| LESSON OVERVIEW
The main objectives of this lesson are to:
- identify and practise stative and active verbs;
- watch an ad and discuss the company’s slogan;
- discuss expressing yourself through possessions and social media.
With this lesson, students talk about how people express themselves, watch a short ad for a trading website, assess their slogan and discuss how useful the website is. They also study stative and active verbs, learn how to use them in different situations, talk about their preferences, and use the target vocabulary to describe people’s personalities based on the platforms they use (LinkedIn, Spotify, etc.).
VIDEO AND GRAMMAR
This lesson starts with a warm-up in which students look at the phrase “express yourself” and say what it means. Then, they look at things (e.g. clothes, language, hobbies, etc.) and give examples of how people use them to express themselves. After that, students watch a video about a trading website and explain what they think its slogan means. Next, they match statements to their related items and watch the video again to check their answers. Following that, students discuss questions to assess the website slogan and identify similar sites and their purposes.
After the video, students look at descriptions explaining stative and active verbs. They find verbs in statements and identify whether they are stative or active. Then, students complete sentences using the correct form of the verbs (e.g. believe, belong, depend, grow, etc.). Next, students look at pairs of sentences with gaps. They decide which sentence presents a state and which an action. After that, students complete the gaps with the correct form of the verbs. Students also discuss how the meaning of the verbs changes depending on their form (e.g. think (stative) = have an opinion AND think (active) = go through a mental process/consider something).
MORE DISCUSSION
In this part of the lesson, students read statements with three different endings (e.g. My mood depends on the weather/how much I sleep/my diet). They pick the answer that is true for them and work in pairs to ask each other follow-up questions. Afterwards, students choose topics from the task (e.g. workplace, birthday, gadgets and media, etc.) and talk about their preferences by finishing sentences. Finally, students read information about users of different platforms and describe their personalities using stative and active verbs from the lesson.
HOMEWORK/REVISION
This lesson also includes an additional task that you can use as homework or revision. In the task, students rewrite sentences to correct mistakes. Then, they choose five sentences and write responses using stative verbs. 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.
WORKSHEETS
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Thank you!!! My student loved it.
Thanks, Mariana! Great to get the feedback
Very engaging and interesting lesson, my student had a blast! thank you
Hi Adriana! That’s super- so glad your student enjoyed it!
thank your for the lesson! I believe there’s a small error in the last task, point A: ‘… and DOES sometimes DOES ‘vlogs’ when she travels to new places’.
Oops! Sorry for that, it only appeared in this one slide, so we’ve just changed that. Thanks for letting us know!
I find it very helpful when a lesson has a Homework slide. Thanks!
You’re very welcome, thanks for the feedback!
nice worksheet, quite challenging for the students to understand when a verb is stative – eg. why is recognise a state and not and action – a few points: I would say that the answer to 7 E should be “can’t believe” rather than “don’t believe” (which sounds strange to me) … also some of the exercises in 8 can have alternative answers, eg 8 B 2 and 8 E 2 could be used with other future tenses; also 8 F 1 should be “CAN you smell smoke?” – again, for me, “do you smell smoke?” sounds unusual, like it is a habit
Hi! The concept of stative and active verbs is indeed challenging for students, but with a step-by-step approach we can make it easier for them to understand and practise it.
Re the point 7E, we agree that ‘can’t believe’ sounds more natural, so we’ve changed it to something different to avoid confusion. Re the point 8F1, ‘can you’ might be used more often, but both options are correct. Check out this cool tool and see how frequently both options are used. Referring to your point about other future tenses, in that exercise, students first establish if something is an action or a state, and in each pair they have to recognize one state and one action. Adding, e.g. ‘will have’ as a possible answer, will make it confusing for students (not mentioning ‘will be having’, as it is a tense B1 students don’t know).
thanks for getting back to me: although that tool is useful, it has to be used carefully with the context, otherwise can lead to misleading results: compare this search: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=can+you+smell+smoke%2C+do+you+smell+smoke&year_start=1950&year_end=2022&corpus=en-GB&smoothing=3
– not having the word “smoke” changes the context completely, and thus gives you incorrect results: “do you smell smoke” doesn’t even come up at all.
For 8E2 it would be better to avoid that problem of possible future tenses (my students wondering why it can’t be going to, will etc) by having a clearer example which isn’t in the future: eg. I am seeing a specialist to help me solve the problem.
As you mentioned, the tool should be used carefully and we need to compare different results to get as big picture as possible. When comparing ‘can you smell smoke’ with ‘do you smell smoke’, we can see all the options available and not only British English. Check out the results for, e.g. American English here and English fiction here. We’ve also consulted the use of both phrases with our editors and we think they’re both correct, as mentioned before.
Re points 8B2 and 8E2, we’ve just updated them to make it less confusing for students. Hope that helps!