LESSON OVERVIEW

In this lesson students learn some expressions with mind, watch a video and discuss life-changing decisions. 

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

Expressions with mind

Before the lesson students do two tasks to learn and practise expressions with mind. First, they read eight statements and decide whether the people are trying to make a decision about something or understand something. Then, they look at the statements again and match the expressions in bold with their meanings (e.g. bear in mind, wrap my mind around, cross your mind). Finally, they complete some statements with their own ideas. The statements include the expressions with mind from the first exercise. 

IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES

Vocabulary and video

The in-class part of the lesson starts with a warm-up activity where students briefly discuss being decisive and indecisive. Then, they read four statements about life-changing decisions and choose correct meanings of expressions in bold (e.g. have enough of, be fed up with, a far cry from). Before watching the video, students read three comments and guess what the video might be about. While watching, they list the reasons people make the decision to move. After the video, they discuss whether anything surprised them in the stories they watched and talk about the idea of moving abroad. 

Practice and discussion

In the last part of the lesson, students do a sentence transformation activity. They need to complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning as the first one. With this task, students practise the expressions with mind and other phrases they learned in the lesson. Then, they say whether the statements are true for them. Finally, students do a speaking activity in which they decide which of the life-changing decisions from the list are the hardest to make (e.g. taking out a mortgage, choosing a career, quitting a job). While discussing, they need to use at least three of the expressions from the lesson.