Traffic rules

Hey everyone,

The year is finishing and so it's the blog's activity; I'm sharing the second last activity for this year. Thank you all for your encouraging comments and the many many visits you paid the blog this year. I look forward to getting more feedback and reaching more teachers in order to share, discuss and make this experience even more enriching.

This is a lesson I created and used with my A2 students to talk about rules. Throughout these activities students will recognize and differentiate the use of can, can't, have to and be allowed to, classify and apply them. It was a very meaningful lesson for my students; I hope it can be useful to yours as well.

As a follow up, students could go to glogster and create a poster with the traffic rules (or any other kind of rules) in their community, or the most important to them.

What do you think? 

Here's the worksheet

Warm regards,
Claudio

Different ways of starting the day

Here's a simple activity to work on the use of simple past with A1 students. I cut the opening scene from the great Argentinean movie "La suerte está hechada". I believe the activity is self-explanatory: however, if you have any doubt, please let me know.

I hope you find it useful.





Here's the worksheet.

Regards,
Claudio

The news

Hi everyone,

I'm sharing a set of activities I created to work with a group of C1 students on the use of passive voice in the context of news. I hope you find it useful.

Warm up: Students share their opinions. Whole class.

How important is it to be informed?
What is the role of the newspaper in society?
What comes to mind when you hear the word "news"? 
What's in the news these days?
Which source of news do you think is best?

Show them the headlines below. Do they realte to their answers?

Activity 1: Mini debate. 

Devide the class in 4 groups. Each of them is going to defend a source of information. They will have 5 minutes to generate arguments to defend theirs and to attact the others'.

The options are: Television, Radio, Internet and Newspaper.

Activity 2: Understanding and grammar discovery.

Activity 3: Once they understood and practiced the use of passive voice, have them invent facts about a story in order to apply the structure. Using the headlines seen in the first activity as a starting point, they have to come up with 2 or 3 sentences.

Closure: Students read this article taken from breakingnewsenglish.com and write a short report based on what they have read, seen and heard about the virus. Finally, they will read it to the class to see if they have similar ideas.

As a follow up: My students prepared a 5-to-10-minute presentation on the most shocking news they remembered for the following class. They had to select one event they vividly recalled and describe the context in which it took place, why they found it shocking and which was the impact it had in the community.

BTW, I should have recorded them, they were great.

Here's the worksheet.

What do you think?

Stay tuned,
Claudio

Art

I'm sharing an activity I created to work with B2+ students in the use of connectors for discussions. We were talking about art and in this class we discussed several aspects of it. Students tried to define what art was for them, they analyzed a concept and designed their own, and they supported their views through a debate.  

Warm up: Take a look at the following pictures and discuss in pairs.

Are these all examples of art?
What's the purpose of art?

Activity 1: Listen to this teacher talking about art. 

What is art anyway?
Do you agree with her?
How would you define it?

Activity 2: This scene explores another side of art. Watch it and choose the correct alternative.

Closure: A school in your community is planning to cut out the Art hours from its syllabi. Half of the class is going to favor this idea and think of reasons why this is a wise choice. However, the other half is going to be totally against this measure and will come up with a list of arguments which show how wrong it is. Once they have written all their arguments, they will exchange their opinions. The only conditions to participate are the following: Whenever they participate, they have to use one of the connectors seen in the previous activity. And remember:

Expressions they might use (besides the connectors):

In my opinion/view .... 

If you ask me ....

As far as I can see/I’m concerned .... 

It seems to me that ....

I have the/a feeling that .... 

I think/feel/reckon/believe ....

Well, I’d say .... 

First of all/To start with I’d like to point out ...

What we have to decide is .... 

There can be no doubt that ....

It’s a fact that .... 

Nobody will deny that ....

The way/As I see it 

Let me put it this/another way .... 

Let’s get this clear (first) ....

The point I’m trying to make is ....

Personally (speaking) I think .... 

I’m absolutely convinced that ....

My view/point of view is that .... 

The way I look at/see it is this

What I actually meant was ....

Here's the worksheet.

Regards,
Claudio