In this imagination-stretching ELL lesson, students play the role of marketing team leaders tasked with creating an advertisement intended to induce a feeling of motivation. But there’s a twist. Rather than creating motivational ads for humans, each pair of students creates an ad aimed at a different animal. The lesson draws on the students’ background knowledge and pushes them to summon their creativity to make something unique and awesome.
Level: Intermediate
Time: 50 minutes
I. ACTIVATION and TASK INTRODUCTION (~15 min)
- With students seated in pairs, give large white paper (B4) and Nike “Possibilities” (my name for the commercial) gap fill handout. Tell students we will listen to “something” and they should try to fill in the blanks. Then play the AUDIO only of the Nike Possibilities commercial.
- After students listen once, tell them we will now watch the VIDEO that goes with the audio, and they can have another chance to fill in any words they missed the first time.
- After watching the video, elicit from students that this is an ad for Nike. Then review the answers to the gap fill, using the PPT below, which also introduces the main task.
II. IMAGINATION and CREATION (~25 min)
- Students choose one animal from the following page, which should be pre-cut before class into individual “cards”.
- You can have students choose out of a bag blindly, or have students grab the animal they want off of a table/desk, so each pair races to get the animal they want.
- I intentionally constrain the students’ choices here so they don’t waste a long time trying to find the perfect animal and also to ensure each team gets a different animal.
- Hand out brainstorming page to each pair and set timer for 5 minutes, encouraging students to pull out their background knowledge.
- After students brainstorm, they should use the back of the same page to start crafting their advertisement’s message, which they will eventually write on their big B4 paper along with an illustration.
- Make sure students have access to markers and/or colored pencils to bring their ads to life.
III. PRESENTATION and SELECTION (~10 min)
- After students finish writing and illustrating, they should clear their desks of everything except their ads.
- Give each student a voting sticker.
- All students should then walk around, read all other classmates’ ads and vote on their favorite by placing a sticker on top.
- Finish class by having the top vote-getting teams read their ads aloud.
STUDENT SAMPLES
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