Presenting a lesson on articles is not the most difficult of things, anticipating your particular students’ problems is. Considering that there are no articles in Latin, Sanskrit or Persian – the mai-baap (roots) of many modern languages – English teachers, at least the ones interested in etymological mysteries, may wonder where the articles in English language crept up from. I haven’t found a meaningful explanation yet, so if you can give me a clue, fire away in the Comments section.

But anyway, the etymology of articles in English is barely of interest to ESL students. With skeletal explanations and a LOT of practice, you can be on your way to solving even that problem. I think the Test-Teach-Test approach seems to be the best approach with articles and used it in this lesson plan.

Give the students two simple rules and drill these throughout the lesson -
1. A/An are used before nouns which are new to the topic.
2. The is used before nouns which have been introduced already.

I used an extract from abridged Othello with gap-fills where articles should be, and let the students get into the skin of the character. I used this particular text because my students would have been familiar with the text already (but give ‘em a short summary of the action so they know what’s going on anyway)

So here goes, enjoy!

Click to DOWNLOAD Lesson Plan: Present Perfect Tense and Present Perfect Continuous Tense –> 

One would’ve thought that the month-long somewhat rigorous course would have taught all us CELTAtians enough that we needed to know before we venture out into the world of ESL teaching. umm… apparently not.

Have you ever been in a situation when everything, and I mean Everything, goes against you? You think the heavens have conspired against you and after a series of mishaps/catastrophes, you begin to give up hope in all that is joyous and wonderful in this world. Presenting the last lesson on the last full working day of the CELTA course should have been a thrilling experience. All the ragda was over. No more stressing over lesson plans and assignments, no more rising at unearthly 6 o’clocks, no more late nights, no more no-beer nights!

I should have breezed through the last lesson, after all I’d been doing the act for a month.

But then, the anti-Pulkit forces of the universe came together to wreak havoc in the until-then magical moments of the last CELTA lesson. I was to begin teaching at 2 pm and since it was an hour long lesson, I had been working on my handouts etc. until about 1.30 pm. With just half an hour to go, I thought I would go ahead and print the lesson plan and finally grab some lunch.

I was using Fernanda’s laptop, which, apart from having Windows in Portuguese, was also about the slowest creature I’ve ever tapped my fingers on. Despite the Portuguese, it wasn’t too difficult to do simple things like opening, editing and saving documents, and using the browser (IE 6, omg… AAARGH).

So it struck 1.30 pm, I salvos my Word doc on the Desktop (it’s an old habit of mine.. just go to the Desktop and save everything.. that much easier to find documents that way) and closed it, hoping that closing Word would prompt IE to open quicker. Well, I was right – IE opened quite swiftly and I logged into Gmail. I was going to email the document to myself so I could access it on one of the computers connected to the printer.

I started to attach the lesson plan… searched for it on the Desktop. Whaddya reckon – it wasn’t there!! Well, no trouble. I went into My Recent Documents and thought I’d find it there. But that was not to be! I opened Word again and searched for the tyke in the Recent Documents under File. Voila, it wasn’t there either. I did not panic yet. I hollered out to Fernanda to decipher the Portuguese f****** for me. With brimming confidence in her ability to understand the cryptic lingo of her laptop, she went about looking for it in all the obvious places.. but my beloved ESL Lesson Plan, the last, was nowhere to be found.

The clock was ticking furiously fast. I had no choice but to run up to the tutors’ room and break the awful news to them. I could have taught the lesson without my lesson plan but unfortunately, all my handouts were in the same file as well! I’d lost everything.

The tutors really calmed me down, saying worse come to worse, I could present the lesson the next day. Phew, the beads of sweat that had been balancing precipitously on my throbbing forehead began to flow down my face from sheer relief that this option was available to me. (I would’ve never known relief can make sweat flow.. but I guess in the state I was, the sweat would’ve flowed whatever the tutors had said)

Meanwhile, half my co-CELTAtians had surrounded Fernanda’s laptop and were trying to scrape it in the hope of finding the elusive lesson plan. Nothing seemed to work.

I relaxed. Elena was filling in for me. I could present the lesson tomorrow.

I was just taking a deep breath when I saw the otherwise-usually limp Wilson and daug Darin stride purposefully into the classroom, snatch their backpacks and go off in a hurry. I looked around wondering if anyone had noticed their odd behavior. With a minute left for the beginning of the lessons at 2, we were all expected to be seated at the back of the classroom to observe the lesson. If anyone should have appeared frazzled at the moment, it should’ve been me (and I was just about beginning to relax).

Well, I leaned over and asked Fernanda if she knew what was going on with those two and she told me they were going to fill in for me. Gabi, one of our tutors had asked them to prepare a lesson plan within an hour and teach it.

“Hell,” I thought, “I don’t want to make these guys go through the trouble.” But I wasn’t quite sure whether I could recreate my own lesson plan within an hour. Well, I went for it.. plodded away at a different laptop this time, rewrote my entire reading passage and the accompanying handouts. I let the lesson plan be – it would take too much work to do that all over again, and I just didn’t have the luxury of time that afternoon.

In about 45 mins, miraculously, I managed to redo my entire lesson. You bet, it was an achievement. WIth a huge sigh of relief, I went into the computer room and set about printing the reading material and handouts. Cleeeeeeek, cleeeeek, whined the printer. Beep, beep, it announced that it was out of ink!! Shit, jog to the reception, ask the nice lady to attend to the dying printer right away. Done. Feed a wad of paper into the printer and give the Print command. Wheeeeee, the printer hummed, sucking in paper. I held my breath. I didn’t trust my luck anymore. It printed a couple of sheets perfectly, I walked back to my computer, in readiness to head out to the copier machine as soon as the printer had finished its job.

Ah it did. Without a glitch. Things were beginning to fall in place. I walked over to the copier with my 6 or 7 handouts ready to make about 20 copies.. we had a LOT of students that day. Placing the first sheet face down on the glass top, I punched a few buttons before the monstrous machine made the unhealthiest copier sound I’ve ever heard. It began with something that sounded like it’s gonna begin copying but turned into an ugly, loud screech. The monitor furiously blinked and announced that paper had been misfed into the bloody copier.

OMG, race back to the front desk, waaaaaaaail. SOS was here. Quite-a-nice-looking front desk chap offered to help. On the way down the lobby, he asked me how the paper got misfed. Hell, how did I know, I wasn’t the one feeding it. I began to question the presence of a brain behind his chiseled bones. By the time we arrived at the scene du crime, it was clear he had set his eyes on the sophisticated copier for the first time in his life. He looked blankly at me and apologized. Hell, he didn’t waste time in fleeing after seeing the glint in my eyes.

Mercifully, a lady I’d never seen before was passing by. She sensed my distress and quickly fixed the misfed paper problem for me. It was about 3.15 now, and the students had been waiting for their second teacher for the day for about ten minutes (they had a 5 min break at 3, when Elena’s class ended).

I don’t much care how the lesson went. After the ordeal of the day, I was surprised I was able to present anything at all. My students had a good laugh when I told them the catastrophic day I had had. It wasn’t the best lesson I presented but I think it was halfway decent considering what I’d just been through.

You can download this lesson plan at the bottom of this post. It ain’t the best and I think you should go ahead and I’d encourage you to create better handouts, but it worked for me in the desperate time ever. The vocabulary I was teaching that day was all related to cooperation and competition, something that I had googled in various permutations and combinations the day before and come up with naught. So I do hope you find this useful and helpful. Drop me a line if you do

If you are looking for assignments that CELTA students are required to do during the course, you’ll find them here. If you are still wondering whether you should go for CELTA or one of the many other TEFL/TESOL courses offered, you might find it useful to read why I chose CELTA.

Go ahead and download this fateless lesson plan. I do hope you have fun with it, not the horrid time I had.

The differences in the usage of present perfect tense and present perfect continuous tense are so many that it can sometimes be daunting for both the ESL tutor and ESL student. In fact, though native English speakers can almost always use the correct tenses during speech, they often fumble while constructing written sentences using these tenses. A lot of writers try to do without these tenses as much as possible, which really constricts their writing.

Preparing this lesson was as much of a headache as presenting it. Truth to tell, the lesson did not go too well (according to me) because one older student kept questioning the rules of the differences between the present perfect tense and the present perfect continuous tense. I think she had genuine doubts but she was also just quizzing me to see when I would break. My co-CELTAtians and the tutor who observed the lesson said I explained the difference quite well but I could see that the student was not so satisfied. Well, I couldn’t do much since I had to move on and complete my lesson.. Too bad I couldn’t spend more time clarifying the differences because I had them all written down on cheat sheet with me. He he!

Here’s the cheat sheet I used… I can’t quite remember whether I got this off the internet or in some book. I think it was a combination of both.. I researched extensively in books and on the internet to clarify the difference between the Present Perfect Tense and the Present Perfect Continuous Tense to myself, which is so very important when you’re going to present a grammar concept to ESL students. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – you must have the concepts crystal clear in your own head before you go in front of a class. Try to anticipate all sorts of questions and answer them satisfactorily so you’re not at a loss if you’re in a situation similar to mine.

I’m reproducing the cheat sheet here but the lesson plan is only available for download. Once I’m done creating this table, I’m gonna be in no mood to create another one for the lesson plan.. Sigh if only WordPress had a better text editor, I promise I would’ve done it.

Click to DOWNLOAD Lesson Plan: Present Perfect Tense and Present Perfect Continuous Tense –>

If you’re a current CELTA student looking for help with your assignments, you might want to peek and see what I wrote in my CELTA assignments. They’re all available for downloads too. Drop me  a line if you found this post/blog helpful. Cheers!

Yet, this was also among the best lessons I presented, if I may say so. I think this was primarily because I relied on my own common sense (rather than resorting to looking for sample plans.. ) and my experience as a journalist in outlining the basic rules of succint writing. At the very least, the attached lesson plan is a good guide to teaching letter writing.

I decided to teach cover letter writing to my group of upper intermediate ESL students because a lot of them had told me they would soon be applying for jobs. Once I started analyzing the form of the cover letter, I found that it could easily be divided into the same categories as any decent journalistic report/story – who, what, why, where, when, how.

Once, I had this figured out, I simply divided the cover letter into sections where these questions are answered. I projected a sample cover letter on our interactive whiteboard (oooh yeah, St. Giles has those in abundance). I had fun using the interactive whiteboard, and it did make explaining things a little easier. Especially in this case, I had to refer to large blocks of text and write notes about them. All I did on the whiteboard was circle the projected text and write my side-notes which the students could copy for future reference.

After the class, a couple of my co-CELTAtians came up to me and asked for the handouts so they could learn how to write cover letters too. Told ya ’twas among my best classes!!

You can download the ESL Lesson Plan: Writing Formal Letters here –>

If you’re a current CELTA student looking for help with your assignments, you might want to peek and see what I wrote in my CELTA assignments. They’re all available for free downloads too. Drop me  a line if these were useful. Cheers!

A Japanese ESL student who masters the American accent but forms her sentences using the Japanese form of S-O-V sentences (instead of the English S-V-O) is going to comprehensible, but only slightly. You get my point

{{To download this lesson plan, go to the bottom of the post}} Click here to see the other lesson plans I have posted.

Anyway,  so this was a Reading lesson planned for the elementary level ESL students at St. Giles International in San Francisco. The lessons we taught our students were free since the teachers (we) were CELTA trainees.

Since the lessons were free, we had a fluctuating student population every afternoon. For the most part, this did not affect our lesson plans. For this particular Reading lesson however, I wanted to make sure the reading for interesting for all the students, whatever their age group. The reading section that I had been assigned from the Touchstone book was horribly slow. I was sure most of my students would be at sea with the level of vocabulary in it..

So I decided to write my own reading text and plan the gist and detailed tasks accordingly. Here’s the plan:

ESL Lesson Plan 5: Reading

Aids and Materials:
Self-created

{{To directly download this message, go to the bottom of the post}}

Generally, Skills lessons are far easier to plan and execute, mostly because students need to do a lot of work themselves and do not need to depend on the teacher for the most part. Of course, the ESL teacher still has to do their part in ensuring the lesson interests the students. Especially in the case of children and teenagers, if the topic of the lesson is not interesting enough, students begin to fidget pretty soon.

I was presenting it to the Upper Intermediate level ESL students at St. Giles International in San Francisco, the same place I did my CELTA course (Read why I chose the CELTA and not one of the hundreds of TEFL/TESOL courses available).

Generally, the Upper Int. students are easier to engage (but harder to please) than the elementary level ESL students. This is because they feel they’re halfway there at learning the language. Every lesson is a challenge for them, and they feel triumphant if they can understand everything being taught. On the other hand, every lesson is challenging for the elementary ESL students. They have to work much harder to hear the (target) language, understand it and use it.

While I would work hard at customizing lessons for the elementary students to make sure the language is graded to their level, I didn’t work too hard in customizing this one. I used to the text straight out of the book and just created some simple activities to peg around it. The listening material was about real-life mysteries and though I knew there would be some difficult vocabulary, I was sure the audio would keep the students hooked.

Note that I used the Test-Teach-Test method of teaching in this lesson. I did not preteach vocabulary as I would have at the elementary level. I’ll write another post to explain the Test-Teach-Test method later.

Here’s the plan:

ESL Lesson Plan 4: Listening

Lesson Aims:
Main Aim: To give students practice in developing listening receptive skills
Sub Aim: To expose students to native speakers’ speech in an authentic context

Personal Aims:
To stick to the time limit.
To minimize TTT.

Aids and Materials:
a)     Handouts/worksheets attached? YES
b)     Specify book material used: Cutting Edge Upper Intermediate, by Sarah Cunningham and Peter Moor (Pearson Education Limited 1999)

Procedure:

(DO NOT CLICK THE SORTING ARROWS IN THE HEADER ROW, I’m still trying to figure out how to get rid of those)

Time	Stage Name	Aim of Stage	Procedure	Interaction
5 min	Setting a context	To introduce the topic of the lesson's topic – real life mysteries	Stick pictures of Ganesha, Loch Ness Monster, the Elephant Bird, crop circles etc on the board and ask students to talk about what the pictures are, why are they strange. (Introduce the students to the words 'mystery' and 'miracle' – students will come into class in 2s and 3s. Where are the other students? It's a mystery. Here they come. You call came back for my class. It's a miracle.)	SS
1 min	Feedback	To initiate whole class conversation about mysteries of life	Ask 2-3 students to share the most interesting stories from their group with the whole class.	ST
4 min	Test vocabulary	To test students' knowledge of words they will need for comprehension	Give the students a Match the following activity (one per pair). Ask them to figure out the meanings of the words	SS
2 min	Feedback and pre-teach vocab	To make sure students know the required vocabulary	Check answers with whole class feedback. Explain meanings of particularly difficult words, ask relevant CCQs, do oral ICP if it's a difficult word.	ST
4 min	Set gist task + 1st listening	To give students a reason to listen carefully to the tapes	Give students the gist task questions and ask them to read them carefully. Tell them they have to look for answers to the questions as they listen to the tape. Play tape.	SS
1 min	Feedback	Encourage students to reach a consensus on the answers	Students compare answers in pairs. Clarify any questions at this point.	SS
5 min	Set detailed task + 2nd listening	To make students more familiar with the recording	Give comprehension questions. Ask students to go over them. Play the tape again and ask them to take notes so they can do the detailed tasks.	SS
3 min	Feedback	Encourage students to reach a consensus on the answers	Students compare answers in pairs	SS
5 min	Feedback	To make sure all students check their answers	Call on individual students to repeat their answers. Clarify any doubts	ST
2 min	Free Speaking Activity	To give students practice in productive skills (speech)	Ask students to talk in pairs/groups about mysteries and miracles from their own culture. For e.g., there is the ________ in Japan, the _______ in Spain etc.	SS

Click here to DOWNLOAD –>

If you’re a current CELTA student looking for help with your assignments, you might want to peek and see what I wrote in my CELTA assignments. They’re all available for free downloads. Drop me  a line if these were useful. Cheers!

I was pissed that I had to teach Food Vocabulary.. I mean, why not Clothing Vocabulary, or Road Vocabulary – those are pretty much the same everywhere! A pant is a pant is a pant, as is a skirt, a skirt, a skirt – in Russia or Thailand. But smoked fish.. gosh, what if a certain country does not have a smoked fish dish. Or worse, how does one explain the differences between grilling and barbecue – a concept much debated in the culinary world too.

I was even more aware of these issues because I’m Indian – and we don’t do smoked fish, not in the North at least (I think the South does have some smoked fish and meat dishes). But I was just fretting without a cause, coz in the end, all my students knew all the vocabulary! Easy sailing, it was

So here’s the lesson plan.. You can Download this lesson plan at the bottom of the page.

ESL Lesson Plan 3: Food Vocabulary

Lesson Aims

Main Aim: To make students familiar with some vocabulary words related to cooking

Sub Aim: To encourage students to use vocabulary related to cooking

Personal Aims:

To use illustrations, gestures, definitions to explain the meanings of vocabulary words (TL).

To use simple CCQs.

To stick to the time limit.

Aids and Materials:

1. Handouts/worksheets attached? YES/NO
2. Specify book material used: Longman English Dictionary,

Working with Words, by Ruth Gains and Stuart Redmen. Published by Cambridge University Press

ESL Lesson Plan 3: Food Vocabulary

Click to DOWNLOAD Lesson Plan: Food Vocabulary–>

If you’re a current CELTA student looking for help with your assignments, you might want to peek and see what I wrote in my CELTA assignments. They’re all available for free downloads. Drop me  a line if these were useful. Cheers!

So this was the second lesson I presented to my group of ESL elementary students. I didn’t know it then, but I would grow really fond of some of the students in the weeks to come. But on that day, I was a nervous wreck. I was teaching the Present Perfect Tense. I’d heard of the dreaded thing before but I hadn’t really examined it in my life, never having needed to teach it to anyone before!!

Unlike some of my American co-CELTAtians, I had actually studied formal English grammar in school but the smart alec I’ve always been, I never really bothered with it, considering I was a natural at learning the language and speaking it like a native right from when I was a toddler.

Hell, the Present Perfect Tense dominated my stream of consciousness those two days. I dreamed of it, a dream that woke me up sweaty and shivering. My most important problem was differentiating between the Present Perfect Tense and the Present Perfect Continuous. The difference, now seems so lucid, then it was a blur.

It wasn’t until I stepped into the shower the morning of, mulling over my lesson plan, that the lucidity sunk in.. And then, I knew I could pull it off. That, by the way, is the secret to every grammar lesson plan – lucidity. It’s not until the concepts are clear in your brain can you hope to explain them to a group of gawking students, the worst of whom are ready to rip the pants off of you if they sense the slightest bit of hesitation.

So this was my lesson plan that day, and it worked like a dream. I got an Above Standard on this – among the only two Aboves I got during the entire course.

Lesson Plan 2: PRESENT PERFECT TENSE

Goals

1.To teach students the use of Present Perfect Tense

Materials

Game  - Find Someone Who..

Worksheet – Work in pairs to fill the Present Perfect Tense form of the given verb

Semi-controlled practice – What are your secret dreams?

INTRODUCTION

You guys must be really tired. Was it better yesterday with the shorter lessons?

So tell me.. how long have you been in the US?

Try making them say it…

You can say, I’ve been here for …… months/years.

What is the most beautiful country you have been to?
You can say, I’ve been to Venice, or I’ve been to Australia.

MEANING

Now, you have been using the sentences with ‘have been’. This is the Present Perfect Tense. Let’s see how this works.

Let’s take a sentence:

I’ve been to NY.

Let’s all say it together: I’ve been to New York. (4-5 times)

So what do you think, does this mean..

Are you in NY now?
Will you go to NY next month?
Did you go to NY last month?
Did this happen in the past, present or future?…. Yes, it happened in the past. But do we know when? No, we don’t know when.

So, we can say the Present Perfect Tense is used for something that happened in the past if we don’t know when.

FORM

Let’s see how this works:

I/You/We/They + have + been + to + NY.
He/She/Takako + has + been + to + NY.

Subject + have + verb (past participle) + to + Object.

Now, what is the past participle verb.. Do you guys know?

There are three basic tenses of any verb..

e.g.

walk/walked/walked
talk/talked/talked
teach/taught/taught

These are the regular verbs, but there are some irregular verbs which are.. umm.. let’s just say, naughty.
The participle form of the verb is different from the past tense.

e.g.

drive/drove/driven
forget/forgot/forgotten
drink/drank/drunk

You just have to learn the participle forms, esp of the naughty, irregular verbs.

Another important thing here is that when we talk, we say “I’ve been to… ” or “He has been to..” but when we write, it is better to write ‘I have been to” or “He has been to…”

Let’s say it together,
I’ve been to, You’ve been to, They’ve been to, We’ve been to, He’s been to, She’s been to

Now, Carlos, have you been to NY?

No, I have not been to NY.
You can say, I’ve not been to NY. or, I haven’t been to NY. (repeat everyone)

Can you ask Ashley whether she has been to NY?

Repeat after me, Have you been to NY?
Ashley, how will you reply?

Yes, I’ve been to NY. or,
Yes, I have.

Ok, let’s play a little game.. Find someone who…. (this is a fantastic word game) (more on this in a later post)

Now, let’s see where Present Perfect tense is used. Can anyone tell me?
Is it used for something happening now?
Is it used for something happening tomorrow?
Is it used for something that has happened already?

But, if it has happened already, why don’t we simply use the past tense?

1. Present Perfect is used when the time when it happened is not mentioned.
So, Takako went to Venice ten years ago.
But, Takako has been to Venice.

2. Something that has happened many times.
I have seen that movie many times.
Angela has written many books.

3. Something that has happened in the past, happens in the present and may happen again in the future.
Tom Cruise has acted in many movies.

Semi-Controlled Free Speaking Activity

Free Speaking Activity

Drop me a line if you have any questions about this lesson plan. Let me know how it goes if you do use it. Oh, and here’s the link to download the plan…

UPDATE: I have received a few requests for posting the Find Someone Who game that I used in this class to teach the present perfect tense. You can download it here –>

Find Someone Who is a brilliant game especially in the ESL classrooms. If you haven’t discovered this super-versatile game, find out more about it here.

If you’re a current CELTA student looking for help with your assignments, you might want to peek and see what I wrote in my CELTA assignments. They’re all available for free downloads. Drop me  a line if these were useful. Cheers!

Most people who think of doing the CELTA or similar TEFL/TESOL courses soon find out that a major part of the course involves teaching. And not just dummy students! It’s really daunting to think about standing in front of a classroom of students, all of whom stare at you expectantly, and there’s no way out for you but to deliver. If you think you can wriggle out of the situation without much preparation, you’re either fooling yourself or you’re an experienced teacher. These students will have questions – lots of them. And unless you’ve anticipated their questions and found all the right answers, you’re gonna end up looking like a fool.

So here’s my advice – day one. Just Be. Don’t worry. However much you prepare, the nervousness of that first afternoon facing the students can’t be overcome by anything else.

Since the CELTA is a Cambridge University course and is carefully structured, most schools expect CELTA trainees to present only a simple 20 minute lesson on the first day. You will be given the topic of the lesson the day before. Mostly, the 20 minute lesson is a game like a Crossword puzzle or something similar using the Target Language (TL) which you have to teach your students.

Though CELTA trainees are not expected to prepare lesson plans for the first of four weeks, I think it is very helpful to force yourself to prepare lesson plans, even if they are simply drafts, or bullet-pointed. The plan worked like a dream for me. In fact, I presented some of my best lessons during that first week!!

It also helps to work your first few sentences over in your mind. make sure your language is graded to the level of students you’re teaching. Especially on that first day, make sure you’re not using the big words you used in your submission papers in school. It takes a while before the learner of a new language (especialy one as complicated as English) can get used to any native speaker’s accent and style of speaking. This was really relevant in my case because I’m Indian, and though I don’t have a strong Indian accent, I was teaching students studying with American teachers.

THE LESSON PLAN

So that first day, I was teaching a group of Elementary students. Maureen, my trainer, had given me some hastily done photocopies of a few pages from the book Touchstone. I couldn’t make head or tail of the activity as the book described it. It took me a while, and Fernanda’s help (who, by the way, was an experienced teacher), before I figured out it was a crossword activity to teach simple verbs such as dance, fly, sell, talk, die etc.

According to the instructions in the book, I was to divide the students in pairs, give one student the crossword with half the words in it, and give the other student the same crossword with the rest of the words. Then, one student asks the other, “what’s 1 down?”.. The other sudent, who has the crossword with 1 Down filled in has to describe the word to his partner.

Here’s a simple lesson plan I made for that first class:

Vocabulary
1. cook, forget, rain, sleep, cry, kiss, run, swim, dream, lose, shut, teach, drink, play, sing, throw
2. count, drive, read, smoke, dance, fly, sell, talk, die, marry, shoot, walk, draw, phone, smell, write

Goals
1.To teach students some useful verbs
2.To add some vocabulary

Materials
Crossword puzzle

Board Work

I teach English.                                                                                   This means I make people learn things.

I live in San Jose.                                                                               This means to stay somewhere for a long time

I drive to the Bart Station in Fremont.                                     This  is done in a car.

Then, I travel to SF by Bart.                                                          This means to go from one place to another

I read on the train.                                                                            You do this with … books

Sometimes, I write poems in the train.                                     You do this with .. pen and paper

Development

1.Can you tell me which are the action words in the sentences on the board?

2.Divide the class in two groups. Hand out the crossword puzzles.

3.Now in groups, you have to solve the crossword. The other group has the word that you want. So, you can ask what is     6 across? One person from this group will describe the word to you.

For example, What’s 1 down?

You do this when it is night. You do this on the bed. You must close your eyes to do this

Answer: Sleep

4. In pairs, tell each other of what you do after the class.

cook – This means to make food. Do you do this in the bathroom? This is done in restaurants.

forget – This is the opposite of remember… happens when people become very old – don’t know their kids.

rain – This means there is water falling from the sky. Some people love dancing in this.

sleep – You do this every night.. and when you are tired.

cry – You do this when you are sad… tears fall from your eyes

kiss – You do this to someone you love.. In some countries, it is also a way to greeting friends.

run – You do this when there is a tiger running after you.

swim – You do this in a pool or a lake or the ocean. If you fall off a boat, you will have to do this.

dream – You do this when you are sleeping. You think about different things while sleeping.

lose – This is the opp of win. This can also mean to misplace something. Did anyone lose a wallet?

shut – You do this to the door so that people don’t come in.

teach – I do this.

drink – You do this with water or Coke. If you’re thirsty, you have to do this.

play – Children want to do this all the time. They don’t like to study, they want to go out to do this.

sing – Madonna does this.. and Elton John.

throw – You do this with a ball