Only 10 days till Christmas and I'm buzzing with excitement already! In the meantime, however, I'm trying to keep my students as thrilled about the festive season as I am. To this end, I've been playing a lot of Christmas music and my beloved Christmas adverts. One of my most-liked Christmas advertisements this season is #YouShall Find Your Fairytale Christmas by Debenhams (a British department store). I love it because it retells one of my favourite childhood fairytales (Cinderella), and it's narrated by the greatest actor EVER, Ewan McGregor 💖 That's all I need to feel happy right now!
This spot is a great material for a storytelling lesson where students practise narrating a story using a variety of past tenses and interesting vocabulary. It also gives a perfect opportunity to involve your students in a discussion about the importance of social media in our lives.
Scroll down to have a look at my attempt to make a good use of this video.
First of all, show your students these two photos and introduce the people as the protagonists of a story. Have your students come up with information about the two characters. Encourage them to be creative and brainstorm both appearance and personality adjectives for each character. I even ask my students to invent names for the people as well as their likes, dislikes, hobbies, etc...the more your students get into the task, the better.
When the profiles of the characters are ready, divide your students in pairs or small groups and give each of them a set of picture story . Tell your students the story they're looking at isn't complete so they need to think of an interesting ending of the story. If you want to spice the activity up, you can cut out the pictures, change their order, and ask your students to arrange the pictures into the logical order to create a coherent story.
Before they roll up their sleeves and get their creative juices flowing, elicit a few features of a good story, i.e. interesting adjectives, past tenses, a range of connectors. Depending on the level of my students I spend some time on revising the aforementioned features or I just move on to the task and monitor the pair/group work.
Once the stories are ready, have each pair/group share their version of the story with their own ending. Then, play the video and compare the stories. Write down any vocabulary that you think your students might find difficult.
To follow up, you can involve your students in a discussion about social media and ask them some of the questions below:
- Do you think social network sites are good?
- What do you use social network sites for?
- How often do you connect to social media?
- How much information do you think is appropriate to put on social media?
- What are the advantages of social media?
- What are the disadvantages of social media?
- Are social media good or bad for relationships?
If you're looking for more festive season activities, check out this post in which I shared some of my favourite xmas lesson ideas.
Merry Christmas!
