of coloured glass, wood, or plastic with a hole through the middle.
• Popsicle — a piece of flavored ice or ice cream on a stick

Hello! Welcome back to English Voyage Blog. Today I am at All Ukrainian Scientific and Methodological Conference in Zhytomir.
Please meet Linda Hebenstreit who is going to tell us how to make a spinner.

So we use these spinners for vocabulary work. They work very well. And we can also use them for fortune telling.

1. So you take two pieces of cardboard and glue them together, so that you get a flat spinner.
2. Then you have to find the center. It can be pretty arbitrary. Just decide where your center is and you make a hole with something that is pointed, maybe a knife.
3. Take a paper clip and open it up. And then you are going to break the end off just bending it back and forth.
4. And you are gonna poke it through the center of the spinner. So you see how we poked it through.
5. And once it’s poked through (I don’t have a hole in this one) so once it’s poked through, you put a bead on and a bead is a spacer so that the spinner spins easily.
6. Then you put your Popsicle (ice cream) stick on and then you put another bead for a spacer. And all of this is on your cardboard, you understand.
7. And then you have this little top piece. And I just wind it around like that. So it can’t come off. But it still spins freely.

Let’s see — can anybody make a spinner? It’s certain!
Thank you, Linda! It’s great! I am sure this useful tool can be applied by teachers and students for different vocabulary and grammar purposes. Thank you very much!
Welcome back next time to English Voyage Blog.