The things we want and the things we need (stative verbs)

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Grammar - stative and active verbs

stative and active verbs

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.). 

B1 / Intermediate60 minStandard LessonUnlimited Plan

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

Comments

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  1. mariana cruz

    Thank you!!! My student loved it.

    1. Megan

      Thanks, Mariana! Great to get the feedback 🙂

  2. Adriana Chagas

    Very engaging and interesting lesson, my student had a blast! thank you

    1. Megan

      Hi Adriana! That’s super- so glad your student enjoyed it! 😀

  3. Владислав

    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’.

    1. Justa

      Oops! Sorry for that, it only appeared in this one slide, so we’ve just changed that. Thanks for letting us know!

  4. Ilvira Groom

    I find it very helpful when a lesson has a Homework slide. Thanks!

    1. Megan

      You’re very welcome, thanks for the feedback! 🙂

  5. Alastair French

    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

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