A lesson about Christmas

Lesson outline

This year, my co-teacher (Miss Lee) and I decided to put our guitar skills to some use and play a song with the students. We decided to play "The twelve days of Christmas" because of its simple melody and repetitive nature - making it easy for the students to follow.

We divided the class into two groups, whereby the first group would sing the odd numbered days (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11) and the other the even numbered days (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12) - this way all students would be involved and it added a touch of spice to the song.

 

Before playing the song with the students, we began our lesson with a speaking task. It was a spot the difference puzzle based on a Christmas theme. Students worked in pairs and had to communicate with each other in English to find the differences between their pictures. This worked well and students enjoyed the activity. We then summarized at the end, with the whole class working together, to point out the differences that they had found.

Finally, to end the lesson, we introduced our New Year's Resolutions to the class. We then asked the students to guess which resolutions belonged to which teacher. It was then the students turn to make up at least three resolutions of their own and to write them on some decorative shapes, which were then used to make a beautifully decorated Christmas display outside of our English classroom.
 

A speaking game

Lesson outline

In this lesson, students played a variation of a classic British TV game show called "Call my Bluff". The original game show used obscure words but for this lesson, I wanted the students to describe pictures and to talk about themselves.

Procedure

I divided the class into teams of three.

Each team then chose its team name.

A team was chosen and asked to sit at the front of the class, where three desks were placed. On each desk was an envelope. Two of the envelopes contained pictures, while the third contained only a blank piece of A4 paper. Students were then given thirty seconds to prepare themselves and think how they were going to describe their picture. After thirty seconds, each student took turns to describe their picture - the one with the blank piece of A4 paper having to make up a description of their own.

Upon listening to all three descriptions, the remaining teams then had to guess who was bluffing. If the person bluffing was identified correctly, then two points were awarded to that team. For each team that failed to identify the bluffer, the team describing was awarded one point. The game continued in this fashion until all teams had participated.

I had planned to do a second round, whereby each team member would think up two truths and a lie and then present to the audience. The audience would have to identify the lie in each case and points would be awarded accordingly. However, the one-hour lesson was taken up by just the picture round and they did not have time to do the second one.

The lesson began with three demonstration videos of the English teachers explaining pictures in order to instil some interest and to rouse their curiosity.