High School ESL lesson plan - Bourbon Street.

This is an intermediate conversation game lesson that I found at  http://www.eflsensei.com/Bourbon-Street/?path=52. Around this time of year lot's of my lessons are changed around due to midterms, school trips and sports days and this lesson is great to use for a fun one off filler. I have extended the original 30 minute lesson found at eflsensei into a 50 minute lesson suitable for use in a High School. The lesson works best with 20 students but if you need more you can either split up some of the more complex clues, or add some of your own.

Lesson aim.

To improve conversational fluency.

Time.

50 minutes

What you need.

A game board for each student.

A copy of the clues, cut out and given to each student.

PPT presentation.

What to do.
Activity one. (Introduction)
Introduce the key vocab to the students, my students are quite high level so you may need to add a couple of words to the slide. Go through the game rules and check the students all understand what they have to do  (5 minutes)

Activity two.
Let the students play the game! Walk around to check that they are asking the questions in English, not just copying from each others paper. Once the first few students have finished and are all correct put the answers up on the screen and let the other students check their answers themselves (25 minutes)

Activity three.

To extend this game into a full lesson I then ask the students to make their own Bourbon Street game. I let them choose their own categories and fill in a blank game board, then challenge them to see if they can be clear enough with their instructions that someone could guess their street correctly using only 20 clues. I also say that only 4 clues can involve house numbers. It is very important to say that you are 'challenging' them to make the game in 20 questions, as every time I made the activity sound like a challenge the students were significantly more motivated.  (20 minutes)