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LearnEnglish Kids Lesson Plan
Using a narrative story: Circus Escape

Topic: The Circus

Aims and objectives:

ƒ To provide reinforcement of narrative tenses through reading and listening to a flash-
animated story
ƒ To motivate students by the use of different media
ƒ To provide written practice of selected tenses and a stimulus for individual creative
written work

Procedure/Activities Tips/Ideas
1. Introduce the topic of ‘The Brainstorm these ideas with the class. You could talk about these
Circus’ in L1 if you like, and introduce some of the key words in English
ƒ What animals perform at the as they arise.
circus?
ƒ What tricks do people do?

2. Introduce basic vocabulary of You could print out and use the circus vocabulary worksheet for
people/animals/tricks this from LearnEnglish Kids:
http://www.learnenglish.org.uk/kids/print/docs/circus.pdf

3. Practise circus vocabulary Divide your learners into 3 or more teams. One member of each
with a mime game. team mimes a circus act. The first team to say the act (in English!)
wins a point. Which team can get the most points?

4. Story: Circus Escape – Tell your learners that they are going to read and listen to a story
before listening activity about a circus. What acts do they think they will see? Ask each
learner to write down five acts that they think will appear.

5. Story: Circus Escape Learners can read and listen to the story if you have enough
computers or you can play the story using a data projector. As
learners watch the story, they see if they guessed five of the acts.
Did anybody guess five?
Play the story again if you like.

6. Follow-up activity. Print the circus story worksheet:

http://www.learnenglish.org.uk/kids/print/docs/circusstory.pdf
Students complete true/false questions and verb gaps.
You could play the story again to check answers if you haven’t
done so already.

7. Extension activity - creative Print the creative writing worksheet:

writing. The writing task can be http://www.learnenglish.org.uk/kids/print/docs/elephantescape.pdf
done in class, for homework or Ask learners to imagine their own story and complete the ‘My
with computers. Story’ column. Then they can practise narrative story-telling orally
by interviewing their partners.

© The British Council/Sue Clarke Spring Gardens 2003

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