LESSON OVERVIEW

This flipped lesson plan is a bit different than others as it includes an interactive video with tasks that students need to do at home. It’s a nice way to motivate students to practice language (in this case, advanced tense review) using technology. The lesson plan touches upon the life of Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter who has been inspiring other artists and people all around the world.

This is a Flipped Classroom lesson plan. In a nutshell, it means that the first part of the lesson needs to be done by students at home. Learn more about flipped classroom and how we implement it in these lesson plans in our post.

PRE-CLASS ACTIVITIES

As part of their homework, students have a few tasks to complete. First, they need to acquire some vocabulary so that it is easier for them to listen to and understand the video. Exercise 1 includes nine sentences with some words in bold. Students have to match these words with their meanings provided. Of course, encourage them to look up some words in a dictionary if they feel that they don’t get them correctly. Then, they move to a task on collocations. There, students have to create collocations to discover how the words from ex. 1 can be used. Finally, students move to an interactive video with focus on advanced tense review. It includes 8 multiple choice questions which appear on the screen every few minutes. All the questions have a common denominator: they namely deal with narrative tenses. It means that students have to verify their knowledge of Past Simple, Past Continuous, Past Perfect and Present Perfect as well the “used to” structure.

IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES

The lesson starts with a task which aim is to check a bit students’ knowledge of Frida Kahlo’s life (based on the video they watched at home). Students need to read a few quotes by Frida Kahlo and discuss how they relate to her life. Encourage your students to give as many details as they can remember. After the discussion, they need to move to an exercise on vocabulary. They have to match basic adjectives with their more advanced (and stronger) equivalents. Very often these are the so-called non-gradable adjectives, so you might add some other related tasks on that topic. If you want to extend this task, you might as your students to think of any other adjectives to add. Finally, students have to use all the vocabulary they’ve learned during the lesson and describe Frida Kahlo’s paintings. You have to find some paintings on the Internet before the class and then show them to your students. For example, see this Frida’s artwork online gallery.