Category Archives: Lesson Plan: Intermediate

Video Lessons: TedEd-Lessons Worth Sharing

Audio, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Listening, , ,

I’ve known about TED (Ideas Worth Spreading) for quite a long time but although I found their videos very interesting I thought they were too long or too difficult for my classes. Now TED has launched a  new  site, called TedEd,  with  a collection of educational video lessons you can choose by subject and view in class or assign as homework. Every video is accompanied by a lesson with Quick Multiple Choice questions that check your general comprehension. If you have one wrong, you can always check with the video hint and you can also have Think questions that further explore the topic.

For teachers , one of the most powerful features is the FLIP THE LESSON where you can customize the lesson by editing the title, giving your own instructions, select  or deselect any multiple choice questions…etc.

This is a lesson I have flipped for my students. I used the video Questions No One Knows the Answer To to give my students some practice using Reported Speech Questions. You can see my lessonhere

 

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!

Lesson Plan: Films

Audio, freeware, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, , , , , , , , ,

Mixing traditional and modern teaching? What’s the right balance? That’s a hot issue and one I haven’t yet found the answer to but I feel that there’s nothing like the interaction between teachers and students or students among themselves.
In this lesson plan Focus on Films I’ve combined both traditional teaching and new technologies. I’ve even published one exercise Film Genres that I’d rather do with my students in class with them taking an active role in their learning process. You choose but what comes below  is how I  definitely plan to do it with my students.

I ‘ve prepared one set of blue strips of paper with the names of famous films and another set of green coloured strips with film genres. All in all I’ve written 10 strips of paper and then placed them on my table. Students will then come up to my table and do the matching exercise using blue-tack to stick the strips on the blackboard. I’m planning to revise  by showing them only the films and then only the genres.

On the other hand, there is another exercise in this lesson plan where, if I were a student, I’d definitely choose to do using a computer and I’m referring to the brainstorming exercise we normally do on the blackboard. Well,  I’ve had a lot of fun ( and also wasted a lot of time ) doing this brainstorming  about films with this little application called Simple Diagrams, which I highly recommend (mainly because it’s free)


It must have been sheer luck that I bumped into this cool site only last week, just when I was gathering material to use  in the FILMS lesson.


This site has been nominated as one of the 50 best sites in 2010 and it contains about 12.000 film snippets that can be searched by genre, director, props, setting…etc. Isn’t it just unbelievable that you can even choose Action  and under this category choose whether you want a clip with a cough or a bump or a cry? Isn’t it just as amazing that you can choose the clip by Mood; do you want something inspiring,creepy or maybe funny?

The whole lesson, designed for intermediate students, comes with Vocabulary, Reading, Listening and Writing exercises. Click HERE to do it