Monday, October 3, 2016

LESSON IDEAS: WHAT'S IN YOUR FRIDGE?

This is a lesson plan that combines new technologies with classroom practice and introduces the concept of flipped classroom or student-centred learning where strong focus is given to the student whereas the teacher takes the role of the guide in the learning process. This methodology means a lot of work outside the classroom on the part of the student but turns into more engaging lessons for the. Click on this link to see a very helpful infographic about this concept of flipping your classes.
In this class we will combine vocabulary about containers we can use to describe things in our fridge with the grammar point about quantifiers which can be used to describe the amount of food we may find in the fridge. We can introduce the topic with a video-based listening activity; there are lots of videos on youtube of people giving a tour of their fridges. I have donloaded one of them, and using EDpuzzle you can create a listening activity. I have decided to use the one below because of the amount of useful vocabulary and grammar structures in it. Click play to do the True/False listening activity:


Students can watch the video at home (it's got the key) or in class (followed by futher discussion) and then we can introduce the topic of the lesson: containers & quantifiers.

In order to present the vocabulary and grammar structures we want our students to practise, I have created a video lesson using Movenote, but this is something we can explain easily in class. Movenote is an online tool that allows you to record presentations with audio and video and share them easily with you audience or embed them in your blog as I have done. As you can see so far the idea of the lesson is to avoid using too many photocopies and new technologies are very useful in this way. 

Click play to watch the video:


Once we have presented the vocabulary and grammar structures it is time for some practice. I had  previously asked students to send me pictures of their own fridges and in groups of three/four they would look at them and describe the food and drinks they see in each fridge.


The purpose of this activity is not only to describe what they can see in the fridges using containers and quantifiers: 'There is a bottle of ketchup with hardly any ketchup' but also to guess whose fridge is the one they are describing and give reasons for it: 'That fridge might belong to Laura because she really likes pasta'. 

Again, with the help of new technologies we can move that discussion online, using twitter for example, and practise writing skills; we can post the pictures online under a #hashtag we have created for this activity or one we would have specifically for that class. Below you can see a couple of examples of such discussion:

Using online tools for discussion such as twitter or asking students to bring their own pictures to class relies on the concept of flipping the classroom and making your students participate actively in the development of the class, which is a great motivator.

Extension: Provided they already know how to give advice, once we know who each fridge belongs to, we can finish the lesson with the students giving advice to each other about their eating habits and how they can improve them in order to follow a healthy life-style.

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