Here’s a link to last year’s version, with the annual link to Alex Case’s Xmas grammar goodies and my own Run DMC “Christmas in Hollis” gapfill worksheets.  Yupi!

Then there’s also my links to other Christmas stuff, a decent Mr. Bean active viewing thing, and a writing exercise from ol’ Boggle’s World.

Right, now then, without further ado, I give you this year’s model, featuring once again my favorite Brad Neely creation the Professor Brothers.  “This IS Christmas music!”

As you will find below, I’ve got this little thingy here if that’s your cup of tea–You know, a little prediction task with some stills from the video and some thought bubbles…then a little listening gapfill.  Then you know you can, like, talk about, like Christmas stuff or Kwanzaa or what have you.

Ah, I should add that the gapfill is meant to focus on the construction I wish/(s)he wishes + past/past perfect.

Prisoner pictures (the pictures)

PRISONER CHRISTMAS (the gapfill)

Merry Christmas!

(Ah, and if you like the Professor Brothers and think you have some students might as well, have a look at this other lesson–talking about the future, nice for New Year, you know…)

Ah, and I forgot to mention, Hall Houston recently put up a nice list of links to holiday stuff over at his blog. So for those of you scouring desperately for something other than yule-log wordsearches or whatever, get on that.

Regarding that first one, various commenters at the post in question were quick to point  to factors such as 1) “weird grammar bits and obscure vocabulary”, 2) “trying to do and crowd in too much”, and 3) publishers “don’t care that much” about Advanced textbooks (being that they don’t sell as much as Elementary level books).

In the Advanced textbook I’m using now–like pretty much every textbook of any level ever produced by anyone ever (for adult learners at least)–there’s a unit on the Lottery.

In this case, it’s an excuse to review mixed conditionals, expressing regret (“I wish I had bought a ticket”, “If only I could win the Pick-6″, and so forth), you know, all that good stuff.  Being not so enthused about the listening and the ensuing”grammary”, “conditional-y” segment in the coursebook, I dove into the multimedia miasma that is Youtube in search of some at least nominally relevant video to show the class, and came up with this:

Psyched I was, being that the target language was right there waiting for them at the end.  (“My wife said she wished she’d torn the ticket up”, “Do you wish you’d never won?”).  Plus there was the perverse attraction of doing something different–something depressing.  I’m usually one to constantly play up everything for yuks, so this seemed like a nice change of pace from my “thuggish-cracker” sense of humor (Nick Jaworski dixit).

I made a little task sheet to go along with the video, which is here: “LOTTERY CURSE“.

Before showing the video, I would play the first minute or so with the sound off, introducing the “characters” (Jack, Brandi, and Jesse), and getting students to talk about them, what their relation is, and what they think will happen to the three of them.

Then distribute the handout, play it once all the way through and have them try to complete the sentences 1-10.  You may need to start it around 4:18 the second time around for students to get the last three sentences in.  Check the answers as a class, move on to part II of the worksheet and discuss.

Then in the last part, students write a sentence using the extremely skeletal prompt in part III.  This is meant to elicit a variety of conditionals–2nd, 3rd, mixed, whatever.  When they’ve finished, have some students come up to the board and write their sentences.  Then you can compare and contrast the forms, the meaning, etc., transitioning into whatever controlled practice activity floats your boat thereafter.

Thanks to Jamie.  And to the rest of you, you’re welcome.

Anyways, time for a lesson plan, it’s been a while.

Right then.  I was at a loss for inspiration.  It had been ages since I’d come up with any new teaching material worthy of posting on $4MT.

But then, thanks to the visit of my main damies (good friends in Pootie Tang speak, if you must know) Danny and Viswas two months ago, I was introduced to the strange and oddly fascinating universe of Neely Comics, and somewhere deep down I knew it would only be a matter of time before I managed to adapt this weird new world to my dastardly teaching purposes.  Mbwah, ah, ah… (*maniacal laughter*)

So, I took it upon myself to make a “decaffeinated” version of one of the Professor Brothers videos most ripe for exploitation in the language classroom: “Future Thoughts”.  See my tutorial on Windows Movie Maker for the “censored version”. (To Mr. Brad Neely, if you’re reading this: Please don’t  hate me, or more importantly, please don’t take legal action against me.  Just holler and your boy will take it down.)

It starts with a group activity on describing people from  a picture, a little prediction task,  a simple little listen and match, a “sentence telepathy” activity with sentence heads, and a debate about what the future holds for us all.  And maybe, if you have the means to do so, a “vox pop” type video similar to the one featuring the Professor Brothers, Baby Cakes and other denizens of China, IL.

THE PROFESSOR BROTHERS “FUTURE THOUGHTS” LESSON PLAN

Disclaimer: $trictly 4 my T.E.A.C.H.E.R.Z. accepts no responsibility for any jobs being lost, teachers being fired, students and/or parents complaining, etc.,  due to use of materials presented here which may or not be considered controversial or taboo.  Teachers should use good judgment in choosing materials to be used with each student or group.  Just putting that out there…!

Level: intermediate

Aim: practice speaking about the future – “there will be…”, future continuous, “is getting” + comparative, etc.

Materials:

Video–See my video about censorship and Windows Movie Maker. The video used in this lesson plan starts at 4:26–if you want, you can download the video and cut off everything before then (watch the first part for instructions on how to do that!)

Pictures from video – (posted here as a slideshow; if needed, you can print out the individual pictures to give to students)

Listening handout

PART ONE – Warm-up / Lead-in

Put students in groups and give each group one of the pictures of the people in the video.  On the board write:

NAME:                                                                  AGE:

HOME:                                                                  JOB:

FAVORITE HOBBIES:                                  PERSONALITY (good points and bad points):

Tell students to look at their picture and make up information about their person, their name, job, etc.

When they’ve finished, each group shows their picture to the class and explains a bit about their person.  (If you like, you can use the Powerpoint in the link above to make it easier for everyone to see the pictures.)

PART TWO – Listening

1. Tell students they’re going to see a video, and that in the video these people are going to talk about the future.  What do you think they will say?  Each students writes two things.  When they finish, they compare with the rest of the group.  Are they similar?

2. Give students the listening handout.  Tell students to read the sentences in the voice balloons.  Are any of the ideas in the balloons similar to the ones they’ve written down?

3. Play the video once.  Students watch and connect the sentences with the person who says them.  Play the video again and let them check their answers.

In feedback, ask:  What did the person in number 1 say? Number 2, etc.

(Answers: 1. “You’ve got hair on your head”, etc. and “Are you goofy-looking?”, etc. 2. “There will be all sorts of new things”  3. “There will be invisibility lotion” and “I think the results of nuclear war will surprise us” 4. “When the aliens come”, etc.  5. “Surprise! I’m a clone!” 6. “The world is getting so much cooler” and “In the future, we’ll all be laughin” etc. 7. “When I was a boy,” etc. 8. “I know what you want, you wanna” etc.)

PART THREE – Lexis (talking about the future)

1.  “Experiment is ESP” (For this part of the lesson, you can use the PowerPoint provided, or just write the sentence heads on the board.)

Explain to students that you are going to do an experiment in Extra-Sensory Projection.  You are going to think really hard about a word and try to project it into their minds.

2. Show them the sentences from the PowerPoint (or on the board) and try to “send” the word to them telepathically.  (Just make some sort of gesture with your thumb and forefinger at your temple and close your eyes for a second or two.)

Ask them if they think they got the message.  If not, “try” again.

Tell students to write the sentence they see on the projector (or board), completing each one as indicated–with a verb in -ing, etc. (Basically this is just a trick to spice up an otherwise rather dry personalization exercise.)

When you’ve done each sentence, have students compare.  Get some suggestions from each student, then give them the sentences as you have them (Ah, yes, I should have mentioned, you need to complete each of the sentence beforehand.  So, it should be something like, “In the future, we’ll all be living in underwater cities”, or “The world is getting so much less interesting” or whatever you like.)

2. Here you can play a version of “Why? Why? Why?”

Students choose one of the statements they’ve written in the “ESP experiment” above and read it to their partner.  Their partner then asks them questions such as “Why do you think so?” “What makes you say that?” “Why does that matter?” “Can you be more specific?” “How is that important?”  (There’s a slide included in the PowerPoint.)  Explain to the students that the more insistent and annoying they are in this game, the better!

Students briefly explain their views.  Circulate and ask questions yourself if things flag a bit, then do a bit of group feedback.

3. Now, something I’ve wanted to do with this but haven’t had the means is a “Future Thoughts” video made by the class: with one of them there fancy Flip Mino  contraptions, perhaps.

You could put students in a line and have them taking turns saying one of their sentences on camera and maybe answering one simple question like the ones above. The student could then take the camera and ask the next student, and so on.  Then at the end you could either do another round with different “Future Thoughts”.  This could all be edited down to a video similar to the one in the Professor Brothers video.

Any other ideas?

]]> http://strictly4myteacherz.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/future-thoughts-lesson-plan/feed/ 6 nowaintthatsomeshit http://strictly4myteacherz.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/viva-la-vida-coldplay-song-used-towould-lesson/ http://strictly4myteacherz.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/viva-la-vida-coldplay-song-used-towould-lesson/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:47:51 +0000 $4MT http://strictly4myteacherz.wordpress.com/?p=485 ]]> It’s been a while since I posted any songs up here–I got started “bloggifying” my blog (making it less about posting materials and more about posting about other’s people’s posts, and posting about posts about other people’s posts, etc.) while I was out of commission with the flu, and now I’m better and ready to contribute.

Level: intermediate

aims: present and practice used to and would, talk about monarchs in history, practice writing and listening

materials: VIVA LA VIDA task sheet

video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvgZkm1xWPE

Note: just like with the Killers, I’m not a big Coldplay fan.  But, I’m having a hard time finding a language point to teach in a Mike Jones song, as I’d only half-jokingly mentioned on another blog. Maybe for simple telephone number practice (“If you wanna get me for a show or give me a feature on a flow/call 281-330-8004″)?

Anyway, this song became hugely popular not just all over the world but specifically in Barcelona, because for some reason that I’m not still not sure I completely grasp, the great Pep Guardiola chose it as his theme song to motivate his players to lead FC Barcelona to last years “triplete” (Copa, Liga, Champions)–I think I recall Dani Alves commenting to the press something along the lines of “Para mi, la canción es una mierda, pero si le gusta al mister…”

So, between the association with triumph in the world of sports, and the title (in Spanish, no less) which could conceivably be translated as an imperative (“live your life”) or more probably something like “Long live life!”, a lot of my students have come away with the impression that the lyrics to the song are about overcoming obstacles and being the best you can be and crap like that.

Not so much.  Rather, it seems to a parable about political changes near the turn of the 19th century (in Revolutionar-era France, if I had to hazard a guess).  Or something like that.  So there.

This lesson starts with a discussion about royalty in the modern world, then moves on to the song, with a little bit of listening practice, a tiny grammar presentation, and a poetry writing exercise using a template based on the song.

PART ONE – WARM-UP/DISCUSSION

1. Draw, slowly, a crown on the board.  Like a big letter ‘M’, but with three points and a line connecting it at the bottom.  Make it abstract and cartoony.  As you draw each line, ask students to guess what you’re drawing.  If they don’t get it eventually, tell them it’s a crown.

Ask them: “Who wears a crown?”  (This could be a king, a queen, a prince, a princess, Burger King, Jughead from Archie comics, anybody!)  “What does a crown represent?”

2. Give students the first page of the handout.  Ask them which countries have kings.  (Answer: all of them.)

Put students in groups and give them the questions to discuss.  Have the groups report to the class.

PART TWO - VOCABULARY / LISTENING

3. Focus on the matching exercise; in groups, students complete the exercise.  Check the answers.  If you like, you can mime the more “actiony” ones (roll the dice, call someone’s name, shatter windows, blow down the doors) and have students call out the answers.

4. Put students in pairs.  Direct their attention to the sentences at the bottom of the page, and have them play the “I saw you…” game.

5. Give students page two of the handout.  Tell them to fill the gaps with the phrases in the box as they listen.  Play the song twice and check your answers.

6. After listening to the song twice and checking the answers, discuss the question: What emotions do you think the king is feeling?  Ask them to refer to specific parts of the text to explain their answers.

7. Noticing: Ss look at sentences from the song and decide if they refer to the past or present. (Answer: The past.)

PART THREE – GRAMMAR / WRITING

1. Focus on the information in the box and clarify as necessary.  Elicit the negative form of each (didn’t use to, wouldn’t).

2. Direct students to the writing task.  They can do this in pairs if you like, choosing either a real king or one of the kings suggested on the sheet, or another one (King Africa? King Vitaman? Toteking? Whoever.)

3. Afterwards, Ss share their poems with the class.  You could even have them put the poems on the wall, and then have students go around reading and choosing their favorite.

For homework, you could give them a writing task, answering the question from page one, part 2.

Hope you like this lesson, I think it’s pretty damn decent if I do say so myself.

The first one is in this series is that oldie but goodie: “I saw you…”

I first came across this activity in the classic 700 Classroom Activities by David Seymour and Maria Popova (MacMillan English).   Its purpose is mainly to practice using narrative tenses.

In the 700 Classroom Activities version, they provide the instructions and some prompts for the students to use in the activity.  To wit:

In pairs, imagine you saw your partner doing something interesting.  Take turns to ask and answer questions to find out more, e.g.

A: I saw you yesterday afternoon.  Why were you staggering?

B: I was staggering because I had just walked into a lamppost and had concussion.

*** crying, being arrested, covered in paint, wearing a wet suit, laughing, running after a mule, sleeping on a bench, carrying a sink, climbing a tree ***

This is a great pairwork activity that can be used with nearly any level (well, from pre-intermediate and upwards),  and can easily be fitted into almost any lesson using almost any lexical set.  All that’s needed on the part of the teacher is enough imagination to create situations that are either so humorous or ethically questionable as to require explanation or justification.  (In fact, the title that Seymour and Popova give the activity is “Explanations”.)

For example, the other day, doing some review of some phrasal verbs with some students at the hospital, I gave them these:

I saw you…

throwing away some files in the container behind the hospital.

 

 looking through the messages on your workmates’s mobile phone

 

trying on the director’s jacket while (s)he was out

 

throwing up in the cafeteria

 

putting out a fire in the trashcan in your office

 looking up silly videos on Youtube during work hours

For a lesson on cars and driving, for example, you could give the students sentences like “I saw you driving down the street in reverse”, “I saw you letting air out of the tires of your neighbour’s car”, “I saw you driving a bus”, “I saw you sitting at a traffic light when the light was green”, “I saw you driving in a pedestrian zone”, “I saw you driving the wrong way down a one-way street”, etc., etc.

Mr. Alex Case’s TEFLtasic website has some good example of using this activity for “study abroad” language and talking about “creativity at work”.

Anyone have any ideas for using this activity that they’d care to share?

If any of the above are true in your case, then I heartily welcome you to the Burgundy Loaf:

And the “Burgundy Loaf” video and restaurant discussion lesson, courtesy of $4MT. It’s a short little number that won’t fill an entire class period but could be useful in a variety of contexts.  Bon appetit!

Level: Intermediate/Upper-Intermediate

Materials:

“The Burgundy Loaf” video (above)

“The Burgundy Loaf” task sheet

• MS Word version (28 kb)
• pdf version (11 kb)

“The Burgundy Loaf” script with gapfill (optional)

• The Burgundy Loaf gapfill (MS Word, 32 kb)

Disclaimer: $trictly 4 my T.E.A.C.H.E.R.Z. accepts no responsibility for any jobs being lost, teachers being fired, students and/or parents complaining, etc., due to use of materials presented here which may or not be considered controversial or taboo. Teachers should use good judgment in choosing materials to be used with each student or group. Just putting that out there…!

STAGE ONE * Warm-up/Discussion (5 min)

1.  Give Ss the questions either on the handout or on the board/OHP.  Have them discussion the ?s in 1 in pairs.  Do a bit of feedback with the whole class, putting up vocabulary or important words on the board as necessary, then put them in groups of four to discuss the five most important things (question 2).  Discuss a bit as a whole group before moving on to the video.

STAGE TWO * Video (15 min.)

1. Focus on part 2 of the worksheet.  Ss mark each sentence C for Customer or E for Employee, then compare with a partner.

2. Play the video and have Ss listen and check their answers in Part Two of the worksheet.  Discuss as a whole class the questions at the end of part two.

3. (optional) If you want to give your students some more intensive listening practice, give them the gapfill exercise with the transcript of the scene.  Play the video once more, as Ss listen and try to fill the gaps.

(Answers: classy, fantastic, fancy, distinction, atmosphere, shit, courtest, relax, toilet paper, gentleman, everywhere)

STAGE THREE * DISCUSSION

1. Ss ask each other the questions in part three, switching partners when they finish.

Alternatively, you could substitute this last stage for some sort of restaurant roleplay or something like that.  (Or you could do the roleplay in addition to the discussion.)

At esl-lounge there’s an example of one under the heading “At a Restaurant”.  And there’s another one at ESLgo.com, though it has more to do with a job-interview situation than a pure “restaurant” situation.  Then again, there are millions out there.

And for homework, the students could write a letter to Better Business Bureau or Chamber of Commercepretending to be the man or woman in the video, complaining about the service at “The Burgundy Loaf”.  They should describe what happened and ask for some kind of compensation.

In the interest of starting off the “new season” of $4MT with something simple, here’s a little something that occurred to me in a pinch in one of my one-to-one classes which after using it a few times seems like a decent way of doing a little tense review.  It’s very similar to another activity which I like to call “Why? Why? Why?” which I posted a while ago.

Give the Ss (on a piece of paper or on the board) some sentence heads using negative verb structures, i.e.:

I don’t

I didn ‘t

I can’t

I’m not

I haven’t

etc., etc.  This can obviously be used for an enormous variety of structures (modal verbs, future forms, conditionals, etc.) Or even for discussing a recent story or text by substituting the name of a character for “I”.

The students all write sentences.  Then in pairs, they take turns reading the sentences to each other, and the other asks “Why not?”  The other student has to explain the reason why.  The other can then ask “Why?” again.  (You may want to demonstrate this with one of your students before you start them asking and answering.)

I’ve found it to be a pretty decent and useful filler type thing.  Maybe you will too.

(Note: I do not like the Killers.  They are definitely not my thing.  Apart from the fact that $4MT has had a strong hip-hop/R&B bias in its musical slant, I should note that the Killers for me are well on their way to dethroning U2 for the post of Most Overrated Rock Band.

But I had another special request from a student who said it was his favorite song.  He just wanted to know what the words were.  Luckily, I was able to extrapolate a slightly more relevant teaching point than just “What’s he sayin’?”, being that there’s a ton of little phrasal verbs and what not to be picked apart.)

There’s two parts basically to this worksheet.  You may or may not want to fold it neatly in half before giving it to the students.

Mr. Brightside song activity (MS Word doc, 22 KB)

 1. Start with the words from the first part on two columns on the board and elicit combinations.  They don’t have to correspond to the ones used in the song.  Get students to give you example sentences for each combination.  Do a little mime game if you want.  All that good stuff.

2. Then students listen to the song and fill in the blanks.  Then after that you can ask them what the hell this guy is talking about.  For example, what the hell is “turning saints into the sea” supposed to mean?  (Personally, I can’t stand this sort of pretentious fake-poetry rock lyrics.  Another example from a Killers song, “Are we human or are we dancers?”–um, you’re probably both, idiot.  But I digress.)

After you’ve got at least one or two possible ideas, show them the video.

Elicit what they think the situation is–how are the singer and the girl in the video related, etc., etc.

As a writing exercise, have Ss choose to be either the singer or the girl in the video.  They must write a diary entry about what happened to them in the song, starting like this: “Last night, I went to a party and…”

Oh, ahem.  Hi, hello there.  I’ve not been doing much posting as of late.  To make up for that, I’m gonna try to double up here.

As things wind down to a close and the kids finish their schoolwork and take their exams, we’re left in a bit of a lull until the actual end of the course.  And of course, the people want songs.  Songs, songs, songs.

So here’s one.  It’s related to sports and sports vocabulary.  It’s “We Like Sportz” by the Lonely Planet, from their album Incredibad. It’s kind of hilarious.  Could be appropriate for that unit related to sports in your typical pre-intermediate/intermediate level.  The “cheating sux!” line goes perfectly with Unit 1C from New English File Intermediate, for example.

It starts with a little vocabulary word-map / brainstorming activity.  Then there’s a listen-and-tick-the-things-you-hear joint.  Then you got a little correct-the-rhyme-scheme, then-listen-and-check joint.  Then a little fill-in-the-blank action.  Then some discussion activity type flavor–do a “Why? Why? Why?” game in pairs, then talk about it together as a group.

We Like Sportz (MS Word doc, 36 KB)

And here’s the video:

Well, I guess part of it can be chalked up to that seasonal syndrome of motivational dysfunction known as “spring fever”.  Maybe it’s really a physical, neurological/endocrinal phenomenon related to the change in season.   (Maybe one of you reading in this in the tropics or Southern Hemisphere can clear me up on this?  Do the months of May and June also correspond to this particular sort of malaise?)

Or perhaps it’s merely a part of my cultural heritage, in which as early as grade school we are subtly encouraged to stop giving a damn during the last month or so of our annual scholastic commitments.

Yes, I’m coasting towards the end of a lot of my commitments teaching-wise, it’s true.  I suppose my lack of blogging motivation may go hand-in-hand with the lagging in my creative teaching motivation.

Thankfully, this lack of inspiration has (paradoxically?) inspired me to have a look at another classic example of the fizzling-out of pedagogical motivation.  To wit: this year, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to start what is often known as “a reflective teaching journal”.  A idea popular with many teacher trainer types, and the subject of all manner of research papers and internet pontification.

This lasted all of about three months.  The first few entries are brief at times, with little detail, but more or less complete, and you can tell that at the beginning I was taking it all a bit more seriously, making such notes to myself as these (both from 3 Feb 2009):

“Must exert more control.  I need to go for ‘stern but fair’.  Not ‘petulant and pissy and vindictive’” [though it should be noted that a week later for the same group I seem to have written: "Much better, I think my 'drama queen' act last week may have actually helped: they were much more cooperative today"...]

or

“Off to a rocky start, but later we found our groove and the personalization exercises and the domino game seemed to be well-integrated and well-received–tomorrow we can start with some correction dictation of the more clamorous errors from free speaking”

Then there’s a page where I’ve written at the top: “I lost a week in there somewhere”, then it starts again, on the 23rd of February.  That’s where it started to get a little squirrelly.

There are weeks where I seemed to be giving it a go with some degree of motivation intact, but these are interspersed with pages where I’d obviously gotten behind and was trying to make up for a week’s worth of lost time–things like “XYZ Company*–past cont./past simp. pictures, listening, rev.extreme adj.”. Or better yet: “Pepito*–review rel. pron., phr. verbs and”

Yeah, the XYZ entry there is an example of a “reflective” teaching journal with absolutely zero reflecting going on at all.  Basically me jotting something down so as not to forget about it over the course of my million other classes that same day.  The “Pepito” entry is even better–I didn’t even bother to finish the phrase.

I could blame it on the conditions I was usually writing in–on buses or in crowded subway cars going from class to class, making it impossible to write consistently.  I suppose I could blame it on any number of things.  Doesn’t matter.  My teaching journal was a total failure.

I guess the important thing is that now, months after my latest attempt at a reflective teaching journal, with hindsight I’ve gleaned whatever little ideas that sprung up, improvised gambits and so forth that worked well, etc., etc. from my meager notes, and I reckon I’ll try to use them in the coming weeks as we draw this year here to a close.

Anyone else have any choice bits of “reflection” they’d like to share?  Or tales of failure and redemption and things of that nature?  Feel free to put them in the comments box.

Or if you haven’t tried and failed the “reflective teaching journal” thing, have a look at these tips for keeping one. (I think I had the biggest problem with tips 1 and 2.)

*Names changed to protect the innocent