Tomorrow I’m helping my students to get ready for a test. The theme? 1st and 2nd conditional sentences, and expressing and defending their opinion.

There are two ways to teach grammar. The mind numbing way, where you shut your student’s brian off with borring rule after rule, and then there’s the fun way, where you turn your student’s brain ON with humor, and interesting content that captures their interest so that you can use it to secretly teach or review the grammar.

Have a peek at this: (Terry Moore: How to tie your shoes. )

Questions:

1. Did you notice the example of the conditional phrase that Moore used? (You can bet that I’ll be challenging my B1 students to listen their guts out to find his perfectly executed example of the 1st condition. By the way, could you hear it? )

You can also be betting that I’ll be asking my students to come up with their own conditions based on what was said during this presentation. Example: You would have a stronger knot if you wrapped the lace under the first bow.

Proper Conditional Punctuation!  (Please don’t forget to teach it!)

• If the ‘if clause’ comes first, you need to use a comma before the ‘result’ clause.
• You don’t need to use a comma if the ‘if clause’ comes after the result clause.

Got it?

Now, did that hurt? Was it fun? (I know I was having fun as I watched the video and thought about how I could apply it to my class tomorrow!)

2. How would/could you tie in an opinion giving/ opinion defending piece to this? Here’s how I intend to do it:

• Before the video, I will invite my students to give their opinion about shoe tying. Is there a right way? Is there a wrong way? Discuss! (And defend!)
• Right after the video I will ask them to share if their opinion has changed about there being a right and wrong way to tie their shoes. (I think using content to evoke opinion is a great way to help students….well, express it! )

Outside the video: I have an ongoing writing project that I’ve been working on with them. It’s nothing major, but I’ve basically been having my students practice writing about their goals, and using conditional sentences to explore what would happen if, and what will happen if they accomplish them.

Class #1: A few weeks ago, we watched a short 3 minute video about the importance of setting and keeping your goals. During the video, the speaker used a conditional phrase. We worked it up on the whiteboard, and then talked about it.

Class #2: I got my students to write about a few of their own goals. I took them home with me for corrections.

Class #3 – tomorrow!  I invited them to write a few conditions that had to be met in order for them to accomplish their goals. I took these sentences home with me, corrected mistakes, and then wrote each student back with a few more conditional questions to keep them thinking about their goals. (They were all really cool!)

There you have it. I expect that these simple activities will easily eat up my 1.5 hour class. But I’ll be covering the four skills: Speaking: my students will have to give their opinions about what they’ve seen, and about how they think shoes should be tied.

Listening: the video. Each other.

Reading: The sentences I wrote them in reply to their goals.  (Perhaps this one has the weakest focus for the day, but if you’re wanting to use this resource to help students polish up their reading skills, you could always print off the transcript which is located on the video over at ted.com. Have them read it. Discuss new words, etc.

Writing: Lots of practice here, and that is my intention. I want to provide more writing work for my students, so I’ve been using a sort  of interactive journal approach. So far, it’s working well.

So that’s what I will do with this video. But I’m curious: how have you taught conditionals to your students? Care to share?

(Photo by kevin dooley)