Lesson Plan Session 3: Travel & Excursions (C1.1 & B2.2)

For the third session of classes both my C1.1 and B2.2 focused on the theme of travel. However, due to their difference of speaking levels, I decided to create two different activities.

C1.1- Let's Plan a Trip!

As a warmup for my higher level classes we started off by brainstorming different means of travel and accommodation for 2-3 minutes. From there, we jumped right into the activity for the day! First, I split my class into groups of 3-4 students --however no more than 6 groups total -- and let them choose from a bank of popular travel destinations in the United States such as:

• New York, New York

• Grand Canyon National Park

• Atlanta, Georgia

• San Francisco, California

• Denali National Park, Alaska

• Las Vegas, Nevada

Using their WIFI devices, they had to plan a trip to the destination of their choosing. They were assigned to research and share with the class:

1. How to get there

2. History of the area

3. Five Must See Sites

4. Best time of year to travel

5. What to pack

6. Places to stay (Accomodation)

7. Best places to eat

8. Three Fun/Curious/Interesting Facts

Due to time constraints, each group was given 30 minutes to plan their trip and 5-7 minutes to present to the class. Once a group finished presenting the class voted on whether or not they would like to actually visit the location in the future. I found the activity to foster a lot of interesting discussion within the small groups and allowed for new vocabulary words to be used and researched. Additionally, many of my students mentioned how they had not thought to travel to many of these destinations in the past. By doing this activity, they were opened up to many different possibilities of travel in the future. I loved being able to go from group to group and I was very impressed by the details some of my students included within their presentations. This proved to be a fun and mind-opening activity for many of my students that brought about many different conversation topics and discussions!

B2.2 - Travel Matching

As my B2.2 groups do not have the same level of vocabulary and speaking as compared to my upper level, I chose to conduct a matching game. At the beginning, each group was given a sheet with 7 questions and 7 corresponding sheets with phrases. The task was to match the questions and the phrases to make complete sentences. The following are pictures of the questions and matching phrases:

Questions

Phrases

After groups finished matching the phrases to the questions, we went around the room and shared out loud what they believed the matches to be. While this part of the activity only lasts 10-15 minutes, we returned to the questions from the matching activity. Going around in small groups, the questions were then posed to each student to answer from their own perspective. For example, Question 1 states "How do people decide where to go on holiday?". Therefore, posing the question to the group, one asks "How do you decide where to go on holiday?"

I believe using this format of activity really helped my lower level groups. While they were able to focus and build upon their vocabulary during the first part of the class by the matching activity, during the second half of the class they were then able to use these new words and phrases to detail their preferences and experiences. I very much enjoyed going group to group and listening in on their conversations -- even jumping in to an interesting story and ask questions!