Lesson Plan, Spring Semester, 2022. Week for Week!

A clear plan, week by week for both parents and students to know exactly what we will be doing in English classes (modersmål) up to this summer.

Lesson Plan, Spring Semester, 2022. Week for Week:

V2. Welcome back everybody! We will begin with an open discussion about our holidays. We are now in a new year with big exciting things waiting to happen! All students will be taken through the term plan; what we will be doing, why, and what I will be expecting from them. But to kick off this new school term we are going to do something more fun. In small groups the students will be given a cypher – a secret message that they work together to unravel.

V3. Start of a project on Civil Rights, week 3-8. The aim of this project is to introduce the students to multiple different English speaking cultures and a different perspective on English speaking culture. There we will be both individual and group work, written and discussion. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: “Dreams” – we go around the room and share our dreams, what do we want to do when we grow up? Today we are going to learn about someone who shared his dream with the world; Martin Luther King, Jr. What do we all know about this person? Has anyone heard of him? What did he do? What happened? We then watch his famous speech together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP4iY1TtS3s The goal of today is to understand why he made this speech as best we can.

V4. Australia’s National Day (Chinese New Year). We are going to start today with some detective work! Without saying anything I give the whole class a series of picture clues to an English speaking country – boomerangs, kangaroos, Uluru, Sydney Opera House. They work together to work out which country this is. When they come to the answer we begin to learn about the native Aboriginals, linking this to last week’s work.

V5. Waitangi Day (New Zealand). Colonies, Colonization, and Native Peoples. After a recap of the past few weeks we will introduce New Zealand, its history, the Treaty of Waitangi. From here we will learn about the Maori people – can our students learn a Haka?

V6. Charles Dickens’s Birthday. Last term we talked a lot about Charles Dickens and read excerpts of Oliver Twist. Since it is his birthday we will remind ourselves who he was, some of his books, and play some Dickens themed games. Afterwards we go back to our discussion on other groups and traditions in the English speaking world.  

V7. George Washington’s Birthday. This is our last lesson before we have a break. Assure them that they are doing well and deserve a bit of time off. After wrapping up the ideas and themes we have learnt so far this term we do a written piece of work on the first American president. This will be a short text on his life with questions on the end. The final discussion will be on how the USA went from being a colony to what it is now.

V8. LOV

V9. World Book Day. Welcome back after your break! The theme from now until the next break with be Women’s rights and Feminism. Last year we made group presentations on important women in English-speaking history, this was very popular and interesting for the students so we will be doing it again with new profiles. But, after going through the plan with the students, and what they will be graded on, we have an easier introduction to the new term. World Book Day is this week and as such we will read some fun short stories and even have a try and writing our own!  

V10. International Women’s Day. The class will be split into groups (no more than 5), they have a few minutes to come up with their own fun group names. We remind each other what we will be doing and why this is important. Each group will then be given their own important woman from English-speaking history. They then have several weeks to research her, I will provide everything each group may need, before finally giving an oral group presentation. Have fun!  

V11. St. Patrick’s Day. To start we will have a fun introduction to St. Patrick’s Day and the beautiful Irish culture, including games and songs. The second half of the lesson will be more concentrated research and group work on their presentations.

V12. World Poetry Day. To celebrate World Poetry Day we will look at a few short poems and learn what exactly a poem is. After that we will put some more final touches on our presentations and prepare what exactly everyone is going to say.

V13. Ramadan. Ramadan Mubarak! Today’s class is going to be in two halves. Firstly, we will have a class discussion on Ramadan, what is it? Who celebrates it? How and why? This is another great opportunity to remind the students that this English speaking world is much larger than just two or three countries, but is a world language (the international language) and can be found anywhere. Moving into the second half we will hear the first presentations – exciting!

V14. Maya Angelou Birthday (Easter/Passover). Happy Easter and Passover! This is our last lesson before we have a break. You are all working really hard and doing really well, and deserve a nice rest. We will listen to the last of the groups and make sure that everyone gets their fair turn to speak and be heard. If there is time left over, I think the students will already be very familiar with the fact that Easter is coming up, so we will do something else on topic – a look at the work, life, and legacy of Maya Angelou.

V15. LOV

V16. St. George’s Day & Shakespeare’s Birthday. Hello everybody and welcome back from your break! This week has both St. George’s Day (the English national day) and Shakespeare’s birthday, so it will be a very British themed week! The students will begin with a puzzle of the English flag, Scottish flag, and the Northern Irish flag, and how they fit together to make the Union Jack (British flag) – this is a good way of explaining how these countries are unique but work as a team. Next we will have some listening exercises – hearing clips from Shakespeare plays and working out what exactly is being said.

V17. Freedom Day (End of Apartheid South Africa). We will begin with me writing some words on the board on the left side and definition on the right, but all jumbled up. The students have to match the words to the definitions.

1. Injured                 Not allowed
2. Banned               Chosen by voting
3. Apartheid            Put in prison
4. Imprisoned          Hurt           
5. Elected                Let out of prison
6. Campaign           A system that does not allow black people and white people to be together
7. Released             Planned political activities

I then tell the kids that all these words come from one person’s story. Any guesses who? It is the story of a man named Nelson Mandela. I give an overview of who he was and we watch a short film on his life. We go through some of the points and talk about why he is important. Then I write several events on the board; A) Elected president of South Africa, B) Put in prison, C) Born in 1918, D) Died in 2013, E) Joins the ANC and starts to fight for equal rights, F) Wins the Nobel Peace Prize, G) Released from prison. The students have some time to put these events in order.

V18. Harry Potter Day. Harry Potter is always requested by the students and still as popular as ever. To both engage their interests and get the students involved in the planning of our term we will have a lesson dedicated to it. We talk about something particularly interesting in the books/movies - The Bogart. After reminding ourselves what the Bogart was I explain to the students that now, one by one, the students will come up and tell us what it is that they fear most - i.e. what would your boggart be? Then the rest of the class shouts out ideas of how to make that thing silly, that is to say: not scary anymore! I go first – I am totally terrified of spiders. No student has to do it if they feel uncomfortable. In their books they write about what we have done, what they said, what the class said, and how the silly ideas made them feel. Did it make the thing less scary? Why?

V19. Grammar. Our structure today will be: 1) review, 2) new, 3) explain. Before we start, it has been a very long time since we have done grammar exercises, so I’ll ask. What is grammar? Why is it important? To jog our memories we will review what we have done in the past. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives. I give them a series of (fun) sentences on the board and they identify the verbs, nouns, and adjectives. When I’m confident that they understand, we move on. Tenses. The new idea we are going to look at today are tenses. A word’s tense is whether it is past, present or future. I draw up a table of the three and we do some random words, for example: walk, walking, walked. We then move on to Present Simple and Present Continuous - these are the most basic forms of tense in English. They will then have a series of examples to work out which is which. Unlink me, most students detest grammar, so we will finish with all kinds of games.

V20. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Birthday. Today we are going to be talking about one of the most famous characters in all of English! Sherlock Holmes. I give them an introduction to Sherlock and his creator Arthur Conan Doyle. Then I break the class into groups and let them decide their group names. I have adapted Conan Doyle’s book The Hound of the Baskervilles into a choose your own adventure story – each group will have a (child-friendly) version of the mystery and clues to follow or ignore, it’s up to them! We’ll see how many get the right answer on the foggy moors of England?

V21. WW2 letters part 1: The most requested topic from the students is World War 2. Of course, this would be inappropriate and not very helpful for a language class. But to meet our students halfway we will be looking how letters sent from that time. How to write a letter? What is typically in a letter? How to write more formally. The students will then have the chance to write their own in that 1940’s style. One of our main sources will be the child-friendly Horrible Histories series of books and television programme.

V22. WW2 letters part 2: Jumping off of last week we will finish our 1940’s letters and then use tea bags to make them look old, and scissors to make them look haggard – to be as authentic as possible. The students may keep their finished letters!

V23. Final Teaching Week (Swedish National Day). Our final lesson! Thank you all so much for a fantastic teaching year! We are going to remind ourselves what we have done this year. Pick some choice classes and go through how much we have learnt. What did you all like, what did you not like, what would you like to learn next year? Then the remainder of our class is full of games and films, and give them a great time to end on.

Goodbye everyone, and have a wonderful summer!