Helping ex-cons find a job – advanced crime lesson plan

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Vocabulary - crime

crime lesson plan

LESSON OVERVIEW

This crime lesson plan gives your C1 students plenty of opportunities to learn new crime-related vocabulary and to discuss a difficult topic of hiring ex-offenders. We divided this lesson plan into 3 sections: vocabulary and reading, video comprehension, discussion. Below you will find some notes on each of the section.

C1 / Advanced90 minStandard LessonPremium Plan

VOCABULARY AND READING

The worksheet starts with four tasks dealing with vocabulary. First, students need to match words from two boxes to create some nouns and common phrases, for example juvenile delinquent, major crime, harsh punishment, repeat offender, criminal record, etc. In the next task, they get a few sentences where they need to fill in the gaps with the phrases from the previous exercise.
The second part of this section includes a short reading about a person who committed some crimes. The text is full of verbs connected with committing crimes and students have to match them with their meanings. Then, they need to fill in the same text with correct prepositions which go with the verbs they discussed in the previous exercise. This way we want to introduce new language in a context and emphasize the verb + preposition combinations.

VIDEO AND DISCUSSION

This part of the crime lesson plan starts with a short lead-in with some questions for students to discuss. Next, students move to the first activity connected with the video. They need to do a quiz and guess which number is correct in each point. The sentences mainly concern some statistics about unemployment among ex-offenders in the USA. Then, students watch the first part of the video and find out whether they have chosen correct answers. The next exercise around the video is a listening comprehension task in which students need to answer some questions while watching the video again.

Finally, students move to a discussion and ask questions connected with what they’ve watched, i.e. the idea of hiring ex-offenders and their future after being released from prison.

EXTRA WORKSHEET – WRITING TASK

We’ve also prepared an extra worksheet for this crime lesson plan with two goals in mind: extend crime vocabulary and practise writing. Your students will first need to identify various types of crimes from fake news headlines and connect them to their definitions. Then, their next task is turning one of these fake news headlines into a short news post! There’s a small twist here as they need to include at least 4 words from a predefined list, so they need to be a bit creative to fit them in and still write something coherent.

WORKSHEETS

Comments

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Leave a Reply

  1. Jon

    Great lesson plan. Congratulations on your site

    1. Justa

      Thank you!

  2. Audrey

    Hi, yes, this is a great topic and really interesting for a lot of adults and teenagers.

    1. Justa

      Thanks, Audrey!

  3. Priscilla

    Great lesson. Thanks a lot! Never thought of talking about this with students, but it’s really important on today’s society!

    1. Justa

      Great to hear it, thanks!

  4. Hellen

    That’s a fantastic LP! Thank you so much for sharing it.

    1. Justa

      🙂

  5. Lorenzo Sclocco

    Hey guys!
    As I already mentioned to Justa, I created a very short activity with idioms related to crime. Just let me know if you want to have it 🙂

    1. helinenunes

      I’d love to.

    2. helinenunes

      [email protected]

    3. Duna.Spain

      Of course! Thanks

    4. chrislewis

      Yes please if it’s still available.
      [email protected]

  6. Paul

    I have a particular student whom I think will really enjoy this topic. I will use this on my next lesson with her.

    1. Justa

      Good to hear that!

  7. Duna.Spain

    Great Lesson plan. How can I get the script of the video? It would be also useful to work on it before watching it. THANKS.

    1. Stan

      There is a good quality transcript available for this video on YouTube! Go to YouTube and click the elipsis () button under the video (it’s just next to “Save”). Next, click the Open transcript button that will show up. This way you will get the transcript which you can simply highlight and copy as a text.

  8. jpbruce

    I liked this lesson, I’ve used it with a few classes. It promoted some good discussion. One thing, I noticed on the reading part of the lesson, that on the e lesson, there are numbers instead of letters for the meanings of the phrases – this was a bit confusing for my students to do feedback. Perhaps you could change it so they are the same on the student handout and the elesson? Thanks 🙂

    1. Justa

      Hi! So happy to hear that you’ve used this lesson many times 🙂 Thanks for the feedback! You’re right, it might have been a bit confusing, so we’ve just replaced the numbers with letters to make the e-lesson plan consistent with the PDF worksheets.

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