Lesson plan - Listening - An Open House viewing

• Depending on your context, you can send the worksheet to your learners for them to have it printed or downloaded on their devices prior to the class.   
• Prepare a Jamboard board to play the first pre-listening game. Add as many pages as groups of students you expect to have for the game, and 4 or 5 post-its on each page (one per student), as in the example below:

• Tell your students that today you will review vocabulary related to parts of the house and objects in the house, and to do so, they’ll play two games.

ACTIVITY TO REVIEW VOCABULARY RELATED TO PARTS OF THE HOUSE AND OBJECTS IN THE HOUSE (10 minutes)

• Divide your class in groups of 4 or 5. Share with them the link to the Jamboard you prepared. Then tell them which page number they should use, and ask them to write their name in one of the post-its. 
• Explain how the game goes:
  - The teacher will call out one category. Each group of students will have one minute to write as many words from the category as they can. 
  - The student whose name is on the first post-it should write just one word from the category. When he/she finishes, it will be the turn of the second student to write one word. Then, the third one will follow, and so on and forth until the minute is up.
  - At the end of the first round, students and the teacher will see together what each group wrote, and grant points for each correct word belonging to the category. 
  - The game will finish after three more rounds. 
• Suggested categories for each round:
  - Category 1: Parts of a house
  - Category 2: Objects and furniture in the living-room
  - Category 3: Objects and furniture in the kitchen
  - Category 4: Objects and furniture in the bedroom
• At the end of the four rounds, the team with more points wins the game. 

Answer key: Your students’ answers will vary depending on what they have been taught previously, so you can make the categories as specific as you need them to be.

ACTIVITY TO REVIEW PREPOSITIONS (5 minutes)

• Play “Simon says”. Tell your students to follow your commands, but only if you start by saying “Simon says”. If possible, tell the learners to turn on their cameras and show you what they are doing. Some suggested commands you could use in your class:
  - Simon says… Stand next to a table
  - Simon says… Stand behind a chair
  - Simon says… Stand in front of the computer / mobile phone
  - Simon says… Stand between a chair and a table
  - Simon says… Stand near a computer / mobile phone
  - Simon says… Go under a table
  - Simon says… Sit on a chair 
  - Simon says… Point at an object above you. Say what it is. 

Ask them ‘Have you always lived in your house?’ ‘What’s your favourite part of your house?’ Explain they will hear a description of a house. Invite them to predict some words or ideas they might hear.

>>> This is the audio file.  

LISTENING FOR GIST (5 minutes)

You can either play the recording as you share your screen on the video call app, or you can read the text aloud (see annex with transcript at the end of this entry).

Work on activity 1 in the student worksheet (see attachments below) for students to get a general understanding of the audio. Tell the learners to close their eyes as they listen and imagine that the speaker is talking to them. Ask them to think of the answer to the questions: “Who are you? What are you doing?”

Answer key: 

Your students might say something like “I’m a person looking at a house”, “I’m someone interested in a house”, “I’m a person in an old house, and someone is showing the house to me”.

- At this point, you can ask your students: Why are you there? 

After listening to their answers, you can tell them, in simple words, that the house is for sale, and that today it is an open house day, which means that an estate agent is showing the house to potential buyers. 

LISTENING FOR DETAILS (15 minutes)

• Work on activity 2 to listen for details. Tell your students to listen again and write down all the objects that they hear. 
  Answer key: sofas / coffee table / rug / bookcases / door / chairs / table / chandelier / oven / sink / fridges
  As an extra, your students may have added quantifiers, colours and adjectives. 
• Next, work on activity 3. Read the activity with your students. Make them pay attention to key words and, as a strategy, you can give them one minute to predict the answers before listening. Depending on how your students do during the task, you can play the audio file once or twice and then a third time in order for learners to check their answers. Learners could check their answers together before discussing them in open class. Elicit right answers and reasons for them. 
  Answer key: 
  1. False. The house is old. 
  2. False. The first room is the living room. 
  3. True.
  4. True. 
  5. False. There are three bathrooms.
• Now move on to activity 4. Read the activity together with your students. Again, you can ask them to predict what the answer to each question will be. Tell them to write full sentences when they answer. Play the recording (or read the text) as many times as they need it. 
  Answer key:
  1. Her name is Hanna. / She’s Hanna. 
  2. The sofas are pink. / They’re pink. 
  3. No, there isn’t. There’s a coffee table between the sofas.
  4. The rug is under the coffee table. / It’s under the coffee table.
  5. There’s a big chandelier above the table. 
  6. There are 2 fridges in the kitchen. 
  7. The bedrooms are upstairs on the first floor. 

NOTE: As you work on each of these activities, make sure to check your students’ understanding and to give them plenty of chances to listen if necessary. Whereas for one task it might suffice to play the recording (or read it aloud) once, for another one, you might need to play the recording (or read it) more than twice. 

SHADOW READING (5 minutes)

• Tell your students to work on activity 5. Explain that this time, they will play the role of the estate agent, and they will practise reading the text aloud. First, make your students repeat after you once or twice. Then, ask them to read aloud at the same time as you do (or as the recording plays). In this way, they will practise their pronunciation and also get ready for the following task.

LISTEN AND DRAW

• Work on activity 6. Pair your students up and ask them to choose to be A or B. Send them the links to the pictures for them to download the corresponding one.
  Student A: image A. 
  Student B: image B. 
• Explain that you will give them 5 minutes to work individually on the drawing at the top. Instruct them to colour the objects that are specified in the box on the left of the page. Tell them that they can add objects and as many details as they wish. They can use a Jamboard to insert the picture and then paint on it. If they have never used it, you can take a few minutes to teach them how to insert the image, make it big and paint on it.

• When the 5 minutes are up, tell your students to get ready to work on the picture at the bottom. In pairs, each one of them will describe their living room as completely as possible: 5 minutes for student A to dictate (and for student B to listen and colour), and then 5 minutes for them to do the same switching roles. After that, they can take 1 minute to compare their pictures showing their screens. The objective is that their drawings (the original and the dictated one) look almost exactly the same.
• When you close the breakout rooms for everyone to come back to the main room, some of the pairs can share their work with the rest of the class. You could ask them to comment on how similar the drawings are (be careful on how you manage this so the interaction is respectful and constructive).

As homework, ask your students to write a paragraph describing their classmate’s living room (that is to say, the resulting picture at the bottom of the page). 

The following class, you can ask your students to pair up again (with the same classmate) in order for them to check their own work together using the self-assessment grid provided on the last page of the worksheet.

• Audio file recorded by Luciana Benditkis
• Sound effects files under Creative Commons license:
  - Doorbell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpwVat7BYA4
  - Footsteps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2-5M91Nz1k  
  - Door opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXm96dUhXbI 
• Audio file mixed and edited using Audacity

>>> Audio transcript:

     Good evening! I’m Hanna. Nice to meet you. Thank you for your interest in the house. It’s an old house but very comfortable, and with very curious details. Come in, please, I’ll show you around. 

     This is the living room. There are 2 big pink sofas right in the middle, and a Victorian coffee table between them. There’s also a long green rug under the coffee table, and there are two black bookcases next to each sofa. It’s a perfect place for a quiet Sunday afternoon, if I may say. 

     And through this door, we come straight to the dining room and the kitchen. As you can see, there are 10 chairs around the black table and a big chandelier above it. In the kitchen there’s everything you need: there’s an oven, there’s a sink, and there are 2 fridges. This house is ready for a large family.

     And there’s one bathroom here on the ground floor with only a toilet and a shower, but upstairs there are 2 more bathrooms and also 4 bedrooms. Would you like to go up to the first floor? Great! Follow me, please.