Free download – Christmas lesson

Following Chris’ last two webinars – HUPE (Croatia) and TESOL Spain, here is a Christmas lesson based on the song The Power of Love, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It is themed on Love and the different forms it can take.

The activities start with a speaking warmer. This is followed by a reading text that looks at how the Ancient Greeks viewed love. Then there is a pre-listening activity focusing on how powerful love can be. Next, the vocabulary activities include prediction activities, matching up phrases, and multi-part words. Then the students listen to the song twice – firstly to absorb the mood and listen to the words, then to see if any of the words they envisaged were present. After this, the lyrics are studied in order to focus on the rhyming in the song. This is followed by two writing activities – the first is an opportunity to construct grammatically correct short sentences beginning with the phrase love is. Another longer writing activity follows where the students construct a ‘love letter’ to someone close to them, be it a partner, relative, friend or pet! There is then a chance to view the video with its Christmas nativity themes and produce a running commentary of what they see occurring in the video. See the Activity Breakdown for more details.

Christmas lesson 2019
The theme of this unit is Christmas – the spirit of Christmas, as well as its commercialism. It also focuses on the loss of innocence and the concept of belief. Reading, speaking, listening and vocabulary are some of the skills that are featured in this mini lesson. There is a warmer activity on Christmas, a text with glossary about Santa Claus and the concept of belief. Next, students listen to a song and then carry out a dictation activity listening out for particular words in the song. Then the vocabulary in the song is analysed with a match-up activity and a discussion about what the message in the song is. The final activity is one in which countries are matched up with their Christmas traditions. There are also suggested additional activities to compliment the theme.