LESSON OVERVIEW

In this lesson about anxiety-free news, students learn and practise positive and negative adjectives and reflect on the impact of news stories on our lives.

NEWS‐RELATED VOCABULARY & VIDEO

The lesson starts with a discussion which focuses on how students feel about the news they read or watch every day. Then, they look at seven sentences with seven underlined words and phrases (e.g. clickbait, doomscrolling, etc.) and try to work out their meanings from the context. They will hear these words in a video about positive news. First, they listen to the video for gist and answer a general question about it. Next, they focus more on the language and have to identify seven words used by the speaker which correspond to seven given definitions.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ADJECTIVES  & SPEAKING PRACTICE

The next exercise invites students to brainstorm ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ adjectives in English. They analyse eight news headlines and identify the synonyms of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in them (e.g. gloomy, upbeat). The next step is to add them to the table with positive and negative adjectives which they created earlier. The vocabulary exercises are followed by another discussion which allows students to put into practice the language they learnt in the lesson and reflect on the impact of news stories on their lives. Then, they discuss practical things mentioned in the video that we can do to make the world a better place and come up with more ideas. They finish the lesson with a mini project in pairs. They watch The Happy Broadcast channel and choose two anxiety-free news stories, take notes and share them with the other students, trying to use the positive and negative adjectives studied earlier.