Christmas and New Year Trends
A LESSON PLAN FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS
Describing changes in what happens at the end of the year, with presentations of the vocabulary and grammar of talking about changes, good for seasonal academic and business English classes.
Lesson Plan Content:
Xmas and New Year trends
Take turns describing the past, present and future trends of one of the things related to Christmas and the New Year below, with the other person asking for more details, adding their own ideas, agreeing or disagreeing, etc.
- Celebration of the Lunar New Year/ Chinese New Year
- Eating out
- Entertainment (TV, movies, etc)
- Financial year
- People spending time with their families
- Presents
- Religious celebrations
- Sales (starting date, length, popularity, number of shops, size of discounts, queues)
- Traditional New Year celebrations (food etc)
- Travel (going abroad, going to visit people, etc)
- Weather
- Winter sports and games (skiing, sledging, board games, etc)
- Work
- Xmas and New Year parties (number, spending)
- Xmas lights and decorations (length of time, when they go up and come down, in the home, outside the home, in the street, in shops)
- Xmas music in shops and cafés (amount, length of time, starting date)
Describe the trends in one of the topics above that you agreed on and see if other people in the class agree.
Ask about any topics above which you don’t understand, are not sure of the trends in, etc, working together as a class to describe related trends each time.
Trends grammar presentation
What tense would you probably need to use with each of these time expressions?
- When I was a child
- Since I was a child
- Since the 1990s
- In the 1990s
- For the last few years/ In recent years
- Last year
- In the next few years
- Next year
Trends language brainstorming stage
What language could you use to explain the trends below (without using any numbers)? Try to think of as many different ways as possible. The third point is now.
What other language can you use to talk about these things?
Go down
Go up
Be flat
Add these to the correct places above:
- Be unchanged
- Climb rapidly
- Crash
- Decrease
- Dive
- Drop dramatically
- Fall sharply
- Flatten out
- Grow slightly
- Increase steadily
- Level off
- Remain stable
- Rise
- Shoot up
- Shrink
- Stay at the same level
- Take off
- Rocket
- Double
- Halve
- Boom
Underline the words above that mean big changes.
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