| LESSON OVERVIEW
The main objectives of this lesson are to:
- practise advanced prepositions in various contexts;
- discuss personal experiences using advanced prepositions.
With this lesson, students work on advanced prepositions with various activities. They choose the correct prepositions in questions, put prepositions in correct places and complete prepositional phrases. The tasks are followed up with additional speaking activities. They also study verbs with dependent prepositions (e.g. resort to, indulge in, confide in, etc.), talk about situations that happened to them and exercise prepositions in binomials (e.g. out and about, back and forth, on and off, etc.).
PREPOSITIONS
In this activity, students choose the correct prepositions to complete questions about personal experiences (e.g. Do you usually work Monday through/via/by Friday? Would you like to change that?). You can also discuss the use of these advanced prepositions (e.g. What’s another way of saying ‘Monday through Friday’?) and ask students to choose five questions to answer.
MORE PREPOSITIONS
In this task, students see two sets of sentences with wrong prepositions and put the prepositions in correct places. Then, you can ask them to think of different sentence endings after each preposition. Alternatively, to check if students understand the meaning of prepositions, you could read pairs of sentences and ask students if they have the same or different meaning (e.g. The app got plenty of hype after it was launched AND The app was launched amid much hype).
PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES
Within this exercise, students complete prepositional phrases using advanced prepositions in boxes (e.g. behind the scenes, at length, with ease, etc.). After that, you can ask them to find prepositional phrases in the statements for the definitions (e.g. in the wrong pitch – out of tune).
VERBS WITH DEPENDENT PREPOSITIONS
In this activity, students complete gaps with the correct prepositions in statements (e.g. I was forced to resort ___ a risky strategy; I haggled ___ the price for ten minutes or longer; etc.). Following that, you can ask them to choose sentences and describe similar situations that have happened to them. You could also ask students to play a guessing game with verbs and their prepositions.
PREPOSITIONS IN BINOMIALS
As part of this activity on advanced prepositions, students match sentence halves to create binomials (e.g. above and beyond, on and off, through and through, etc.). Then, you can read pairs of definitions for the phrases in bold and ask students to choose the correct ones. (e.g. above and beyond – more than OR just as much as). You can also ask students questions with the binomials (e.g. Why do people learn English on and off?). Additionally, you can ask them to choose three of the sentences and explain to what extent they agree with them.
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Awesome
Thanks!
This is some handy material for my advanced students who are fluent and struggle with prepositions. Thanks a lot!
Fantastic! Thanks for the feedback.
I loved this class! More of this one please, for other levels too
Thanks, I’m glad you liked it 🙂
Amazing exercises and I love the additional ideas in the teacher’s version. Top!
That’s great to hear, thanks for your feedback!
Great lesson! The ideas for extra practice make a huge difference.
Fantastic, thanks!
Hi there, thanks for a great lesson plan. However, I found a mistake in one of the exercises: “I did my English homework without FAIL.” It’s always either FAILURE or FAILING. We cannot use just FAIL there. Thanks.
Hi, I’m glad you like the lesson!
That’s actually not a mistake – ‘without fail’ is a fixed phrase. You can see some details e.g. here or here.
Glad you replied! Cause I asked my American friend right away and they didn’t like it lol.
Although this is a useful lesson, it doesn’t explain why we use the prepositions when we do. This is what students find so confusing.
Hi! Telling students that we use prepositions to show time, space, relationship between objects or people, direction, location, etc. probably wouldn’t help much. I’d say it’s rather a question of practice.