| LESSON OVERVIEW
In this lesson about nature students talk about a podcast they listened to at home and practise advanced vocabulary related to the natural world. They also discuss the role of nature in their lives.
This is a Flipped Classroom lesson plan. In a nutshell, it means that the first part of the lesson needs to be done by students at home. Learn more about flipped classroom and how we implement it in these lesson plans in our post.
PRE-CLASS ACTIVITIES
In the pre-class part of this lesson about nature, students do two tasks. They start with a vocabulary activity in which they need to complete sentences with pairs of words (e.g. basking + refresh, scenic + floating). Then, they listen to the podcast and note down three things. Those include: something that students find surprising, something obvious and some piece of information which is useful to them and other people.
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
Once students are in class, they share their notes about the podcast and discuss how important the topic is on a global scale. They also talk at length about their experience with nature, the benefits of spending time in nature, and other issues mentioned in the podcast. Then, students do some vocabulary activities. First, they complete sentences with provided words. The contexts represent their basic meanings (e.g. weed, stem, blossom). Next, students read some statements and explain meanings of words and phrasal verbs in bold (e.g. weed out, stem from, blossom into). After that, they have to complete some statements about nature and compare their ideas with a partner. In the final speaking activity in this lesson about nature, students look at some ideas for appreciating nature and discuss several questions. Finally, the teacher can choose to do a revision task which is included only in the teacher’s version. In the task, students need to choose a word from a box and rewrite underlined parts of sentences. They also need to make any necessary changes to the sentence. The teacher can also set this task as homework.
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Fantastic lesson, thank you very much! The podcast is a great idea,
Thanks, Sam 🙂
Here you can find the transcripts 🙂
Very good lesson! Thx!
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1105229060
Thank you!
Hello, I have just started listening to the podcast and was wondering if there was a way of skipping back just 10/20 seconds? (It’s near impossible to rewind so little manually). Thanks!
Hi! Yes, there is a way to do it. Go to https://www.npr.org/2022/06/15/1105229060/good-things-come-in-trees and play the podcast there. You’ll find the buttons to skip the recording 15 seconds (backward and forward) in the right corner.
Great lesson! Thanks
Thanks, I’m really happy to hear that 🙂
Hello! Where is the podcast? I can only see ‘Cookie Consent & Sponsorship Choices’ inside a box underneath the picture of the birds.
I’ve found it! I didn’t realise I had to scroll down, I’m brand new here!
Hi! Great to have you 🙂 Yes, you just need to accept/reject cookies to listen to the podcast. You can also play the podcast in a separate window using the link in the pdf or the e-lesson plan.
The podcast link is broken.
Hi! You can play the podcast after you’ve accepted the NPR cookies. Or you can use the link in the lesson to open the NPR website and play the podcast there.