Teachers often use videos to give students a break from the usual classroom activities. Learners use videos, too, to improve their listening and speaking skills.
In this week’s Education Tips, we look at how one of our videos can be the start of a full English lesson. We will look at the video for The Big Snow, Lesson 11 of Let’s Learn English Level 2.
In this lesson, Anna and Pete are reporting on a snowstorm, or blizzard. Anna loves to talk about weather. Pete is unhappy because he is working on a weekend. The video teaches the present perfect and past perfect verb tenses.
In recent workshops with English teachers in Ukraine, VOA Learning English instructors asked the teachers to brainstorm ideas for activities they could create with this video.
The teachers came up with about 40 ideas. They range from activities centered on grammar to activities that cover the subject of weather.
Here are some examples of classroom activities for before, during and after watching the video:
Before watching
While watching
After watching
As you can see from this list, there are plenty of ideas for giving students the chance to speak, write, read, and listen while enjoying a short, humorous video.
If you want to see more ideas, each Let’s Learn English video comes with a lesson plan that you can download. For the snowstorm video, one activity sheet asks students to use the present perfect and past perfect tense to think of questions and answers using “snow words.”
Another activity sheet gives students weather information from around the world and asks them to give a weather forecast like the ones you can see on television.
We are sure you can think of other ways to use this video in learning or teaching English. Write to us in the comments if you want to share your own ideas.
I’m Jill Robbins.
Anna Matteo and Jill Robbins wrote this lesson for Learning English in collaboration with English teachers from Ukraine in our Go English workshop.
