A Future Tense Review: New Year's Resolutions!

Michael Liu

PROCEDURE:

1. Warm up activity (5 min)

2. Introduce activity (5 min)

Ask the students if they know what New Year's Resolutions are and explain the basic concept if they don’t. Write down the top 5 list on the board, and give them a short explanation of each one and maybe a story about why they are popular (for example, paying back credit card debts is a popular American resolution because many Americans tend to overcharge their credit cards.)

3. Review Language Targets (10 min)

Pass out the worksheets, and have the students look at the New Year's Resolutions one. Write the grammar points on the board, and, using the example sentences and whatever sentences you can come up with (i.e. I'm going to try harder to get a girlfriend), go over how the sentence structures in the first box can be combined with those in the second. Funny sample sentences can help keep your students interested and semi-alert.

4. Writing (10 min)

Have the students write their own resolutions in the blanks below the the sample sentences to check understanding. After 5-10 minutes, call on a student for each question to read their answer aloud for the class.

5. Supplementary activities (remaining time)

Move on to the second worksheet, and go over the categories of resolutions. To make things quicker and easier to understand, I wrote the categories on the board and had my JTE write Japanese translations next to them. Finally, have the students write as many new resolutions as they can for each category as they can before the class period ends.

NOTES:

This activity is actually a modified version of some worksheets I pulled from a website online. I thought it was an interesting way of communicating a part of American Culture. The original version was actually harder than this, so I ended up toning it down a bit with my JTE. The sentence structures we chose to teach were fairly arbitrary, so feel free to change them to suit your students. With two worksheets focusing on writing resolutions, the lesson bit heavy on the resolution writing, so a different activity on the second worksheet would probably work well also.

I teach at two fairly low level schools and I used this activity for all my classes for the week for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd years. I ended up skipping the second worksheet for my first year classes because the first worksheet took up the majority of the class period, but for my higher level classes the students were mostly able to give at least 5 or 6 resolutions for the second worksheet.

Again I am at a low-level school, so mileage may vary.

HANDOUTS and WORKSHEETS:

Worksheets for this lesson are here:

http://teachingactivities.pbwiki.com/f/newyearsresolutions_mliu.doc