First Lesson Idea

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The first real lesson may be after you’ve finished with your ice breakers or it might be the second meeting with your class.  Either way it is also just as critical to pick the right first lesson. If you need a full lesson idea with limited materials you can try the future lesson, or the killing time lesson, or the describing behaviour lesson. It is important that it be something that you can use in the future with other new classes you might end up having.  It should also be adapted to different levels because you never really know what you are getting at the very beginning and those placement tests that schools give never seem to give you the perfect mix of students who are all at the same level. oops! So what can you do? My favourite starts with a simple question:

What do you prefer?

You can prepare a photocopy or project it on your digital whiteboard and save trees.  All you have to do is come up with some mix of basic and more complicated questions, put your students in groups of 3 or 4 and leave them to it.  You can walk around and listen to their conversations and even encourage them to ask you some of the questions so they get to know the teacher a bit to.  The aim of the lesson is two-fold.  You obviously are getting them to practice their speaking(here’s a lesson idea for only speaking the debate lesson) but also active listening which is a very important factor to emphasize when they will be doing any kind of speaking activities throughout the course.  Before students start encourage them to give full sentence responses and to ask additional questions based on the responses their classmates give them.  Emphasise that this helps them practice question forms and listening skills.

Here are some categories to get you started that I have used over and over again:

What do you prefer?

• cat  or dog
• skiing or sunbathing
• cruise ship or caravan
• Thriller or comedy
• Recital or gig
• honest truth or white lie
• put your oar in or keep a low profile

These are just ideas but as you can see there are some easier and harder questions here so as to suit all levels, you can adapt it with your own ideas as you wish or depending on your class.  When they have spent enough time talking you can do a feedback session by asking students what they learned about the others in their group.  Boom! By the way, if you want a lesson on artificial intelligence check it out, it’s adaptable for different levels.

If you need a lesson idea on a proverb here is an idea:

Enjoy the content? You can find many more lesson ideas here as well as videos on my YouTube channel for free.