Treasure Hunt

The Treasure Hunt design launches users on explorations into various corners of the Russian language. Treasure Hunt activities are stratified for proficiency level, and even A1 users (with a vocabulary of only a few hundred words) have ample opportunities to go on Treasure Hunts. They can be undertaken in groups or individually, in the classroom or self-study.

Each Treasure Hunt begins with a simple Prompt, an instruction on how to use a SMARTool search function to extract a target set of sentences, and a question to consider. After deducing an answer for themselves in the SMARTool, users can compare their answers with an Answer Key. A Take-Away Idea summarizes the result and what users can do with it.

Story Time

The goal of Story Time is to build up skills and confidence in productive communication in Russian. Story Time helps learners to become confident writers, and, when used in the classroom – speakers.

Story Time activities take advantage of the fact that all lexemes in the SMARTool are searchable according to Topic, and many lexemes belong to more than one Topic. Filtering lexemes by Topic facilitates the targeting of word forms that learners can use to construct coherent narratives.

The task for learners is to use the models of word forms and their typical contexts presented in the SMARTool to build their own sentences and, ultimately, paragraphs.