Tag: 21st century skills

Food Vocabulary + THERE TO BE Lesson Plan for CEFR-A2

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Hi there!

I hope you’re having fun with your students in this second week of classes. I’m having fun but I have to admit they are a little uninspired and pretty exhausted. Kids are working too hard these days, aren’t they? Swimming, Judo, computer science, horseback riding, robotics, languages, soccer, dance, courses and more courses. It never ends. It feels like parents want to have future secret agents or superheroes.

Kids need to be able to play and have fun. After all, that’s how they learn. With that in mind, I decided to share this lesson plan I believe worked well. Perhaps you can give it another twist and make it even better. The lesson was about food and a revision of THERE TO BE in the present simple tense. My students are 10-12 years old and they use Oxford’s GOT IT! 1 2nd edition but I’m certain you can adapt it to whatever book you’re using.

The highlights:

1) We talked to a friend from Israel on WhatsApp. She turned on her camera and showed what was in her fridge. My kids were shy at first but they really loved it.

2) I took my groceries with me to the classroom and they were excited to guess what was inside my bag.

3) The brain breaks were fun and helped them consolidate vocabulary.
Summarizing: It worked well and they were more engaged.

Next step: Tell them to do some research on what people eat in different countries.

Give it a try and let me know how it went. I’d love to get some feedback from y’all!

Here’s the link to Hungry Planet, the resource I used for this lesson: http://time.com/8515/what-the-world-eats-hungry-planet/

Here’s the link to my lesson plan(I used Chalk.com) :

André Hedlund – Planboard Lesson – Aug 7 2017 FRESHMAN

Don’t forget to check out my planning for American English File 2nd Edition here.

You might also like this lesson plan about telling the time for Young Learners

Uncertain Future, Critical Thinking and an Endless Journey to Curiosity – A student’s perspective

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My CEFR-B1 student Julia wrote this incredible entry!  Júlia is a 14-year-old Brazilian girl who loves books, movies, History, math, writing, art, and philosophy. She is also very interested in music and poetry. I’ve been trying to make her get more interested in astrophysics! She told me she liked it and I recommended Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series, Carl Sagan and, of course, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. 

Hi!

My name is Júlia Mota, André’s student at CCBEU, and I’m going to talk about the future.
My teacher always shows us TED speeches, texts and different videos talking about people who changed their lifestyle, had an amazing idea, innovated or invented something. It’s made me think a lot about what am I going to do with my life, what I will be in the future. I’m always asking myself those questions, and that’s a normal thing for a teenager, because we have an existential crisis almost every day, though. I was being haunted by them all the time, and no one was collaborating, because in life you hear lots of people rushing you about those decisions that you have to make (detail: probably the most important decisions too) exceptionally when you’re going to high school. After thinking a lot, I made some conclusions.

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As Kierkegaard, an existentialist philosopher once said:

“Life is a leap in the dark”

You never know what’s expecting you, but you have to jump on it. When we’re making important decisions in our lives, we have to take our time. The formula of success is patience, hard work, and faith. Patience because as my mother always told me: haste is the enemy of perfection. Hard work because you have to fight for your dreams, and never give up. And finally, faith. You have to believe in yourself because if you don’t, who will?

How many people said that they want to change the world? Lots. And how many people actually fought and changed it? Not many. It’s up to you to decide which one of them you’re going to be. I made my decision: I’m going to change the world. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, I can’t see the future. But I’m sure that I will! What about you?

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

Albert Einstein