Tangerine Dreams

What is a webquest? A webquest begins with an engaging idea and is built from there. If the topic is not engaging, the lesson will not be effective.

Begin by sharing the presentation below with students, putting them in pairs and giving them 5 minutes to collect as many ideas as they can. They can use the internet or other resources at their disposal.

Some ideas for tangerines

Then put your students in groups of four, and give them 5 minutes to select the best idea from their cumulative list.

The next part depends on the subject that you teach. Some options include:

• Make a poster describing the idea in detail
• Make a PowerPoint/Prezi/Google Slide presentation describing the idea in detail
• Create a product: cook the dish, make the juice, organise the sports event
• Create activities for others based on that idea.

At the end, students share their end products with the rest of the class and are evaluated on them according to pre-set criteria.

Video lessons

How do you use videos in the classroom? Here are a couple of ways:

Low Levels:

With a lower-level class, the first thing would be to pre-teach or elicit some vocab, such as octopus, van, chase, stairs, swimming pool,  fish tank. 

Then we can present learners with some gap-fill or true-false exercises.

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Intermediate Levels:

Students describe the story of the video in pairs, then write it out in the form of a story.

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High Levels:

Students summarize the video briefly, and then brainstorm and write a story with similar elements and themes: love, devotion, fighting for others.


Below are some other tried-and-tested videos that work well with a variety of levels and ages:

The smallest car in the world

Paperman

Experience the Power of a BookBook

History through the Eyes of the Potato

Life of a Plastic Bottle

Bizarre sports - cheese-rolling 

World's Smallest Car - video lesson

Get Ss to discuss the different types of cars they know. Ask them what the smallest car they've seen is. Then show them the video. Ask them to take note of all numbers that they hear and what they refer to. Then in pairs they combine their information. 

After watching the video for the second time, they will create an advert for this car in groups of 3 and present it to the rest of the class.

  

Paperman

Tell your students they will be writing a story. Tell them to put their pens down and watch the short film, and play them Paperman, below. 

Get your students' opinions on it and check if they need any vocabulary to tell the story of the film. Remind them to write in the past tense. Pair them up and give them 20 minutes to summarize the film in writing. Encourage them to describe places and people.

On the board, write these two sentences:

She said sorry.
She said I am sorry.

Ask if they are both correct. Elicit the correct punctuation for the second:

She said, “I am sorry."

Then elicit how to say it when narrating the girl’s words to a friend:

She said she was sorry.

Elicit the differences between direct and indirect speech: punctuation, change of pronoun, change of tense.

In the same pairs, students should continue the story of the film, creating the dialogue between the two protagonists and noting it down. Then they present their stories. They can also act out their dialogue.

If you have stronger students, they can swap their stories after 10 minutes and continue each others’. Encourage the use of different linking words and descriptive nouns.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! (Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious)

I thought I'd start with one of my most popular go-to lessons when there is no programme to follow or I have to come up with a lesson on the spot. It works for all ages and levels and can be easily linked to other activities.

Objectives:
- Recycle vocabulary that students know in a new context.
- Practise story-telling tenses, vocabulary and structures.

I start the lesson by writing the word PLANET on the board. I get students to make new words out of the letters as an open-class activity, and clarify the rules as they go:

1. Do not repeat letters unless they are repeated in the word.
2. Do not use letters that are not in the word on the board.

Once students have come up with ten or so words, I put a new word down on the board:

SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS

I give students twenty minutes to work in pairs, making words from these letters.

During the twenty minutes I go around, moderating the word creation and helping along students who are stuck. Once the twenty minutes are up, I tell students to start writing a story in pairs, using as many of the words they have come up with. They underline the words as they use them and shouldn't repeat them.

Five minutes in, or once they have written an appropriately-sized paragraph for their level, students pass their story to the person on the left who continues it.

Two minutes later, they repeat this.

I repeat this a couple of times until the time they have is down to 30 seconds and they only have time to read the last sentence and write a short sentence of their own.

Once they are done, students get their original story back, they peer-review it, fixing mistakes they can spot. Then they read the stories aloud, and vote for the best one as a class.