ACTIVITY: DINNER DATE ROLE-PLAY
LEVEL: Intermediate
Language Focus: Vocabulary, Past Continuous Tense
Objective:
- Students will be able to correctly put into practice the past continuous tense into personal responses.
- Students will actively listen during conversation and respond accordingly.
- Students will recall previous knowledge of vocabulary and grammatical structure.
Pre – Activity Knowledge: Students have been taught the past continuous tense, including the various conjunctions required for this form, earlier in the lesson, including several repetitions and worksheet activities the both introduce them to the grammatical structure and practice with it independently in written form. The roleplay will act as the oral practice of the grammatical form.
ADDITIONAL VOCABULARY: MADE UP, EXCUSE
| ACTIVITY | TIME | GROUP | MATERIALS | NOTES |
| THE DINNER SCENARIO:
SAY: You are going to go to a dinner party with a friend you haven’t seen in a LOOOOONG TIME. Do you know what an EXCUSE is?
Elicit answers.
An excuse is something you tell people when you have missed something, but don’t have a REALLY good reason for missing it.
For example, one CLASSIC excuse that people use to use for when a teacher asked “where is your homework?”
Someone would answer: “My dog ate my homework”
Do you think that’s the real reason he or she didn’t bring her homework?
Elicit answers.
NO! Of course not! Its an…..
Elicit an choral answer (EXCUSE!)
For this exercise you are going to be FULL of excuses.
Show of hands, who has ever MADE UP an excuse?
Wait for hands.
Why did you make up an excuse?
Elicit answers from students.
SAY: Okay, the exercise will help you practice making those excuses. Excuses can describe something that we were doing WHILE we were suppose to be doing something else. What verb tense do we use in the past that also uses a conjunction, such as WHILE or WHEN?
Elicit answers.
Yes! The past continuous tense.
Place students in pairs, based on strength.
Hand out The Dinner Scenarios to each pair.
Go over the instructions of the scenario and model the example for them.
Ask if there are any questions.
NOTE: Reiterate that a FULL sentence means using part of the question in the answer. Tell that while FULL sentences may not be useful in this informal friend interaction, that in a business situation or in written form, the full answers are expected.
Tell them that each member of the pairs will have a chance to play both roles, so make sure each person is given equal time to practice. Tell them that I will write the time on the board so that they know when it is time to switch roles for practicing purposes. Tell them that after each group has fifteen minutes for each person to practice each role, that we will regroup as a class and each group will present their scenario to the class. Tell them to BE CREATIVE; come up with some GREAT excuses. Make sure you jot down your answers, just in case we run out of time and you need to perform it next class.
Give students 50 minutes to practice the dialogues. Move around to the groups to see if they need additional help and assess. Note the time on the board and tell them when to switch roles. At 50 minutes , ask groups to perform the roleplaying scenario for me. Assess students and give oral feedback about pronunciation and tense usage. Provide feedback for each student in written form of what they need to work on. Get students who are not performing to listen and write down assessment notes on grammatical structure and pronunciation on small slips of paper with the performing pair’s name at the top. Keep own assessment and each pair’s assessment in their files.
Stop performances only if there are consistent grammatical or pronunciation mistakes.
After all the groups have performed, a oral assessment will be conducted to give students the freedom to ask questions about the activity, the tense, as well as give general feedback about their experience and the application of the activity in their lives. For the intermediate levels, the additional act of them changing the scenario and using the same verb tense may be a next step that will embed the structure into a more personal and real context.
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30 – 40 Mins | Pairs | Diner Scenario | The practical application of this tense is explained and utilized in this role playing activity.
Make sure the pairs put stronger students with weaker students, so that they can help and assist each other construct their answers.
In general, the lower level students will need additional scaffolding and language to complete this assignment. The advanced students may need to write their own scenarios, with various tense forms to find value in this sort of activity. |
DINNER SCENARIO
You are at your favorite restaurant with your friend for dinner who you have not seen in a long time. Your friend is curious about what you have been up to and why you have been TOO busy to hang out with them. Using the past continuous tense, explain to your friend what you have been doing. Make sure to use FULL sentences.
EXAMPLE:
Friend: I called you last week, why didn’t you answer?
YOU: I was using the vacuum cleaner, when you called last week
OR
When you called last week, I was using the vacuum cleaner.
Friend: How are you doing?
YOU:
FRIEND: Last week was my birthday, why didn’t you come?
YOU:
FRIEND: Okay. The week before that, my girlfriend/boyfriend broke up with me and I emailed you, what were you doing?
YOU:
Friend: That makes sense. You told me to eat at Ruby’s Diner last Saturday and I did. Where were you?
YOU:
Friend: I called you last week, why didn’t you answer?
YOU:
Friend: A month ago, I saw you across the street from my work and I yelled at you. Why didn’t you hear me?
YOU:
Friend: Okay. That’s fine. We agreed to go to Japan together and I bought the plane ticket, but you didn’t show up at the airport. Why didn’t you show up?
YOU:
ACTIVITY 2: STUDENT BLOGS
LEVEL: Intermediate
Language Focus: The conditional clauses and comparatives and superlatives
Objective:
- Students will be able to set up and write a simple blog on WordPress
- Students will be able to know the vocabulary and grammar associated with blog writing
- Students will understand the difference between informal blog writing and formal essay writing
- Students will share their own personal thoughts with their peers and the global community
- Students will be able to read and respond to their peers’ blogs
Pre-Activity Knowledge: Students will be quite familiar with how conditional clauses work with other clauses and which contexts comparatives and superlatives can be used. Students will also be familiar with the language associated with computer and blog technology and also have a website set up through WordPress. The lesson that had students set up blogs, via visual projected step by step modeling, also went into further descriptions of how to increase the functionality of their blogs. Again, while one of the benefits of this will mean that the students become more computer literate, it also gives them the practical grammar and vocabulary that involves technology, an aspect that may be outdated or too formalized to be included in classroom resources. Students will also be shown other student blogs, as well as my travel blog, so that they can see the practical advantages and benefits of keeping a blog beyond simply a classroom activity on grammar. Students are also made familiar with how to search for media via the Creative Commons, as well as Microsoft Word.
| ACTIVITY | TIME | GROUP | MATERIALS | NOTES |
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WEEKLY BLOG:
Open up a “My Weekly Blog Entry” and show them this week’s entry on the projector.
Copy the entry into Microsoft Word.
Get students to read it to themselves for 10 minutes.
Read it aloud with students and explain any idioms or colloquialisms that exist that they may not understand, such as “happy camper”.
Ask: What is the title of this entry?
Elicit answers.
Ask: What is the blog about?
Elicit answers.
Ask: Do you like this blog?
Why or why not?
Elicit answers.
Get student to write a practice response for my blog. Give students 8 minutes of this activity.
Get students to share their responses.
Highlight specific sentences of the blog that deal with conditional clauses.
Go over the examples each type of conditional clauses and examples of each:
Type 1 Conditional Clause:
if + Simple Present, will-Future
Example:
I told him that if he had a nap, the trip’ll go faster.”
Type 2 Conditional Clause:
if + Simple Past, Conditional I (= would + Infinitive)
Example:
“He told me he if I wanted it, he would visit me in two weeks.”
Type 3 Conditional Clause:
if + Past Perfect, Conditional II (= would + have + Past Participle)
Example:
“My dad says he would act calmer, if he hadn’t of gotten stuck in the Wall.”
Students are asked to locate other conditional sentences in the blog.
Students are then asked to make two columns, a “superlatives” and “comparatives” columns. They are then given a minute to find all the superlatives and comparatives in the blog.
After the a minute, turn off my blog page. Allow students to elicit answers, asking them to give the root word for each superlative and comparative.
Note if any of the superlatives and comparatives have been missed.
Hand out the blog checklist and go through each of the blank spaces for this week, eliciting their answers as to what the target language is for them. Give them around ten to fifteen minutes to fill it out. Go around to each of the students to assess whether they know what they are going to write about and if they are confident using the target language or need some help.
A random draw is held in class to assign which student blog each student is responding to.
Students are reminded that both their blog entries and peer feedback responses will be due in a week.
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20 Mins |
Individual |
My Weekly blog on Projection Blog Checklist |
Students are told previously that when I ask “what a blog is about”, there is an implicit request to have their summarize the main points of the blog in their own words. For the lower levels this may be simple sentences. For more advanced students, this response should be more complex, multi-clausal sentences.
The superlative and comparative game allows for some fun and competition to see who can get the most in a certain amount of time and then further more, if they know the root of the conjugated word.
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Weekly Blog Checklist: January 24th, 2015
Title of blog entry:
Topic of blog entry:
Language focus:
Examples of language focus:
Additional language focuses:
Examples:
New vocabulary:
Creative Commons task:
Blog Entry Example:
The Saddest Dad in China
In 2013, I moved to Beijing, a city in China, to teach English to children. When I first moved there, I thought everything was the greatest. China has the greatest food. China has the nicest people. China has the biggest buildings, even though I know there are bigger buildings in other countries. It was all so new to me, I didn’t think it could be any better. One day, my dad called me to see how I was doing. I told him I that I couldn’t get any happier. He was happy for me. He told me he if I wanted it, he would visit me in two weeks. I was so excited. This was the best surprise ever! I prepared to show him around Beijing. If the weather was nice, we could go to the GREAT WALL OF CHINA!
In two weeks, I picked my dad up from the airport and we went to his fancy hotel. The hotel was only ten minutes by bicycle from my house. After only a few days, my dad thought China had the best…everything, as well: The best restaurants, the best history, the best subways. I told him that, if it were sunny tomorrow, we would go to the wall. He was as excited as I was.
The next day we jumped on a bus and headed out to the Great Wall of China. I decided that we were going to a special part of the Wall, a part where you didn’t have to buy tickets. On the Internet it is known as the Wild Wall, because no restoration has been done to it. My dad was impatient on the bus ride. I told him that if he had a nap, the trip’ll go faster. After two hours on three different buses, we arrived at our destination.
A large sign read: “If you climb on The Great Wall here, you are breaking the law”. I was told that the only reason that sign was up was because their were no tickets to buy to get onto the Wall, so the government made no money from it. Other parts of the Wall, you have to buy expensive tickets. The Wild Wall parts are hard to find, if you don’t know where to look.
The entrance to the Wall was on an old man’s farm. He charged us 3 Yuan to enter his farm to get to the wall. 3 yuan is about 20 cents in Canadian money! The Wall’s entrance was a tall ladder that you had to climb up and then climb through a window onto the Wall. My dad was the first to climb up. My dad is a big bigger than me and he is scared of heights. When he got to the window at the top of the ladder, he started to climb through it and got stuck. I’ve never heard him whimper that loud. He was not a happy camper. As much as he tried to wiggle himself out of the window, the more he was stuck. Finally, an older man on the Wall, pulled him through. I climbed up the ladder, through the window of the Great Wall.
My dad was sitting on a stone step, looking pretty shaken up. It was the saddest I had ever seen it. “I told you how everything in China is the best”, he said, “then why do I feel like the saddest dad in China?” I gave him a BIG hug and we both sat on the stone step, look at the rest of the Great Wall, snaking up the side of the hill, into the forest. My dad says he would act calmer, if he hadn’t of gotten stuck in the Wall.
ACTIVITY 3: LISTENING TO MUSIC
LEVEL: Beginner
Language Focus: Verb conjugation and it’s position in the sentence
Objective:
- Students will practice active listening to music for meaning
- Students will acquire new verbs and vocabulary from contemporary songs
- Students will utilize new verbs and conjugate them in different tenses
- Students will practice reading for comprehension
Pre-Activity Knowledge: Students need to know the basic composition of a simple sentence with one verb, as most contemporary radio songs are composed of those. In a previous class an example song was broken down for students to understand how the activity will proceed and what they will actually be listening for (verbs). Students will be asked in a previous class to send a link of an English song that they would like to analyze to my teacher email. I will tell the students that not all of the songs will be analyzed, but the top three most requested will be. For higher-level students, an additional reasoning could be submitted along with the music choice. Students will also understand vocabulary associated with songs such as “lyrics”, “verse” and “chorus” just as scaffolding to better be able to talk about it. In terms of verbs, they understand how to conjugate “to be” in it’s various forms, so the following activity also acts as a formative assessment of their ability to decipher those particular cases, or if the class in general needs more work on it.
| ACTIVITY | TIME | GROUP | MATERIALS | NOTES |
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DECIPHERING THE MUSIC:
TELL: Okay, we are going to listen to some music now and see if we can hear any verbs we know.
But first…the top song choices to be selected for today are:
Name all three songs.
Hand out the lyrics with the missing lyrics for the first song.
TELL: As you can see, the verbs are missing. We are going to listen to the song and as you listen, I want you to focus on the verbs, which are the words that are missing. Fill in as many as you can. Don’t worry, we will be going over them after the song.
Play the song once through.
ASK: How did you guys do?
Elicit answers.
If they would like to, let them listen to the song an additional time.
Elicit answers for the blank spaces. Include wrong answers as well and list them on the board.
Reveal on a projection the FULL lyrics of the song.
ASK: Which words do you not understand?
Elicit answers and clarify the words.
Clarify the context of specific words such as “to quit” and “to work” in the context of the love song, as the students might understand them in their more formal meaning.
When the students have acquired all the lyrics to the song, find a back track of the song without a voice and get them to sing it as a class.
Afterwards challenge the classroom to rewrite the song in the past tense. Demonstrate with the first line:
“I knew you loved me, I loved you too”
Spend 10 – 15 minutes having the students re-write the lyrics. Depending on the interest and language levels of the student, you can either move onto the next song and change the tense in a different way or take the current song and get them to replace the verbs with NEW verbs, which acts as a form of recall and assessment of previous learned material and also gives students the creative freedom to author their own lyrics.
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20 Mins |
Individual |
Lyrics of songs with blank spaces
Audio device to play music |
In actuality, this activity appears repetitive, yet there is a challenging aspect of the activity for the students to get the words correct, as well as there is a desire for many of these students to understand the meaning behind many of their favorite English songs, so that they are not simply singing them phonetically.
Note, the song that is published here is not real, due to copyright infringement laws.
Singing the songs as a class, not only is good practice and a form of repetition disguised as a fun activity, but it also has a practical element of challenging them outside their comfort zones. While this is a grammar class and the mandate is practical and creative activities and language application, challenging students out of their comfort zone also positively effects students’ SEL, as in many instances they will be forced to speak aloud with confidence. The singing is done with the whole class, so no individual feels embarrassed or pressure to be “perfect”. |
Lyrics to Song
VERSE 1:
I know you love me, I love you too
We’ll be together, I feel it’s true
You want me so bad
Your heart was broken
I’ll never ever let it happen again.
Don’t quit on me, and I’ll work so hard
We’ll stay so close, won’t be apart
He treated you bad, she treated me worse
You’ll never ever let it happen again.
And I was like….
CHORUS:
You and me, me and yooou
There’s so much, so much that we can do,
We got some time now, let’s take it slow,
There’s nowhere we have to go,
So let’s take it slooooooow
VERSE 2:
It’s been forever, since we’ve been happy
I see you crying, I cry too,
I’ll dry your eyes, if you dry mine,
I’m sure we’ll be just fine
I call you cellphone, you send me texts
Girl, I won’t hurt you, I’m not your ex
You are my equal, I am your equal,
We’re just two people, so what’s the deal?
And I was like…
CHORUS:
You and me, me and yooou
There’s so much, so much that we can do,
We got some time now, let’s take it slow,
There’s nowhere we have to go,
So let’s take it slooooooow
SONG WITH VERBS MISSING
VERSE 1:
I _________ you __________ me, I __________ you too
We’___ __________ together, I __________ it’___ true
You __________ me so bad
Your heart __________ __________
I’_____ never ever __________ it happen again.
__________ __________ on me, and I’____ __________ so hard
We’____ __________ so close, __________ __________ apart
He __________ you bad, she __________ me worse
You’____ never ever __________ it happen again.
And I was like….
CHORUS:
You and me, me and yooou
There’s so much, so much that we __________ __________,
We __________ some time now, __________ __________ it slow,
There’s nowhere we __________ to __________,
So __________ __________ it slooooooow
VERSE 2:
It’___ __________ forever, since we’____ __________ happy
I __________ you __________, I __________ too,
I’____ __________ your eyes, if you __________ mine,
I’____ sure we’____ be just fine
I __________ you cellphone, you __________ me texts
Girl, I __________ __________ you, I’____ not your ex
You __________ my equal, I __________ your equal,
We’____ just two people, so what’_____ the deal?
And I was like…
CHORUS:
You and me, me and yooou
There’s so much, so much that we __________ __________,
We __________ some time now, __________ __________ it slow,
There’s nowhere we __________ to __________,
So __________ __________ it slooooooow