Humans of New York lesson plan and worksheets

How do you procrastinate (I know you do ;) )?? I’m guilty of procrastinating every day. I sometimes convince myself that I can’t work until the house is spotless so I clean it until every room shines. On other occasions I feel I can’t do anything before watching an episode (or three) of Friends (btw. My life wouldn’t be complete without Monica, Chandler, Rachel, Ross, Phoebe, and Joe). And then, there are days when I just scroll up and down my facebook checking out what’s happening in the world…not very productive, right?

Not everything on facebook is useless though! There are some pretty cool pages out there! One of them is Humans of New York - a photoblog with street portraits and interviews collected on the streets of New York City. I’m absolutely hooked on reading those short but inspiring stories!

I have recently been practising for FCE speaking test part 2 (photo comparison) and I noticed that my students struggle with speaking and speculating about photos. Even though they know some useful phrases to make hypotheses and they’re familiar with modal verbs of speculation, they still lack ability to put these into practice. I knew I had to stimulate my students’ imagination and give them an interesting task to help them become more successful at speculating about photos, so I decided to turn one of my procrastinating activities into a task for my students. This is how I came up with a lesson plan based on a few photos and stories taken from HONY in order to give my students the opportunity to practice modal verbs and other phrases of speculation to hypothesise about photos.

In the lesson students can also become more confident at describing people and their feelings as well as telling or writing stories. The lesson can be adapted to lower levels and can be used to practice for other Cambridge exams such as PET speaking test part 3 (photo description).


Here are the links to the lesson plan (link) and the worksheets:


Humans of New York lesson step by step
Humans of New York lesson photos A-E
Humans of New York matching activity
Humans of New York matching activity KEY
Humans of New York creative writing (homework)

Hope you like the lesson. Don’t hesitate to write to me with your comments about it :)