LESSON OVERVIEW

This flipped lesson plans is perfect for Past Simple revision. Students practise using Past Simple by doing a few grammar and speaking exercises as well as learn verbs and phrases related to setting up and running a business. Moreover, they will do a jigsaw tasks and discover the stories of some famous entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Zhou Qunfei or Amancio Ortega.

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

In this part, students do exercises which help them revise the rules and use of the Past Simple tense. First, they study a table presenting how we create questions, affirmative and negative sentences in the Past Simple tense and need to fill in some sentences with the correct forms of the verbs given. All the sentences are about famous people and their lives. Next, they learn some vocabulary connected with running a business, e.g. go bankrupt, found, expand. To practise both, the use of Past Simple and the vocabulary, students read a short text about Bill Gates and have to fill in the gaps with the correct forms of the verbs in brackets.

IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES

Speaking and listening

The in‐class part starts with a discussion. Students are asked to recognize some famous entrepreneurs and talk about successful people. Next, there is a short task on regular and irregular verbs in which students just need to write down the past forms of the verbs given. After that, they move to the video‐related tasks. First, they brainstorm what they know about Steve Jobs, watch a short video and learn about his early life. Then, they watch the second video, which concerns his early career, and have to mark the given sentences true or false.

Pairwork

Finally, students move to a speaking part. A good idea for the Past Simple revision is a jigsaw exercise. Give your students an infographic about a famous entrepreneur. Each person gets an infographic, but with some facts missing. Students read the information they get and ask their partner about the missing parts. The lesson plan includes three sets of infographics (about the lives of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, Zhou Qunfei, the richest self-made woman and Amancio Ortega, founder of Zara and the Inditex group).

student’s versionteacher’s versione-lesson plan