Describing things 2 lesson plan

“My shoes are dirty”

Lesson 26 Level 3 Age 7-9

Lesson plans for ESL kids teachers

Lesson 26

Describing things 2

In this lesson students continue to practice using common adjectives to describe animals and objects and make comparisons. They also play adjective games and activities and read a fun story about monsters.

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Age: 7-9 years
Time: 1 hour – 1 hour 20 mins
Objectives: Describing things and animals with common adjectives.
Structures: “Let’s look at~”, “What’s that?”, “It’s a/an (adjective)+(noun)“.
New vocabulary: hard / soft, old / new, cheap / expensive, clean / dirty.
Review vocabulary: big / small, long / short, fat / thin, fast / slow, strong / weak, ordinal numbers 1st ~ 31st.

Lesson materials

Flashcards:

Adjectives flashcards: big, small, long, short, fat, thin, fast, slow, strong, weak, hard, soft, old, new, cheap, expensive, clean, dirty

Printables:

Monster friends reader worksheet
Adjectives opposites worksheet
Find it task sheet
Adjectives opposites write worksheet

Readers:

Monster friends

Supplies:

name tags for each student
board with markers / chalk
weather board (from previous class)

Notes:

In this lesson students continue to practice using common adjectives to describe animals and objects and make comparisons. They read a fun story, play adjective games and take part in some exciting tasks.

Lesson procedure:

Warm up and maintenance:

1. Greetings and name tags
Greet the students as they enter the classroom and gesture for them to sit down. Before class prepare some blank name tags (stickers or pin-on tags). Give these out and have everyone write their names and put their tags on. If you use pin-on tags, you can keep and give out every class.

2. Play “Quiz game show”
Draw some circles on the board and randomly write numbers 1, 2 or 3 in each circle. These will be points.

Put students into teams. Then ask the first team to choose a number – 1 is an easy question (e.g. “Do you like bananas?”) and 3 is a difficult question (e.g. “What time do you get up?”). 2 will be in between in terms of difficulty. When the question has been answered correctly, erase that number circle. Play until all the number circles are gone – the team with the most points is the winner!

Questions on the following topics can be asked:

Numbers 1-150 – write numbers on the board and ask what they are.
Likes & dislikes for food and drink – “Do you like milk?”, “Yes, I do / No, I don’t”.
Clothes – “What are you wearing?”. “What do you wear on rainy days?”, etc.
Days of the week – say in the correct order.
Daily routines – hold up a flashcard with a daily routine and ask, “What is this?”, then “What time do you get up?”.
Ability – hold up a flashcard and ask, “Can you …?” and “Can your (mother) …?” questions.
Parts of the body – say, “Touch your (shoulders)” and the student touches the correct body part.
Possessions – ask, “[hide_on_uk]Do you have[/hide_on_uk][hide_on_us]Have you got[/hide_on_us] (a cat, a tablet, a bicycle, etc.)?”.
Seasons – ask, “What’s your [hide_on_uk]favorite[/hide_on_uk][hide_on_us]favourite[/hide_on_us] season?”.
Describing people – show a picture and ask, “What does s/he look like?”.

3. Homework check
Check each students’ homework worksheet and ask to describe some of the animals using adjectives, for example:

Teacher: What’s this?
Student: It’s a small mouse.

Give lots of praise, and then put some kind of mark on the homework sheet (e.g. a sticker, a stamp or draw a smiley face).

Finally, tell your students to put their homework back into their bags.

4. Talk about the weather using the “Weather board”
Use the weather board that you created in the previous class. Ask, “How’s the weather today?” and have students put up their hands. Allow one weather condition per student (e.g. “It’s rainy”) and have each student come up and put a weather picture on the weather board.

Depending on weather conditions, you can introduce more weather words (with pictures … you can get students to draw them), such as:

stormy
misty
showery

freezing
humid
frosty

icy
drizzly

Say when your birthday is board questions and answers

5. Say when your birthday is
Have everyone take out their handout “Dates for birthdays” from the last lesson. Chorus the ordinal numbers quickly … we’ll work on these over the next few lessons, getting used to saying them.

On the board write the questions from previous lessons:

When is your birthday?
What did you get for your birthday?
What did you do on your birthday?

and have your students ask you the questions and write your answers.

Finally, go around the class asking each student the 3 questions on the board.

6. Review the adjectives – play “What is it?” reveal
Let’s review the adjectives from last lesson:

big / small
long / short
fat / thin
fast / slow
strong / weak

Before class print out the adjectives flashcards – for this section of the lesson we’ll use the following flashcards: big elephant, small ant, long pencil, short pencil, fat cat, thin cat, fast car, slow car, strong man, weak man.

Shuffle the cards and really quickly flash the first card at everyone. Students have to shout out what they see using a full sentence and adjective, for example:

“It’s a fat cat”.

Continue through all the flashcards, getting everyone to shout out the adjective sentences. When finished, play again if more practice is required.

New learning and practice:

1. Read classroom reader “Monster friends”
Before class, download and print off the reader “Monster friends”. As you go through each page, point to the pictures and elicit each of the different body parts and adjectives. Have fun asking other questions as well, such as the different [hide_on_uk]colors[/hide_on_uk][hide_on_us]colours[/hide_on_us] of the monsters, for example:

Teacher: (reading from the story) This is my friend Dodo (pointing at the picture). What [hide_on_uk]color[/hide_on_uk][hide_on_us]colour[/hide_on_us] is Dodo?
Students: He’s blue!
Teacher: Yes, that’s right! And look at his arms! Wow! He has … (eliciting the adjective)
Students: Long!
Teacher: Yes! He has long arms. And is he short?
Students: No, he’s tall!
Teacher: That’s right! He’s much taller than Susie!

Get the students really involved in the story by asking lots of questions and asking them if anyone in the class has similar characteristics to the monsters (e.g. the tallest student, the fastest student, etc.).

After reading the story, give out a reader worksheet to each student and have everyone match the monsters to their adjectives. Then go through the answers as a class.

Alternatively, watch our video version of the reader (Internet connection required).

2. Introduce more adjectives
In this lesson we are going to build on the adjectives we learned in the last lesson:

hard / soft
old / new
cheap / expensive
clean / dirty

Draw a horizontal and a vertical line on the board so you divided it into 4 rectangles of the same size. In the top-left rectangle stick the hard and soft flashcards. Elicit / Teach the adjective for each flashcard and chorus the adjective phrases at the bottom of the cards.

I the remaining space of the top-left rectangle we are going to get students to come up with some other examples, such as a hard bowling ball and a soft cushion. Try and elicit at least 3 examples of each adjective. You can draw pictures for each next to the words.

Your board could end up looking something like this:

Make sure your students are writing the same information in their notebooks. Chorus through all the phrases one more time. Then erase everything from the board and have everyone close their notebooks – you are going to test their memories. Shout out a noun and encourage everyone to slap their desks if they can remember the adjective that collated with the noun, for example:

Teacher: house!
Student: an old house and a new house!
Teacher: Yes, good job! … robot!
Student: a hard robot!
etc.

Do the “Animal adjectives write" worksheet

3. Do the “Adjectives opposites” worksheet
Give out the worksheet and then model what to do – show that each row has opposite adjectives, so the first answer is “hard” because it is the opposite of “soft”. Then draw a picture of a soft candy in the box. Do a couple more answers until you feel everyone understands what to do.

Then have everyone work on their worksheets – circulate around the classroom helping with spellings. Finally, do a class check by asking individual students to give the answers. Be sure to give lots of encouragement and a round of applause for each student.

4. Read and write time
This segment can be part of all your lessons. Spend 10 to 15 minutes building up your students’ writing and reading skills. You’ll need to assess your students’ reading/writing level and then choose to start at one of the following stages:

Reading and writing activities by level:

1. Beginners: students cannot read or write the alphabet.
Each lesson introduce 3 lower-case letters of the alphabet (first lesson will be a, b, c). Use flashcards to do this. Play alphabet games and do printing worksheets.
» See our ‘Alphabet a-z (lowercase)’ mini-lesson plans for full details.

2. Early starters: students have experience with the alphabet but need phonics practice.
Each lesson introduce 5 lower-case letters of the alphabet (first lesson will be a, b, c, d, e). Use flashcards to do this. Start by working on the sounds of the letters and then move onto letter clusters (e.g. sh, ee, etc).
» See our ‘Alphabet’ and ‘Letter clusters’ mini-lesson plans for full details.

3. Early readers.
Work on reading and writing simple sentences with lots of practice activities.
» See our ‘Early reading’ mini-lesson plans for full details. (click on “Early reading” tab)

4. Elementary readers: students can read and write simple sentences well.
Work on reading and writing short texts and stories.
» See our ‘Reading short texts’ mini-lessons for full details. (click on “Reading short texts” tab)

5. Play “Opposite adjectives concentration”
Let’s play a fun game of concentration with the adjectives learned in the past two lessons. Before class, print out enough sets of the “Adjectives flashcards” for groups of 4. Start by running through the flashcards – hold up each card and elicit the adjective and get everyone to read the phrase under each picture.

Then, put everyone into groups of 4. Give a set of cards to each group and have them turn the cards over and mix them up on the table. Model with a group: the first player gets to turn over 2 cards, saying the adjective on each card. If the cards are opposites (e.g. big – small) the player can remove those 2 cards from the table and keep them. If they are not opposites, the player must turn them back over again.

Players take turns turning over cards and removing opposite pairs until all the cards have been removed. The player with the most cards is the winner!

Teams can play a few games if they enjoy playing!

6. Play “Find it”
We’ll finish with a super fun game! The idea of this game is for students to find objects that represent adjectives to win points.

Split the class up into 2 , 3 or 4 teams (depending on your class size) and have each team sit together. Each team must select a captain. The captain will make final decisions.

The teacher reads the tasks from the “Find it task sheet” and the members of each team need to find the objects for each task. So, for example, the first task is, “Find 3 long things for 3 points”. The teacher reads this to the class and each team must find three long objects within a time limit (e.g. 30 seconds). The team only win points for this task if they find the objects within the time limit and that the teacher deems the objects as a good example of the adjective “long”. Students can also win bonus points by saying what each object is, e.g.

“This is a long pencil, and this is a long shoelace, and this a long ruler”.

Teacher keeps scores on the board – after all the tasks have been completed, the team with the most points is the winner. The game is a lot of fun and can get a bit crazy at times as students rush around the classroom finding the weirdest things to win points!

Wrap up:

1. Assign homework: “Adjectives opposites write”
Hold up the homework worksheet and model what to do – write a sentence which is the opposite of the first sentence. The first one is done as an example.

Give out the worksheets and say, “Put your homework in your bags”.

2. Do “Quick check” and say goodbye
Time to leave the class. Make sure everything is put away and the students have gathered their belongings. Have them line up at the door and place yourself between the door and the students.

For each student hold up an adjective flashcard and have the student say a sentence containing the adjective phrase, for example, “It’s a fat cat.”

When they give you a suitable answer say goodbye and let them leave. If their answer is wrong, have them go back to the end of the line – they will have to try again once they reach the front!