| LESSON OVERVIEW
Thanks to this Christmas lesson plan, students discuss Christmas preparations, watch some tear-jerking commercials and write their own Christmas wishes.
DISCUSSION & CHRISTMAS ADS
First, students discuss a few questions about Christmas, their preparations and celebrations. Next, they move to another exercise and watch Christmas ads. Each of them watch one advert. While watching, they should take notes because then they’ll summarize the ad to their partner and explain how the people shown were preparing for Christmas. After this exercise, students talk about other cool Christmas commercials they’ve seen, the Christmas spirit as well as whether they write wishes or text messages during this time of the year. This question should serve as a lead-in to the remaining tasks.
WRITING CHRISTMAS WISHES
The next task is a word formation exercise. Students read some Christmas wishes and decide which part of speech (noun, adjective, adverb, etc.) is missing in each gap. Then, they complete them with the correct form of the words in brackets. To practise a bit the expressions and phrases, they get a Christmas card and need to find and fix four mistakes in it. Finally, in the production stage of this lesson plan, students have to write Christmas wishes to a friend, family member, or co-worker. They need to choose the appropriate beginning and closing from the list given. Remind them to come up with their own Christmas wishes and don’t copy word by word the ones from the previous exercises.
WORKSHEETS
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I love all the materials, this one was amazing! My students felt really emotive with the ad of the grandpa learning English to talk to his granddaughter.
Do you guys have plans to launch a structured course or something like that? I would definitely buy it.
Also, do you have plans to extend to A1 and C2 levels?
Thank you so much for this amazing job. I’m very proud to purchase it.
Thanks Gabriel for your comment and your support! Great to hear that you loved this lesson. BTW, the Allegro (Grandpa) ad is from Poland from a few years back – gets me emotional even after watching it for the 100th of time. To answer your questions: we haven’t thought about creating a whole course and at this point we don’t feel there’s a need for that. Now, in terms of levels, that’s more likely to happen, especially for lower levels. If you look for C2 lessons, you might just check some of our C1 lessons as I believe they’ll be interesting and challenging for C2 learners as well.
In slide 14 – what is the mistake with “may” about? 😀
Ha ha, that’s a good one!
What’s the answer please?
Hi there! If you’re asking whether there is a mistake in slide 14, there isn’t. When we wish somebody something, we put ‘may’ at the beginning of the sentence. Hope it helps!
What a pity, the quality of the materials is incredible. I was dreaming of a full coursebook or something like that hahahaha. But that’s ok. Are you guys preparing a lesson about New Year’s Resolutions as well? Thanks!
New Year’s resolutions? We have an idea for such a lesson especially considering how 2020 ruined everyone’s resolutions 🙂 I bet people are going to have different ones for next year. FYI we might not follow through with that lesson in time so don’t wait for us.
thank you but I won’t be able to share with my students due to the one slide with *****ing profanity. I wish I could. District won’t permit.
You mean that one word in the Allegro Christmas ad? Probably not the best for teenagers/school use, even though it’s a quote from a movie, the Taxi Driver. Worry not, the Internet has a solution for that called NoFanity. It’s a tool for beeping profanities from Youtube videos. Seriously, I just discovered there’s a thing for that. Can’t wait to test it out 🙂
Thank you so much for this lesson plan. All my private Ss enjoyed it a lot!!!
Great! Thanks for your comment!
All the materials are really amazing, apart from this one. It would be better to talk about Christmas traditions and Christmas vocabulary etc in the next Christmas worksheet. It’s, unfortunately, culturally appropriate only for Catholic countries which I find a bit unfair. I can’t use it. The thing is that I rely strongly on your worksheets, guys. They reduce preparation time to minimum. However, in this case, I will have to prepare all the materials by myself. We don’t celebrate Catholic Christmas in my country…So it’s absolutely out of touch with our reality. I think, you might probably be teaching a lot of Latin Americans or Central Europeans that’s why you don’t take the whole world prospect into consideration. Hope, next Christmas worksheet is going to be more appropriate for international environment. Thanks for all other worksheets, anyway! They are absolutely amazing!
Hi! Sorry to hear that this worksheet is not what you expected. We didn’t want to do a standard Christmas traditions worksheet. You know, the one about Christmas pudding and singing carols – there’s plenty of stuff like that out there so doing it again is pointless. Instead we focused here on some Christmassy ads and talking about this time of the year rather than any particular religious events. Next year, we might come up with a lesson about how the ‘holiday season’ is celebrated around the world and not just in the West. Think Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Orthodox Christmas. I don’t know where you are from and how you celebrate this time of the year, but would love to hear more about it 🙂 (you can email me at [email protected])
Maybe you could adapt your class showing how Christmas is celebrated in other countries. The video about the Polish grandpa is lovely and it doesn’t specifically show that it is a Catholic country where the man is from… Perhaps setting a challenge to your students by asking them their opinion on these Christmas ads? I come from a South American country and I am not Catholic . However even if my students are, I have asked them how Christmas is different in non Catholic countries, for instance, Japan – where my grandparents are from . Being creative and flexible might help you and give you a bigger range of usage for these wonderful worksheets from ESLBrains. 😉 Good luck and great festivities for us!
Letícia, thank you so much for your comment and great ideas! Happy Holidays 🙂
I realize this is a belated reply to a message I just saw, as I am recent subscriber. First of all, Christmas is celebrated by millions of Christians all over the world, not just “Catholics”. (According to Wikipedia, Christianity is is the world’s largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.4 billion followers representing one-third of the global population.) Secondly, with so many lesson plans available on this wonderful resource, you can simply skip the ones you deem to be inappropriate for your students. For example, I have many students all over the globe, of diverse faiths, some of no faith, so I would not use the Christmas lesson plan for those who might not find it useful or applicable. On the other hand, many who are not Christian but appreciate the Christmas celebration for its cultural significance, and would still enjoy a worksheet such as this. Whatever your faith, peace be with you! 🙂
Excellent as always! Thank you Stan and Justa!
I believe the title slide should be capitalized – Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/capitalization-in-the-titles/
Hi there! Thanks for the comment! I think we’d have to capitalize the whole phrase if we referred to the Sinatra’s song. Here, we only treat it as an expression that we can use as one of Christmas wishes (as in ex. 4e).
Thanks for another great lesson plan! Just a small edit needed in the name of accuracy. In Ex 7, the expression is “word for word”, not “word by word”. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/word-for-word
Of course! Thank you so much for letting us know! We’ve just amended the PDFs and e-lesson plan.
Thanks for the fast response! Wishing you and your hardworking team Happy Holidays! 🙂
Thank you and all the best to you 🙂
I have taught this lesson about 6 times over the last week. I tear up at those commercials every time! Thank you for the great Christmas lessons (I’m using the other ones as well). In fact, I love all your materials! Thank you for giving me the time to focus on teaching and not struggling to come up with cohesive materials. The subscription is worth every dime.
Hi Leslie! Yeah, the commercials are just amazing and there’s another one by the same company (as the one on English and the grandpa), but from this year. You can check it out here. Thank you so much for taking the time to comment and such kind words about our materials! We’re thrilled to hear that you enjoy them and find them so useful 🙂 Cheers!