Tag Archives: speaking

Lesson Plan: New Year Resolutions

Lesson Plan: Advanced, , , ,

Happy New Year to everyone  and good luck with your New Year Resolutions. I have a dozen  resolutions myself  but I no longer believe I am going to keep them. The title of this post is not what one might think it means though it’s true that I have had the same New Year Resolutions for quite a number of years. But I want to be positive, start off on the right foot and mentally prepare myself for, this time, keeping them. Time will tell!

Why the title, then?  There is a very funny lesson that I prepared two years ago called Bridget Jones’s Diary that has to do with Resolutions. A few days  I got a comment to a post in this blog where I introduced this  lesson (here) and so I thought I might show it again .

Lesson Plan : Personality adjectives

Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Music, , , , , ,

Step 1. Look at the mosaic below with the faces of some well-known celebrities and, bearing in mind what you know about them, write a description based on their personalities. Make sure you use personality adjectives. Do not mention the name of the celebrity you are describing as your classmates aim will be to find out who you are describing. Please, don’t be too flattering or too hard on people. Remember that “not all that glitters is  gold”.

Important: the description should be written in the way of a comment to this post. How to do it? at the end of the post, click No Comments (or 9 Comments  if hopefully I have already published nine comments), leave the comments in the right field, repeat the required anti-spam word and click Submit Comment.

Step 2. Let’s have some fun. How would you fancy converting text to music? This funny programme allows you to type any words and it sings them back to you. Try typing some personality adjectives and listen to them sung by different people. The site is called Text to sing.

Step 3. Exercises. Do the following online exercises .

Exercise 1 Exercise 2

Step 4: Writing. How do you see yourself and how others see you? This task, as you can imagine, requires mature students as it involves writing and reading about you. First, students  find a classmate they know pretty well. Secondly, students write about their own personality and then, about their friend’s personality. Encourage students to explain and exemplify why they have chosen a certain adjective to describe them and also to describe a negative trait in their personalities as well as in their friend’s. Students pair themselves and compare what they have written.

Step 5. Singing Hand in my pocket by Alanis Morisette

Lesson Plan: Retelling an article using Word Clouds

Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Speaking, , , ,

This is a lesson I did with my upper-intermediate students in the computer room and I thought it might be useful to some teachers. The main idea is to retell a text you have previously worked with in class. This is important as  otherwise the task of retelling might be a bit  difficult for weaker students. This is how I did it.

♣ First, for homework, I asked students to reread the text several times .

♣ Then, in the computer room, I asked students to form groups of 3 or 4  and divided the text according to the number of students in each group .

♣ Now, individually and  using the website Word it Out, which is a word cloud generator, I asked them to select the key words in their texts, type them in Word It Out and generate the word cloud. If two words need to be together, it is easy with this generator. Imagine “suffer from”, you only need to insert _ between the two words and they’ll be kept together in the cloud.

♣ Students in groups again, retell the story with the help of the generated  word clouds.

I especially liked this exercise as students get a lot of fun out of it and they collaborate every step of the way. Here are the word clouds generated by a group. I hope you find it useful!