A lesson on the Polish-Belarusian border crisis + Conditionals:
Level of English: B2 – C2
The lesson focuses on practicing speaking skills and revising conditional sentences (2nd Conditional, 3rd Conditional, Mixed Conditionals).
It’s built around a German TV report which the students are watching in parts. Once they do that, they get a chance to summarize particular fragments (using new words) and speculate about what would happen or what would have happened if a particular situation took (or had taken) place. Students are given the beginning of each conditional sentence and their job is to complete it using their own ideas. The whole exercise is quite long and some parts of it can easily serve as homework. 🙂
An extra thing that you’ll see among the slides are a few Youtube comments which may spark a nice discussion or prompt your students to share their thoughts on the subject at the very least.😉
Although the topic is very serious and might be quite depressing, served in this way, intertwined with grammar review that makes the student focus on using specific structures, ends up quite palatable and especially after commenting on the YT comments 😉leaves the students thinking positively about the future.
If you want to finish your lesson on a lighter note, you may think of incorporating some parts of this video into it:
John Oliver is a British comic based in USA who took it upon himself to educate American citizens on a range of various topics (Belarussian political situation included). The whole video is definitely too long and could take up your whole lesson, but can surely work in parts (as a comic relief) or serve as a nice homework (you can pick some fragments and ask your students questions about them, e.g. by showing them some snapshots from the video and asking them what they refer to 🙂).
Alternatively, you may treat the video as the basis for the lesson and send it to your students beforehand (a flipped classroom style) and then move on to the speculation/German TV material from the slides. 😉
It will work either way, trust me. But be warned that the handout itself is far too long for the usual 60 minutes.
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The John Oliver video is a theme of #Lesson 72 whcih you can check out on my FB profile:
If you’re in need of more creative material on the 3rd Conditional or Unreal Past, you may be inspired by this: Chicago, the musical, and Unreal Past.
Thanks for stopping by and hope you’ll be visiting me more often 🙂
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