| LESSON OVERVIEW
The main objectives of this lesson are to:
- learn and practise useful vocabulary to describe experiences,
- discuss the ideas of house sitting and home exchange.
In this lesson students learn about house sitting and home exchange, watch a video and listen for specific information and learn vocabulary to talk about different experiences (e.g. handle an unexpected situation, meet expectations, a mixed experience, etc.). Students also play a quest game in which they make choices based on situations.
WARM-UP & VIDEO
This ESL lesson starts with a warm-up activity. Students discuss questions about homes and houses and touch upon the ideas of home exchange and house sitting. After the warm-up, students read some statements and decide if they describe house sitting or home exchange. You can also ask them if they would like to have any of these experiences. Then, students watch the video featuring people who take part in home exchange/house sitting and learn more about it. After the first viewing, students tick the statements that are mentioned in the video. Then, students watch it again and complete the sentences with a word or number. Before moving to useful vocabulary to describe experiences, students discuss questions and say whether home exchange/house sitting is popular where they live and brainstorm what can make these experiences positive or negative.
VOCABULARY TO DESCRIBE EXPERIENCES & QUEST GAME
In this part of the lesson, students look at the comments and decide whether they are positive or negative, about home exchange or house sitting, made by a guest or a homeowner. Then, they look at the comments again and match the phrases in bold (e.g. make an impression on someone, stress someone out, feel at home, etc.) to their meanings. To work more with the phrases, students complete the sentences with their ideas. As a wrap-up activity, they do a quest game in which they go through different scenarios connected to house sitting. You can also ask students to sum up their scenario using the vocabulary to describe experiences they’ve learned earlier.
HOMEWORK/REVISION
This lesson plan also includes an additional task that you can use as homework or revision. In the task, students complete the gaps with key vocabulary and create questions. The task is available in the teacher’s version of the worksheet. You can print it and hand it out to your students. It’s also included in the e-lesson plan.
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Dear Inna,
Today I took this lesson, and it was fascinating and exciting because in my country, we don’t have such kinds of possibilities. So, the students can only search for information about home sitting and exchanging in English as an additional task. However, I am writing not only to provide positive feedback but also to address some confusion. I teach online, and when I reached the slide of the game, which is funny and makes this lesson very attractive, we realized that the order of slides was wrong. Could you make some corrections? Thank you very much!
Szilvia from Hungary
Thank you so much for your feedback! We’re happy your students enjoyed this topic. It’s great that English lessons help discover new things, isn’t it? 🙂 When it comes to the game, the slides are not supposed to be in a certain order as there are several scenarios that you can follow by choosing one of the options of answer to each question. Let us know if you need further clarifications regarding this activity 😉
Yeah, and it’s best to play it when in a presentation mode as then you choose a given option and it takes you to the correct card.