LESSON PLAN 3 (11 A) 2nd semester

Teacher: Istrate Laurențiu Gabriel

School: Colegiul Național ”Ștefan cel Mare”, Hârlău
Date: March 23, 2022
Class: 11th grade (Maths-Computer Programming)
Level: C1
Lesson: Being inventive
Type of lesson: listening for specific information, acquiring vocabulary, developing
conversational skills
Skills: listening, speaking, reading
Teaching aids: textbook, blackboard, audio material, smart TV, laptop, TED talks clip
Textbook: Objective Advanced
Time: 50 min
Method: communicative approach

Objectives
 To train the students’ speaking skills
 To extend student’s vocabulary related to science and technology
 To extract the main idea from a video material
 To develop students’ ability to listen for specific information

Procedure
Stage 1. Warm-up and introduction (5 min)
Teacher reveals the topic of discussion (science and technology - inventions) and the purpose
of the lesson (we use technology – devices, gadgets, home appliances – on a daily basis and
sometimes we take all these things for granted, without even thinking how science has
evolved throughout history; for an ESL learner, it is crucial to know how to talk about the
gadgets and devices they use every day). After students understand the importance of the
topic, the teacher can ask them some general questions to break the ice: how much time do
you spend on your phone or other electronic devices? For what purpose do you use them?
What home appliances do you find most important? etc.
Stage 2. Acquiring new vocabulary. Describing inventions (10 min)
At this stage, the students will read a text from page 52 consisting of short presentations of
four crazy inventions. They will have to use adjectives from a box to express their opinions on
the importance of those inventions. Some of them have negative meaning, some have positive
meaning. The students have to find the adjective(s) that best describe(s) those contraptions
and justify their answer. This acts as a preamble to the clip that will watch later on about the
inventions from the past that didn’t seem to be necessary at the time.

Stage 3. Extracting the main ideas from a video material + free discussion related to the topic
(15-20 min)
This is the moment when students get in contact with spoken English language in order to
learn things about different topics, in our case topics related to science and technology. The
teacher will play them a video about the playful wonderland behind great inventions, namely
programmable computers. At the end of the video, the students will have to answer simple
general questions such as: what is the main idea of the video? What is the video’s purpose?
What can we learn from it? Are there inventions that we can consider useless from the start?
This clip can further generate a free discussion about useful and useless inventions, science
and art, objects of beauty and objects of practical use. This is something that students might
do a lot individually at home – watching an educational clip and reacting to it, acquiring
knowledge and information; this exercise is an excellent way to make students enthusiastic
about a subject and encourage them to speak.

Stage 4. Listening for specific information. Developing listening skills (10 min)
This is a typical listening activity that tests the students’ listening skills. It is based on the
IELTS listening exam. They will listen to a material related to a recent scientific project and
will have to solve some “missing words” and multiple matching exercises. At the end of the
task, the teacher reveals the answers and the students assess themselves (self-assessment
practice).

Stage 5. Homework assignment. Teamwork (5 min)

For the next class, the students organize themselves in groups of 4-5. Each group will work on
“designing” an invention that might be useful for humanity (or not). They have to describe the
invention, to specify its purpose and importance. The students can receive high marks if they
work on this small project.
https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_the_playful_wonderland_behind_great_inventions