For once in my life, I decided to break with tradition and actually do a Valentine’s Day lesson. Turned out to be quite good fun with my Upper Intermediate teens during their last lesson before Valentine’s Day…
Image from wikicommons.org licensed for commercial reuse with modification
This lesson includes a prediction quiz, a video clip, a short philosophical reading, a discussion and some project work. Materials used are all linked to at the end of this post.
- Brief lead-in: Show slide with a Valentine’s Day picture and a picture of marmite. Ask students what these have in common. (Love it or hate it…) Which camp are they in? Why? (NB: you may want to show a quick clip of a marmite advertisement – I would if I did this lesson again! Unless students are familiar with marmite…)
- Prediction quiz: In pairs/small groups, students complete the quiz about Valentine’s Day with their predictions.
- Video clip: Students watch/listen and check their predictions, noting correct answers where necessary.
Click on this picture to be taken to the video clip!
- Check: Students check what they understood in pairs/small groups.
- Discuss: Students discuss if they are surprised by any of the statistics and why/why not.
- Discuss: In new groupings, students discuss the two philosophical questions that lead in to the reading.
- Read: Students read the short text and compare the writer’s views with their ideas from the discussion.
- Discuss: Students discuss the gist and opinion questions at the end of the text.
- Produce: Having learnt all about Valentine’s Day, the students, as campaigners, now create their own holiday. (Who is it in honour of? Why? How is it celebrated? Encourage them to make it as zany as possible. Encourage them to incorporate the statistical language from the video clip [in the case of my teens, this recycles the statistical language they met last term]). Students should present their holiday in a poster (for my students I prompted them to use the persuasive language we’d looked at in a previous lesson, so some more review), to convince the government to give everybody a national holiday for it. I also warned them that I (the government) would be asking a few questions following the presentation, which they duly prepared for.
My teens got really in to the final production stage, getting into role as petitioners for their holiday, and they even took a photo of their finished poster afterwards! 🙂
Here are the materials I used:
And here is the holiday that won!
The ‘Government’ says, “Yes, please!” 😉
If you use this lesson with your classes, I hope you enjoy it! Let me know how it goes by posting in the comments… 🙂
Lizzie Pinard 