LESSON OVERVIEW

The lesson is based on the TED talk by Michael Norton titled “How to buy happiness”. This ESL worksheet is for B1+ students as the speech is not very difficult to understand, but rather fast. Norton’s talk has a rather controversial topic and it could be interesting to ask your students this question before watching the video and learning what the author has to say on money and happiness.

VOCABULARY

The lesson mainly concerns money and issues connected with it. The first exercise in the worksheet is on synonyms of words poor and rich. These words and phrases are useful for the following exercise. Next, students move to a discussion on money and happiness. You should monitor them and remind them of using vocabulary from the previous task. Then, students move to completing gaps. There are questions which contain phrases used to talk about money. Moreover, after filling in, students can answer these questions in pairs.

VIDEO AND DISCUSSION

Finally, students move to the last task. They have to watch the video and discuss the speaker’s ideas. Encourage your students to express their own observations on the topic. The whole lesson should take you around 45 minutes as the speech is 11-minute long. However, it always depends on how much your students are engaged in the discussions. Tell us what you think about this ESL worksheet!

EXTRA WORKSHEET – WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT

We also have an follow-up worksheet to expand on the topic and teach your students some new vocabulary. The worksheet consists of various exercises and the whole worksheet is based on the World Happiness Report that measures how happy citizens of over 150 countries are. See it at The happiest country in the world.