Tales of mere existence
This activity uses a short cartoon called ‘Procrastination’ by Lev Yilmaz. It comes from a great series called Tales of mere existence. I have used the activity with elementary level classes and above. You will need to download the following worksheets:
procrastination-worksheets-1-2.doc
Lesson plan:
1. Casually tell your students that they have a lot of stuff to get done today. It is very possible that they will not be aware of the word stuff so write this sentence on the board (’We have a lot of stuff to get done today’).
Draw attention to the fact that the word stuff is functionally similar to the word things. One major difference is that it is uncountable.
2. Play the clip below with the sound turn down and make use of the pause function to elicit the following vocabulary (which could be written on the board).
- Procrastination (find out if students know what this means)
- A desk
- To spill coffee
- To clean up with a sponge
- Cereal (also uncountable)
- The grocery store
- To do your shopping (for the week)
- To make an omelette
- To do the dishes
- To squeak
3. Put your students into pairs or small groups, play the clip again with the sound still turned down, and get them to guess what the story is about in their pairs or groups. You could ask them to write down their ideas.
NB You might want to play the clip more than once to allow ideas to develop.
4. Let groups share and compare their ideas.
5. Give out copies of worksheet 1 and the glossary which is included. Get your students to cut up the 8 pieces of text and put them into the correct order according to the story. You might want to have them do this in pairs in order to save paper.
6. Let everyone compare their answers before playing the clip again, this time with the sound turned up.
7. Give out copies of worksheet 2. Drill the 8 sentences before getting your students to translate them into their own language. I find that translation works best as a collaborative effort. Allow students with the same linguistic background to pair up or form small groups for this purpose.
8. Once all the sentences have been translated successfully, get your students to fold worksheet 2 along the dotted line in the middle of the page. This should allow them to see their own translated sentences but not the original ones in English. Get them to use their own translations to recall the original English sentences.
9. Let students pair up and test each other. Student 1 says the sentences in student 2’s language and student 2 must recall them. Roles are then reversed.