Humans of London: Rebecca's Story

After a long break (work, work, work), I'm back to share another activity that I created for my pre-intermediate/intermediate students to practice the past simple and the past continuous tenses.  The activity worked really well with my adult students but I'm sure your teens will enjoy it too.

Since my lesson inspired by Humans of New York has been quite popular (if you haven't checked it out yet, click here ), I decided to prepare something similar, but this time I looked for inspiration on Humans of London . 

To warm everybody up, ask your students if they know what Humans of New York/London/Amsterdam are. Have a quick discussion about the photoblogs and ask if there is any story your students would like to share if they were approached by a journalist working for any of these blogs. 

Tell your students they are going to read a story told by Rebecca- a middle-aged woman from London. Show them these two photos of Rebecca  and ask them to describe her appearance and think of some personality traits she might have (always elicit why). 

Now on the whiteboard write down these verbs: have, work, can, grow, cry, divorce, break up, run, lose, go, meet. Tell your students that all these verbs appear in Rebecca's story. Divide your students in pairs/small groups and ask them to write a story about Rebecca using the above verbs in the past simple and the past continuous forms.You might need to go over the forms with your students beforehand if their level is weaker. Give them enough time to complete the task and compare the stories they came up with. Correct where necessary. 

Then, give each student a copy of Rebecca's story which they have to complete with the right form of the verbs. Depending on their level, you might need to pre-teach some vocabulary. Give them enough time to do the task and check it together. Compare the real story to theirs and ask them what they think of it. 

Hope the lesson works for you as well as it did for me :) 

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 :)