Lesson Share: Teenagers: Fruits and vegetables

Aims

• To practise simple personal questions: What’s your name? How old are you? Are you married? How many children do you have? What’s your job?
• To revise basic vocabulary.
• To break the ice and make students relax and enjoy using English.
• To incorporate body language and intonation into the lesson.
• To get students moving around the classroom and changing the dynamics away from a teacher-led activity.

Procedure

• Ask students to write down the following words on a scrap of paper, keeping what they write secret form those around them:

1. The name of a fruit
2. The name of a vegetable
3. A number between 1 and 200
4. The answer to the following questions – Do you like football?
5. How many pencils and pens do you have?
6. 6What is the first thing you do every morning?

• Now tell students that these things are actually:

1. Their first name
2. Their family name
3. Their age
4. Are they married?
5. How many children they have
6. Their hobby

• Now they must get up and go around the class and ask the personal questions and share information about their new selves.
• Encourage them to shake hands (if appropriate) and make eye contact when meeting new people.
• If they don’t automatically use intonation appropriate for surprise etc, why not model it before the activity. E.g. How old are you?A hundred and fifty seven.Really!? (said with rising intonation and a long stretch of the word).
• This game ensures that students really listen to the answers of their questions as it is an information gap – they won’t know what the answers will be.