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St Patrick's Day |  I've decided to talk about Ireland and St Patrick's Day with my intermediate level.
I first worked on a listening comprehension found here:
http://www.elllo.org/Text0601/638-Ruth-Advice.htm
It's quite difficult so I just asked my students to focus on the main details and they found out quite a lot of stuff in the end!
Then, we worked on reading comprehensions (one about Ireland and one about St Patrick's Day). The aim of the lesson if to create a touristic leaflet highlighting the main features of the country. This will allow students to train their writing skills.
I would like to thank one of my colleagues, Laetitia, for her good ideas!
You will find the reading comprehensions in the lesson plan:
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| To teach them writing skills, I use this sheet:
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| Valentine's Day |  Valentine's day is a good opportunity to talk about love with the pupils in a funny way.
I chose to do it only with my older pupils (14 year-olds) because I didn't have many ideas for the lower levels. Making cards is fun but I didn't feel like doing it. I find it hard to make the topic linguistically interesting; I mean it's hard to practise the language with such a topic, especially with beginners. There's not much to say.
That's why I created a lesson plan for my older pupils, which could also fits High School students.
I chose to introduce love with the theme of advice: should / if I were you, I would...
Pupils are confronted to love problems which they have to solve. The first one is introduced through an oral comprehension, from this page. You can capture the sound with a software such as audacity.
Pupils will have to give advice to Alice, whose heart is broken.
Then I chose to work on an extract from "Friends".
Did I tell you how much I love the series Friends???? I own the 10 seasons (big fan!) and I find them great to watch and use in class. The situations are often interesting to describe, as well as the themes and the characters' actions. I really would like to work more with Friends, to create lesson plans based on the series, to make a list of all the themes/scenes which are worth using in class.
Creating a new blog would be great for that but I'm afraid I just don't have the time.
Anyway, Friends are full of scenes about love, argument, cheating, relationships and so on.
Take season 3, episode 8 in which Chandler learns that Janice is cheating on him. The episode shows several scenes in which the characters questions their feelings and wonder what to do. Those are perfect scene to ask the pupils: what would you do? What should he do?
I then want to finish the lesson plan with dialogues made up by the pupils (see the list of themes in the file) in which they will have to give advice.
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| Our Future | Here is a new lesson plan talking about the future of our lives and society: how will they be in 50 or 100 years? That's what I'll propose to my pupils in 3ème form - second language. They are supposed to be lower-intermediate or intermediate but their level is very good so I'm doing quite ambitious texts and projetcs with them.
The starting point is an article found on www.oup.com/elt (they propose a lot of samples on this website so I can't give you the exact link but I'll put to file to download here).
It's an article about a huge ship which is going to be built to welcome a kind of small society. Maybe you've heard about the project.
The pdf file can't be mofidied, it's protected. So I just printed it and scanned it to modify it (I cut it out into 5 parts and cut out the image).
Then we'll watch an extract from "Back to the future II", a scene in which Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) discovers his town in 2015. How did Robert Zemeckis (the director) imagine life in 2015? That's quite interesting to see.
Finally, I'll ask the pupils to tell me THEIR vision of the future (in an oral presentation).
This lesson plan is useful to introduce WILL (in nearly all forms) and other little things (personal expression, HOW questions, would like, etc).
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| A worksheet (a grid to help read the article):
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| A sheet to use on the OHP:
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| | An advertisement |  Another lesson plan today ! Well, don't be too enthusiastic, I don't have that many to share !!
Today is a lesson plan I did last year when I was teaching in High School. I liked teaching in High School because the range of possible subects is much wider than in secondary school. But I LOOOOVE teaching in secondary school level. The kids are simply great.
Anyway.
This lesson plan is about advertisement. I chose one particularly ad, which I found really funny and surprising.
This lesson plan not in conformity to the European Framework of Language Teaching since I was not as well trained last year as I am today.
Ads are great to study with the pupils because they are short, often well-made and the level of English is usually adapted to teenagers. Choose funny ads, your pupils will love them. Go a bit beyond the first level of comprehension and make them talk about the way the ad is made and for which purpose. Try to make them aware of the power of advertisement (spoof ads are good for that). |
| | | Coming back from a trip | It's important to take every opportunity to make the pupils talk about their personal experiences. Trips are great for that. If they're gone on a trip with the school (it may be any kind of trip), don't hesistate to talk about it in class - before or after, or both.
Before the trip, you can talk in the future tense: make them talk about their planning : what they're going to do, etc.
When they come back, use the preterit tense and make them talk about what they liked/didn't like. They will have a lot to say !
You can have them work on a summary of their trip or a kind of journal.
I chose to have my 3ème (learning english for 2 years) write a thank you note to their penpals and their family. They spent 10 days in a German family so it's a good opportunity to write a small letter and teach them:
- how to write a letter
- how to say thank you
- how to say what you liked
The fact that it's a german family doesn't really matter. Some of them spoke English anyway during their trip. The most important thing is that this task is real and it will therefore make sense for them.
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