LESSON OVERVIEW

In this grammar lesson, students learn a few idioms for expressing emotions, discover how to use past modals as well as practise them in speaking activities.

IDIOMS

The worksheet starts with a short exercise in which students learn six idioms related to different emotions. First, they have to complete a few dialogues with some words given. The task include idioms such as look like thunder, walk on air, shake like a leaf, etc. Next, students read the dialogues again and try to guess what emotions the idioms refer to. To practise them in speaking, they have to discuss questions which all include the idioms they’ve just learnt.

PAST MODALS

The second part of the worksheet focuses on grammar. All the dialogues from ex. 1 include different past modals, so students read the dialogues again and discover the rules when we use specific past modals. Then, they get a few sentences and have to react to them using verbs in brackets. After that, students move to the speaking part which consists of two activities. In the first one, they look at some pictures and say how the people there feel. Then, they should make deductions about the past using different past modals: must, can’t, couldn’t, might (not), could, may. Encourage students to use also some emotion idioms to describe how the people in the pictures feel. Finally, we prepared six situations for students to discuss. They have to read each situation and result, think about what might have happened and speculate about each point. The activity is best done in pairs where students can discuss together each situation, but it also works fine when done individually.

RELATED LESSON PLAN

After doing this worksheet, you might want to practise past modals with our ‘detective stories’ lesson plan:

• Whodunit (practise past modals with riddles)