Teachers' Zone 18

Teachers' Zone 18

Dear Teachers,

Happy New Year! It is the first time I have  had the honour to address you this year  so let me wish you all the best – lots of inspiration, even more patience and the most enthusiastic students you can dream of!

New Year inevitably conjures up images of  a new beginning, similarly to birthdays. That is why I have decided to discuss birthday related issues in the context of our lessons. Everyone celebrates birthdays, which makes it a topic close to our hearts and a topic that we generally like talking about. Why not take advantage of it and use it in our lessons? Here come my ideas to  show how we can incorporate  one of the most common occasions in our everyday school practise.

On the one hand, we could personalise the lesson by running the whole group/class birthday lesson. Before it we need to ask students to send us their childhood photos that nobody else has seen before. By showing them on the screen and sharing them with the rest of the class we can ask other students to guess who that is. We can encourage  using modal verbs of deduction, i.e. It must be X as he has such blue eyes. Or It could be Y as I remember him telling me about his childhood toys. At the end, the person from the photo  says who was right and can tell the class a story connected with the photo. Alternatively, if the photos are printed out and hanged on the classroom walls we can ask students to walk around and write down on a piece of paper below the photo who that is in it. After a class voting everyone stands next to their own photo, gets familiar with the notes and decides who  made the right guess. My favourite follow up exercise is an activity called „ My dream present”. Students are presented with a  number of ideas such as  „ treating yourself to your  number one dessert” , „ staying in your favurite pyjamas all day long”, „ jumping in the middle of a puddle”,           „staring in the  clouds all the afternoon”, etc. Students’ task is to choose one present from the list and telling the group why, how  and when they would like to use it.

If  for some reasons the group does not feel like sharing such personal details with each other we could use the topic of birthdays to introduce  party-related vocabulary. Alternatively, we could use a ready-made plan https://www.onestopenglish.com/listening-lesson-plans/listening-skills-lesson-plans-talking-about-birthdays/146225.article and run an integrated-skill lesson . I also love the suggestion of Oxford University Press that you can find here: https://oupeltglobalblog.com/2021/06/04/queens-birthday-elt-activities/ , which involves lots of speaking while practising grammar and integrating with each other. In case  none of the ideas presented here has appealed to you so far there is one option more to be found here: https://www.talkenglish.com/lessondetails.aspx?ALID=235 . That one focuses on organising a party and structures that are used to make arrangements and put forward suggestions.

In a nutshell, since each of us celebrates birthdays at some point during the year and since it is an incredibly  enjoyable occasion we can organize a lesson on the topic and at the same time introduce new vocabulary items as well as more or less complicated grammar structures. Another advantage of such a lesson is that the more personalised it is, the more chances there are that our students will feel appreciated and connected both with each other and our subject.

So- when is your birthday?

Take care and all the best-

Katarzyna Nowak