[Lesson Plan] Sleepy Hollow and Favorite Places

This week with the students ended up being a lot of fun; I did two different lessons with the students, including one where we got to talk about the environment. It was interesting to hear what they already knew (such as climate change) and fortunately, there are enough words that are similar in French and English (like “pollution,” “recycle,” and “compost”) that it was possible to have longer discussions about different environmental issues.

Lesson 3a

Sleepy Hollow and Favorite Places

What I ended up doing: This week, I did two different lessons. In the first lesson:

• Showing brochures of Sleepy Hollow: I took in some brochures from Sleepy Hollow and showed them a map of where I lived. I would break up the “presentation” part of the lesson by asking them follow-up questions like “What activities can you do in a forest?” that would allow us to go over words like “walking.”
• Review of introductory phrases: I would then talk about my favorite place and we would go over the difference between phrases like “I come from…,” “I live in…,” and “My favorite place is…” For example, I would say “I come from Sleepy Hollow but I live in Bethune.”
• Sharing where they come from and favorite place: We’d then go in a circle and students would say where they come from and what their favorite place is. I would then ask them follow up questions like “Who do you go there with?” which was helpful since sometimes they would have issues with understanding question words like “who.” If they couldn’t think of a favorite place, I would ask them “Where do you like to go with your friends?” or sometimes “Where do you like to go on vacation?” to help them think of something. They would sometimes start trying to repeat the same answer as the last person, so I’d tell them that they had to pick a different place. 

This maybe wasn’t the most exciting lesson, but they generally were interested in hearing about the fact that I had been a tour guide at a cemetery. In one class, a student who spoke English really well started talking to me about how little there was to do and told me about how she was often in trouble because she would talk too much. Another student who had misbehaved in an earlier class with me had rehearsed a heart-breaking apology and asked if he could be let back in the class again (of course I said yes!).

With the rest of the classes, I ended up doing an environmental survey, which was lots of fun and led to students shouting “greenhouse effect…OHHH!”