Do you ever wonder what you could do with the students who have just returned from their holidays? Why not implement story-sharing and a review of the first, second and third conditional? It’s a perfect way to talk about their future plans, hypothetical future trips and anything that went wrong and could have been prevented.
I was on the lookout for a good way of reviewing the first, second and third conditional. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many options available online at the moment. That’s when the idea of combining travelling with grammar revision came into the picture. It’s a great one-off class that could be used at the beginning of an academic year or can be treated as a revision of the conditionals if that’s something you have been working on recently.
Scroll until the end of the post to get the presentation and the worksheet + the teacher’s notes.
I realized that most of my newest lesson plans start with a short discussion and I think it’s time to switch it up a little. Before reading a short travel story, look at three pictures and discuss what you think the story is about. The pictures show a man waiting at an airport, a Portuguese flag and a messy hotel bed. At this point there are no right or wrong answers, so let students get creative.
Read the story about a man, a solo traveller, who went alone to Portugal for the first time. The story is full of conditionals, so some of the more observant students will know immediately your plan for the next part of the lesson. Once you finish reading, retell the story in your own words to check their understanding.
The grammar is introduced by reading a set of seven pairs of sentences and deciding which one of them is correct. Choose the correct sentence and justify the answers by looking for explanations in the text. All of them refer to conditionals and allow to understand and analyse the conditional structure. Underline all of the sentences and proceed by identifying the rest of the conditionals. Categorize them based on their structure and elicit the types of conditionals. Optionally, if this class serves as a conditional revision, you can ask to find one example of each conditional and dissect it to remind the typical structure of each one. To review the use of each conditional, match each sentence with the correct description.
Since the idea behind this class is to practise the use of different conditionals and identify them from the context, the first grammar exercise looks at eight sentences. Students complete them with either the first, second or third conditional. If you want, you can try putting different conditionals into the sentences and discuss how the meaning of the sentence changes in each example.
The last part of the class mimics the first activity in a speaking form. Before you get to this part, you can go over another travelling story and think about the types of missing conditionals. Read the text and correct the answers. Now it’s time for students to think about their travelling experiences. If you have time, you can ask them to plan their answers and the way they could use the conditionals. If it’s not necessary, let students follow the questions and talk about their trips, things that went wrong and how these situations could have been avoided in the past and can be prevented in the future.
Click the files below to get the presentation and the worksheet with the teacher’s notes.
JoannaESL 