| LESSON OVERVIEW
This lesson plan focuses on future tenses and expressing probability. While its main topic is space exploration, this lesson on making predictions gives plenty of opportunity to talk about the future in various areas. At the beginning, you will test your students’ knowledge about space. There are 3 basic multiple choice questions to lead into the topic. The first question might be an issue as this number changes constantly but thankfully we have the Internet for that! You can check it on a website created just for that: How Many People Are In Space Right Now? (there’s even an app for that!). It’s changing faster than we can keep up, so we recommend checking that before the lesson 🙂
GRAMMAR – MAKING PREDICTIONS AND EXPRESSING PROBABILITY
In the first grammar task, students need to fill in the gaps with the provided words. This way they discover phrases and structures used for expressing probability and making predictions. These are grouped according to how certain you are about your prediction. This will be useful for the next exercises. As this is a lesson on making predictions, next task focuses on using those expressions and grammar structures in practice. Students will discuss how likely some predictions are and discuss their opinions. I’ve tried to add a variety of predictions (not only related to space) so that most students will find a topic to talk more about. You could make sure that students understand such phrases from these statements as consciousness, eventually, irreversible or genetic.
VIDEO: VOCABULARY AND LISTENING TASKS
Now comes the interview with Elon Musk. As he speaks rather fast and talks about some science stuff, before you watch the video go through the vocabulary exercise. In that exercise (no. 4), students need to determine the meaning of a word or phrase from the context and match it with right definition. Some of the sentences are the video transcript and others not, but all of them will be used during the video. How you proceed depends on your group level. If you feel your students can handle the pace of the video, then go directly to exercise 5, play the video and ask them to answer 5 comprehension questions. If not, play it first and ask them to listen how the words in exercise 4 are used in the video and whether they matched the definitions correctly. Next, play the video again and ask them to look for answers to the comprehension questions
DISCUSSION AND VOCABULARY EXTENSION
Exercise 6 is for oral practice. Students read part of the transcript and comment about the questions being asked there. This is a nice way start a discussion about what was said in the video. If you want, you can try to build on this to have a longer speaking activity on space exploration. Next task is used to let students discover synonyms of the word “predict”. Thanks to that they can extend their language base and not the same word too often. Last task brings together all the grammar and language points from this lesson. Students need to be a bit creative there and make 5 predictions of their own in relation to space exploration. If you feel, you’ve exhausted the topic already, change it to ‘any predictions about the future‘. Nevertheless, encourage your students to use various expressions and grammar points from this lesson and monitor how they use them. Finally, put them in pairs or groups and let them talk about their predictions and discuss how probable they are.
And remember: live long and prosper ?????
I love it! Thank you for all of your hard work! I discovered this site late last year, and I keep coming back to it, can’t stay away. 🙂
Thanks a lot ❤️ We’re very happy that you like it!
Please do a lesson on the flat earth.
We have a whole lesson on conspiracy theories, including the flat earth one. Just go to https://eslbrains.com/conspiracy-theories-passive/
Awesome topic! Thanks for sharing 🙂
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Enjoy the content and spread the news about our site 🙂
Great work! Thanks for your effort!
The lesson is great and inspiring. Maybe you could include the script of the video for a teacher’s and students’ convenience.
A transcript is actually available on YouTube. See how to find it easily: https://www.alphr.com/how-to-get-transcript-youtube-video/ . Watch out though as very often it’s auto-generated so it may include errors (that’s not the case with this video, though).
Love this lesson, you guys work very hard. I’m definitely going to upgrade when I get more students. Thanks for all you do.
Thank you 🙂
Hi! The link on exercise 5 brings us to a video about the office rather than SpaceX.
Thanks for alerting us! It was just a simple human error. The video from ex. 5 is the same video as in ex.4. We fixed the PDFs and reuploaded the files.
Amazing! My students loved it! 🙂
So great to hear that! Don’t know if you know but another Falcony Heavy launched (and landed) just a few days ago
Great class, but now Elon Musk is openly white supremacist this lesson is a bit controversial with my students. Maybe a change of video?
Hi Hugh! While I understand that Elon Musk is a controversial person, unfortunately, it seems that he’s the only person seriously doing something about the future of space travel, so it’d be hard to omit him or SpaceX when talking about space. I think the video itself doesn’t include any of his personal statements and focus solely on the topic.