Lesson 1

My Family, My Friends and Me. Introducing the topic

Aims and objectives:

• introducing the aims and objectives for the current academic year

• revising the vocabulary

• revising and brushing up basic skills

• introducing the topic "Autobiography”

Equipment: writing paper, handouts for the games Sequence

I. Warming-up

1. The teacher greets the students with the beginning of the new academic year and sets the goals for the course of studying in the 9th grade paying special attention to the examination and the ways of preparing for it.

2. The class is divided into 2–3 groups. The teacher asks the groups to share their opinions about how they have spent their summer holidays by finding the greatest number of adjectives to complete the sentence "My summer holidays were...”. (Time — 2 minutes.) After that the groups share their variants.

3. Most probably, the students have changed in some way. The teacher asks the students to have a close look at each other and write a sentence, describing what exactly has changed. If the number of students is even, the activity can be performed in pairs.

II. Main part

1. Revising the structure of the English sentences

The teacher reminds (or elicits from the students) the word order in affirmative, negative and interrogative sentences. After this is done, the class is given a task to accomplish.

Task. You will have a chance to check how well you remember the English grammar. Each of you will be given a piece of paper with a few jumbled sentences. Put the words in the correct order. If you do it correctly, reading every third word you will find a message.

1) class / will / you / to / and / tomorrow / come / I. (You and I will come to class tomorrow.)

2) travelling / I / on / not / am / usually / keen. (Usually, I am not keen on travelling.)

3) to / give / chance / never / a / despair! (Never give a chance to despair!)

4) person / a / you sociable / are / very ? (Are you a very sociable person?)

5) the / it / in / to / was / sail / interesting / ocean? (Was it interesting to sail in the ocean?)

6) for / this / work / person / does / Microsoft? (Does this person work for Microsoft?)

Message: I am a very interesting person.

This can be done in pairs or groups to save the time. In this case, it is not bad to think of a small prize for the winner.

2. The game "My Word”

This is a competition, in which students try to score as many points as possible by continuing a story started by the teacher using a given set of words.

The teacher gives the handout to each student and checks if all the words are familiar. After that, the rules are explained: the teacher starts telling the story, and the students must continue it when the teacher stops using as many words from the list in their sentences as possible. Each word is assigned a certain number of points, and it may be used only once. The student who gets the highest score wins. The beginning of the story may be as follows (depends on the teacher): I’ve had a wonderful summer this year. First, I... After the player is chosen (or appointed), he / she contributes a sentence to the story using as many words from the list as possible.

Other students may question the suggested vocabulary. If the suggested words are agreed upon, the student’s score is counted, and another student takes the turn.

After the game is over and the scores are counted, the students are divided into 3 or 6 groups depending on the total number of students in the class. Groups 1 and 4 work with the list of adjectives (the first column), groups 2 and 5 work with the list of verbs (the second column), and groups 3 and 6 work with the list of nouns (the third column).

If there are not many students in the class or little time available, the work may be limited to 10–12 words from the list.

Task. Describe your classmate (friend, teacher etc.) using the words from the list.

3. Introducing the topic

After the groups have produced their sentences, the teacher draws the students’ attention to the fact that not only adjectives (which is quite common) but also other parts of speech can be used for describing both people’s appearance and character.

T. You have just used a great variety of words to describe mostly appearance and character. There is one more way of describing people but it mainly deals with telling the facts from people’s history and background. Such way of describing is called "biography”, and you know it quite well.

We are going to start this year with telling not about other people but about ourselves, and this is called "autobiography”.

Before writing autobiographies let’s practice describing biographies of other people by playing a game.

Game "Lifeswap”

The students are given the cards (one for each student). The teacher asks to imagine that they are the people in the cards and think a while how old they are, what their education and occupation may be, what they do every day, where they work, what their hobbies are, etc.

There may be a need to prepare a certain questionnaire for the students to note down the answers. Then the students are told they would like to change their lifestyle. They have to think of what they really dislike about their present lifestyle, and what they are looking for. Then the students go round the class and talk to the others in search for the person with whom they would like to swap lifestyles.

See cards on the pages 9, 10.

III. Summary

IV. Homework

Use 12 words (4 adjectives, 4 verbs and 4 nouns) not used in the class from the table to the game "My Word” to describe yourself.

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