Aims means what you are trying to help students achieve in a lesson or course.

Objectives means how you are going to do it � the activities the students will do
in class in order to realise the aims.

Warmer/Lead-in
The opening stage is usually referred to as a 'warmer', 'lead-in' or 'starter'.
This may consist of reviewing work done in an earlier lesson, but it is usually an
introduction to the topic and/or target language of the lesson you are about to
give. As the name 'warmer' suggests, this should be a lively activity which gets
students working together and engages their interest. The warmer stage should last
about 5-10 minutes.

Body
The 'body' of the lesson is the main content and activity of the lesson and itself
will be divided into a number of different stages.

Plenary/Final stage

The final stage is often called a 'plenary'. Its purpose is to bring together and
summarise what has been done in that day's lesson. This does not have to be a
formal listing of what has been learned � more often it is an engaging activity
which requires students to apply what they have learned that day. The final stage
usually lasts about 10 minutes.

Remember that the attention span of an adult is only about 20 minutes and that
concentrating in a foreign language is particularly difficult.135156782

This means 20 minutes is the maximum time you should spend on a single stage, and
for most learners (lower levels and children) this would be too long.

Typically, a 60-minute lesson would have five or six stages � a warmer of 5 -10
minutes, a plenary of about 10 minutes, with the body of the lesson divided into
three or four further stages of 10 to 15 minutes each.

This gives us two stages to begin the lesson with:72306347

1. Brainstorm weather vocabulary and directions (north, east, etc.). You could use
visuals such as these to prompt their ideas:

2. Introduce other useful vocabulary items from the text that students don't
already know.

We could then get the students to watch and listen to the text, but we need to give
them a task before they listen, so they know what they are trying to find out. The
first time they listen this should be a fairly simple task, such as 'What places
does the weather forecaster mention?'. This is to help students get a general
understanding of the text.
So the third step of this lesson would be:

3. Listen to and watch forecast (for the first time)

So the start of the first column of our lesson plan now looks like this:

Here are just a few ideas. You will be able to think of many more. (Any game that
involves asking questions or practising the alphabet is very useful as students
often don't get enough practice with these.)

Hangman - a game in which one player writes a number of blanks to represent a word
or phrase they have thought of. E.g. if the word was 'hospital' they would put _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ on the board. The class tries to guess the letters of a word, the
other player recording failed attempts by drawing a gallows and someone hanging on
it, line by line. See this wikiHow for a fuller description.

Yes/no game - one student sits at the front of the class. The other students ask
them questions. The student being questioned must NOT say yes or no, nor nod or
shake their head.

20 questions - one student thinks of an object and the others can ask up to 20
questions to find out what it is. In this game, the student who is being questioned
can only answer yes or no.

Famous people - can be played in pairs, small groups or by the whole class. One
person thinks of a famous person; the others ask questions to find out who it is.
Again, the student who is being questioned should only answer yes or no.

The alphabet game - give students a category such as animals or food. Going round
the class, students have to try to think of an animal or type of food, etc. that
begins with each letter of the alphabet (e.g. antelope, bear, cat/apple, bread,
carrot).

Telling a story/building a sentence word by word - small groups or whole class. The
first student says a word, the next one gives the next word in the sentence and so
on, e.g. Student 1: A, Student 2: man, Student 3: was,
Student 4: in, Student 5:

Language learners are placed in a class based on their level of English. There are
3 very broad levels of progress: Elementary (A), Intermediate (B) and Advanced (C).
Each of these is subdivided, making 6 levels:

Beginner
Pre-intermediate
Early Intermediate
Upper-Intermediate

Early advanced
Advanced