Video lesson 1

Topic
Animated stories

Aims

• Global understanding of video
• Presentation of language
• To give learners an opportunity to use language from video in a creative context

Age
5 - 10 year olds

Level
Elementary

Introduction
There are lots of animated videos for native speakers of English. Many will have an educational aspect as well as providing entertainment and will often aim to 'teach' children something. Common topics are family, school, friends etc. These can be easily adapted for teaching language to non-native speakers.

Materials

• Video - any animated story video: Spot, Spider, etc (I used the Eric Carle story The Very Hungry Caterpillar)
• five or six flashcards of the story illustrating the main points

Procedure

• Pre-viewing
  • Tell learners they're going to watch a story.
  • Show the flashcards and invite children to use existing vocabulary to describe them.
  • Put them on the board mixed up. Ask learners to predict the order and put them on the board in that order. (There are no wrong answers at this stage.)

• While-viewing
  • First viewing: Global understanding - Learners watch the video and after it's finished check the order of the flashcards on the board. Change if necessary.
  • Second viewing: Presentation of language - Identify a language point (probably vocabulary) from the story. Stop the video at relevant points and ask questions, or tell learners to listen for words connected to the topic and say 'stop' when they hear one.

• Post-viewing
  • Learners make a story book based on the video.
  • Learners act out the story.
  • Craft work - make something connected to story, a picture, puppet etc.
  • Learners do further work on the language point presented.