Middle School Lesson Plan - Olympics

As well as teaching in high school, I do 4 lessons a week at a middle school. Whilst the lessons are usually straight from the textbook, I had a summer camp during August and I had to create my own lessons. This is the first of the four lessons that came under the general theme of Great Britain. Both parts of this lesson got really good reactions from around 10 different classes and the students all use a lot of English during this lesson. 

Olympics from Duncan Elder

Objectives

To learn about superlatives.

To learn the names of different Olympic sports.

Materials

PPT.

Activity 1

Ask the questions on the slides and ask the students what the correct answer is. (5 minutes)

Activity 2

Put the groups in 4 teams. I asked each team to choose one of the countries on the following slide to be their team name. Show the next slide and again ask the question on the slide. The students should look at the possible answers and guess who is going to win. Next show the video and give any team that guessed correctly a point. (20 minutes)

Activity 3

The final activity is a class olympics. Split the class into four groups. Ask for one volunteer from each group to put their hand up and choose two of them to go first. Then show the students the activity that they will be competing in(it is best to tell the activity after they decide who will be competing so it is more even). You should then make the students compete in a semi final and a final for each activity, till you get a winner. The winner will get one point for their team. After each individual event you should ask each group 'Who do you think is the strongest/fastest/etc'. Finally the team with the most points is the winner. (Assuming your lessons are 45 minutes in all, this activity will probably over run. However if you should be able to get through most of it  by the end of the lesson)

The activities are:

Strongest: Pushing game. (two students stand close to each other with their hands out, palms touching. They then have to push each others palms. The first person to move their feet loses).

Weakest: Thumb war

Fastest: First to 10 star jumps.

Slowest: Pin steps race.

Tallest: Long Jump

Smallest: Limbo