Getting Christmasy

It’s that time of year again. That time of year when you and your students need a break. But you are the one who probably needs it more. After the first semester is over and because of too many unanticipated hours of marking, sleep deprivation and lack of sunny days, the last thing in the world you truly want to do is design another last set of activities for the pre-Christmas session most (if not all) teachers have to bear.

I’ve always dreaded the idea of having to come up with something super cool for the Christmas season at school. So, what I’ve done most of times is google something up and see how it goes with the groups. Usually you come across myriads of webs and grab-as-much-as-you-can-take sort of lesson plans ready to be used. Yet, none has ever seemed to tickle my fancy really, so I’ve always had to make do with bits of everything I found.

This time, however, I’ve decided to do the complete opposite: I’ve made my own lesson plan just to try something different, something I could connect all my students with that was relatable to and fun for them. And, you know what? It worked!

This lesson plan surely isn’t the best of plans on the planet, and I’m very much aware of that. It may even fail to amuse your students or prove to be consistent with reality, but I came to class with it, we practiced all the four (main) skills and learned new vocabulary and, what’s most important, the students liked it a lot. And that’s the reason why I had to share it.

Hope you find it interesting/useful/quiteOK and that it inspires you to use it, laugh at it, loathe it or whatever you want to do with it 😍

The plan has some worksheets and other materials that you can find here.

Procedure	Timing
1) Warm up with some questions about Christmas. This paves the way for what comes next and it is useful to get to know what the students think/(dis)like about the topic, and to revise and introduce new vocabulary.	5-10’
2) Start the PowerPoint presentation, slide 2. Show the eight words to the group and discuss their meanings. Encourage them to say as much as they know about the words, and to use them in a sentence. Then, do the second part of slide 2 (word types). 3) Put students in pairs or small groups and give each group a copy of the text “Christmas in Australia”. Have students fill the gaps with the correct word from the slide and then discuss the text (traditions) with the class.	10’ 10’
4) Go on to do slide 3. This one is a video by Jola Josie, who talks about her experience of having Christmas in New Zealand. I played it just once, because my group is well used to watching tons of videos every week, and they are B2. If needed, play the video twice or switch subtitles on. After watching the video, have the groups discuss which differences they noticed with their kind of Christmas. Then, report some answers back.	10-15’
5) Move to slide 4 and play the video just once. At this point, students do not really need to focus on what they can hear but on what they can see. Ask your students to pay attention to the food, the decoration, the whole mise en scène. After that, jump onto slide 5 and follow the instruction. To design their menus, I used some food catalogues from British supermarkets. In case these aren’t available, you can provide catalogues from your country or have students use their phones to browse products on any webpage they like. At the end, I asked students to very briefly present their menus and then we voted on the most British, the yummiest, the healthiest…	20-25’
6) To finish the PPT presentation, we sang a Christmas song on the move. My school has a Christmas party for the students and we all sing songs in different languages. This year, the English department chose a song which was a real success. What I did to rehearse and to revise vocabulary was this: I printed 2 sets of photos showing some words from the song (highlighted ones in lyrics file). I hanged them randomly around the class and ask the students to identify them. Then we read and listened to the song one time. After that, I played the song again and asked students to run to the photos when they heard the word it matches. For example, if the song says “Christmas tree”, the students have to find where the photo with a Christmas tree is and run to it. Lastly, we rehearsed once more and headed for the party to treat us to some delicious cakes and keep on caroling 😊	10’