A Day in the Life of the Queen: Lesson Plan

Image courtesy of London Moving (2012)

As it was my last day at the British Council Bucharest today, I thought I would share some lesson material that I have developed over the past few weeks with my Young Adult class mostly related to “A Day in the Life of the Queen”.  I asked the learners what they wanted to learn more about, and one student suggested “I want to learn more about the Queen”.  With this suggestion, I decided to think about a lesson and how it would help learners discover more about our great Royal Family.  Then I thought about the Queen attending Royal Functions, meeting various people and spending time at Buckingham Palace.  I suddenly realised what video to show the students (embedded below).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AS-dCdYZbo]

However, before showing the video to students, I asked learners to think about what the Queen does each day and spend a few minutes jotting down a few ideas in pairs.  Then I gave one handout to each student to make a few sentences from their notes.  After they completed the handout (embedded just below), I got students to compare in pairs.  You could use the handout below for students to make a few notes or just skip this and get them to write up their ideas in sentences with the worksheet (as suggested above).

The Queen Daily Routine

After a few minutes, I wrote their ideas up on the Interactive Whiteboard.  Next, I told learners that they were going to watch a video (the one above) about the Queen and what she did during one particular day, and that they needed to take some notes about who the Queen meets, where she is staying and where she goes, what things does the Queen and the guest see during their trip, how they travel, etc.  Then I played the video above.  After they made some notes and wrote some of their notes up on the board, which I had elicited, I handed out a worksheet (embedded below) and I asked students to work in pairs again and to write up some sentences about the video that they had watched.  The student writing can then be used for feedback, error correction, reacting to grammar forms, etc – how ever you wish to use it.

Day in the Life of a Queen

After getting collecting the student writing, I told students to think about what life must be like for the Queen and asked students to individually make a note of advantages as well as disadvantages.  Once learners made some notes, I put students into small groups (between 3 to 4 students) and I nominated the team leader to write up their list of advantages and disadvantages, of being the Queen, on the worksheet (embedded below).  They discussed in their groups and I mentioned if there was any further information that they could include (about family, life, hobbies, etc) that they could add it to Additional Information on the handout.

The Queen Debate

Once learners had completed their worksheet, I put the groups into two separate parties for a debate: one party had to debate being the Queen was good (and mention the advantages), while the other party had to debate that being the Queen was not so good (while mentioning the disadvantages).  This created a lot of emergent language that could be scaffolded and then I wrote up some useful phrases which could be used during the debate.  Next I swapped the role of each party and they had to debate the opposite this time, using some of the language on the board.  It worked really well and gave the learners the chance to re-use some of the vocabulary/lexical chunks on the board.

The next part of the lesson, I asked learners to look on their phones about what rules or etiquette is appropriate for addressing the Queen and asking a question.  Some of the learners found some information on the smartphones pretty quickly and I put their suggestions up on the IWB:

1. You must bow when meeting the Queen
2. Do not show your back to the Queen
3. Etc