how to teach conditionals in a fun way

If you liked this post, something tells me that you'll love FluentU, the best way to teach English with real-world videos. The students deal out the 'Result' cards and place the 'If' cards in a pile on the desk. The first to say ‘bingo’ is the winner. This is called the second conditional or the unreal conditional. A fun way to review this grammatical concept is to use a board game. Give students scrap paper, preferably used photocopies and tell them to write 5 half conditional sentences on. Fun 1st Conditional Practice Stimulating ways of practising “If + Present Simple, Will” sentences in the classroom. (Download). When teaching it’s always important to keep an eye on the time. Use this conditional to show an unlikely or impossible outcome that probably wouldn’t happen (unless a specific condition were met). It can be revised in the class any time using some fun and interesting activities to spice up the learning and get the practice first conditional learning needs. Have students work in pairs or groups of three. You could make them answer an addition problem before passing a ball, for instance, or solve a sum before drawing a color by number page. You can also mix different conditional tenses to make it more or less challenging. Click here to get a copy. The third conditional can be a pretty dry grammar point to teach! This will allow the student to understand the concept of the first conditional without feeling overwhelmed. And I don’t imagine that this article will replace the mutterings of “Ugh, Grammar” with “Yeah, Grammar!”. In those days, I’m sure it was boring and tedious for them, since it was boring and tedious for me. Ask for volunteers to compose a sentence; then ask the other students to identify the subject and verb. Beginners can be introduced to the basic forms of the first conditionals. Throw the object at a student and ask him to complete it. However, it can also be used as a warmer activity for a class if you do teach something at the end of the previous class and ask them to prepare songs with the pattern you taught. Students can indulge in different role play activities and carry out conversations using first conditional. Learning English becomes fun and easy when you learn with movie trailers, music videos, news and inspiring talks. Whenever a student lands on a square, he has to perform the task on the matching card. Explain the "if" sentences describe the reasons for the wishes. Print a large number of quotations—between 20 and 30 quotes seems to work best—and cut them into two parts each, dividing the conditions and the results. Please note: I teach one-to-one online and, on the whole, teach grammar when the need naturally arises during a lesson. … I only wish I’d realized it sooner. For example: Teacher: “If pigs could fly…”. Teach the Conditional Now, don’t skip this important first step! A good activity to open a group up and have some fun in the class. First Conditional can be a tricky topic for teachers as well as students. So what changed? Not to mention, it's guaranteed to get your students excited about learning English! You'll find music videos, musical numbers from cinema and theater, kids' singalongs, commercial jingles and much, much more. The verb in the if clause is a simple past verb, and the verb in … Mill Drill Questionnaire. 8. These aren’t the focus of today’s post, though. Challenge the kids to play games or make crafts where they have to add simple sums before taking a turn or creating a project. This is sometimes a bit trickier, since you have to depend on material that you find “as is.” It may not always have exactly what you’re looking for. Now you understand how to use conditionals, but you might not know how to make them interesting or fun—for you or for your students. The stages given here are intended to follow activities aimed at teaching the form, use and pronunciation of the third conditional. Ask them “Would you rather…?” questions, and then imagine the results if they chose either option. For example, although I’m sure the original language was French, there’s a quote by Gustave Flaubert that demonstrates how English conditionals can be weird and flexible. While the students are writing their sentences, walk around giving help where needed and making sure the students are following the … Now cut the strips of the paper and just write the words on the flap whereas the contractions on the inside. The first part of the activity gives learners a chance to interact with each other by working on a meaningful grammatical task. You can easily teach conditionals without coming across as an insufferable English nerd or a joyless grammar tyrant. Zero conditional rules and instructions bluff. This video will save you hours of planning and provides a fun and dynamic way to review and reinforce conditional sentence structures. You can’t please all the people all the time, especially when it comes to music. Take a look at this article about the best watches for teachers. Sorry for the light colors. So I also thought, “Ugh, grammar,” when I saw things like conditionals on the curriculum. Perhaps you remember the game Mad Libs. Examples of Conditionals Here are examples of some conditional sentences and their uses: For example: If he comes, we will have lunch. Start by dividing the class into two teams and drawing a path from one side of the whiteboard to the other. Use a first conditional worksheet to ask students to practice the form. Board GameTo use first conditional for warmer activities, you can use any board like snakes and ladders and customize it to the target topic. Think of weird scenarios to catch your students’ interest from the get-go. We can keep that spirit alive when teaching conditionals. The first conditional is quite significant for ESL students and there are many songs you can use to practice this conditional. FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons. The right approach to conditionals can transform grammatical theory into practice right before your students’ eyes. They can interview partners, or write answers on papers and guess who would do what. Have one student say a condition and a result. Hard work and keen focus, along with proper guidance, can turn an obligatory skill into magic. #1: Conditional Board Games. The rest of this post will be focused on using conditionals in a fun and interesting way in your classes. Sign up for a free trial and bring FluentU to your classroom today. Student A: “If this happened, I would cry like a baby.”, Student B: “Hmm, would you cry like a baby if your favorite team lost?”, Student B: “Would you cry like a baby if you failed English?”. Still, here are two good general tips: No matter which route you take, you can always find plenty of great content to hold your students’ interest on FluentU. You get printed strips of first conditional questions and put them face down in front of them. It’s perfect for in-class activities, group projects and solo homework assignments. All you need is an A4 paper, scissors and pen. They’re very easy to make in just a few minutes once you have a bit of practice doing it. If we have lunch, we'll go to Riccardo's pizzeria. transform grammatical theory into practice, “(If You Don’t Love Me) I’ll Kill Myself”, Storytelling 101: 6 Engaging Writing Activities for ESL Students, A Starter Guide to Teaching American Culture to ESL Classes with “The Simpsons”, 7 Awesome ESL Resources for Finding and Teaching with Videos Like a Rockstar, 10 Best, Shockingly Good Apps for ESL Teachers, How to Teach English Through Short Films and Documentaries, ESL Listening Jackpot: 7 Audio File Resources You’ll Thank Your Lucky Stars For. You can combine these songs with any of the techniques or activities mentioned above, depending on your needs. Here’s a mix of different ideas that I’ve used successfully in my classes. The students answer using the correct structure of the first conditional. 1. The following ideas for activities are versatile, can be modified according to what you think would work best for your class and can all be done in groups or pairs. If I'm teaching a class I know very well I misspell it and use this mistake as a way to introduce the activity. The first player tries to make a conditional sentence by placing one of their dominoes at either end of the first domino. These sentences can be given in the form of blanks to practice first conditional. Again, making strange or funny scenarios helps keep their interest. You can make a report with the names and answers so that students can write what they have found. Here’s one way of making it a little more fun and engaging for your students. Prepare a five- or 10-minute review on subjects and verbs. Then have the next student take the result from the previous student’s sentence and make a new condition from it, along with a new result. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso. Let’s put our cards on the table, shall we? You can use different colored cards for the two parts. Here and here are two longer quotes that you can convert for this game, but really any quote can work. Role play is an effective exercise that makes it fun and interesting to learn and practice first conditional. Proceed with other questions to practice the first conditional. 8. You get printed strips of first conditional questions and put them face down in front of them. How about an example? The subject of a sentence is the person, place, thing, idea or activity that the sentence is about, and the verb tells what the subject does. The second student then has to run across the room and tell the quote to the third student, who writes it down piece by piece. It’s not even as hard as pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The best thing about the first conditional is that it can be easily gamified for practice and learning. A student selects a strip randomly and asks the question to other remembers in the group. You can print the bingo cards with six boxes. The groups give their own responses and you can judge them as voters or customers and favour the one with the best answers. They work in small groups and come up with ideas for role plays and group discussions. He is passionate about learning, coffee, traveling, languages, writing, photography, books and movies, but not necessarily in that order. In that single quote, he starts with a third (past) conditional condition, moves on to a second conditional result and then has a first conditional explanation. And when it comes to more advanced grammar topics—like conditionals—then sometimes even we language teachers join the chorus of complaining students. Words come with example sentences and definitions. can take anywhere. I really like using quotes in my classes, and I’ve noticed that many contain conditionals. You can also expand the activity by having them find information about the person who said it, argue for or against the quote or do a different activity to increase participation. Think of weird scenarios to catch your students’ interest from the get-go. my daughter made it. Show pictures of people in different situations. Conditional chains are a great warm-up exercise, and you can also expand them if you want. I used to be in your shoes. It’s not easily visual like vocabulary, and it’s not automatically engaging like speaking and listening. After many years of trawling through conditionals-focused grammar lessons, I’ve come up with quite a list of ways not to go about it! Students are divided into groups of 2-3. With fun exercises, you can give the extensive practice the students would need to practice first conditional and learn the right usage. Question StripsThis fun activity offers practice when the students are introduced to the topic. The second conditional (e.g., If I were, I would…) often causes difficulties even for advanced English learners. Using an iPod to teach English. The conditional refers to a Due to the nature of conditionals, the English level in such quotes tends to be higher. Nobody normally gets excited about learning grammar. There are tons of great choices there when you're looking for songs for in-class activities. One of my favorite quotes is by Pablo Picasso and uses the first conditional in a way that’s clear and repetitive, which helps reinforce the structure: My mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. You speak out the parts of sentences and if the students listen to two halves of the first conditional sentence, they can cross the box on the card. We hate SPAM and promise to keep your email address safe, Sign up for our weekly blog newsletter for a chance to win a free FluentU Plus subscription (value $240), Get regular language learning tips, resources and updates, starting with the "Complete Guide to Foreign Language Immersion" e-book. What would you have done if you had fallen in front of everyone? While most teachers think it should be introduced late, they should not be hesitant teaching it to the lower intermediate learners. It can also lead to discussions about vocabulary (for example, how “idiot” isn’t terribly insulting in English, but it is in other languages like Spanish), or can be used as a starting point for students to reflect on their past and how it affected their present. Here is a wonderful yet simple foldable to teach contractions to kids. (3), (4), (6), (7), (9), (10) and (12): Seven body parts. Students will be able to add them to their own vocabulary lists, and even see how the words are used in other videos. Then have the next student take the result from the previous student’s sentence and make a new condition from it, along with a new result. We also participate in other affiliate advertising programs for products and services we believe in. The student then throws it to somebody else in the other team who gives a different clause for the same sentence. Students change three rules of a game or sport, then explain a mix of those three made up ones and seven real ones to another group for them to guess which are false. . For example, if a student taps on the word "searching," they'll see this: Plus, these great videos are all accompanied by interactive features and active learning tools for students, like multimedia flashcards and fun games like "fill in the blank.". The same thing can also work for instructions on how to … Conditional TrainAnother version of Pass the Pig, this game involves an additional challenge of having to make a new sentence using the end clause of the previous one. Then, the students’ partners have to guess which condition the others are completing. The students shuffle the dominoes and deal out five cards each, placing the remaining domino face up on the table. Give each group of three a set of 'If' cards and a set of 'Result' cards. One extremely painless, fun and motivating way of ‘doing’ conditionals is through music. It also focuses on: helping students to say third conditional sentences clearly and in the correct form. ESL Email Etiquette: 5 Email Activities for ESL Students, Error Correction Exercise to Help Students with Learning ESL, 4 Fun ESL Activities with Pictures to Speak Better English. Please check your email for further instructions. The student who gets the maximum card pairs would win the game. A Future Situation That is Unlikely or Impossible. First conditionals can also be used for negotiation: If you cook dinner, I’ll wash the dishes. 3. You’ll likely never find a song that every student in your class loves, but most of my students have at the very least tolerated all the songs below, and some students have even commented that they really liked some of them. In order to practise this, prepare a few cards before the class with a situation on each – cook dinner, wash dishes. They are especially good for teaching common phrasal verbs like ‘take out’, ‘pick up’, ‘put down’ etc. You can have each word on a separate bit of paper, or have phrases of a few words on every piece. You can learn more or connect with him through his website Sitzman ABC. Whether it’s fair or not, many students associate worksheets and writing with “boring,” and speaking with “fun.” So use activities that let them speak more and learn the language naturally through experimentation. First conditional is a way to connect two separate yet related events. If I could have just one wish, I would wish to (1) every day to the (2) of your (3) on my (4), the (5) of your (6) on my (7), the (8) of your (9) on my (10), and the (11) of your (12) (13) with mine…knowing that I could never find that (14) with anyone other than (15). In formal writing, however, it’s best to avoid contractions. The two most popular songs for teaching conditionals are:If you don’t know meThis first conditional song is by Harold Melvin and the lyrics contain various examples of the topic. What then? A good example here is a quote by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, which is partially fun just because her name is challenging to spell: What a wonderful life I’ve had! You can also have them do a dictation back-to-back or, if you’re daring and feel like riding a wave of barely-controlled chaos, have them say/shout the quote across the room to their partners. Here are some activities that I like to do to incorporate quotations with conditionals into my classes. BrainyQuote.com has hundreds of quotes that use conditionals, but here are a few I like to include: Print and cut a quote into pieces, and have students arrange it in the correct order. However, these days conditionals are actually among my favorite topics to teach in my ESL classes. What would you buy if someone gave you a million dollars? The game involves creating five pairs of cards with the start and end part of the first conditional sentences written on each. The team that has the ball when the time is up loses the game. Just … I think the fact that ESL students may find these types of quotes a bit challenging or need more time to work them out is actually a good thing. This will work for all conditionals. If you still think you don’t like them or let out that old familiar groan when you have to teach them to your students, I understand. Students have the chance to see and listen to how the form is used to express how events in the past could have been different. If a student completes a line, he says ‘line’ and ‘bingo’ when he does all the boxes. Students can easily find the examples of first conditional from the lyrics. Videos are a fantastic way of teaching and revising verb-noun collocations as they contain natural everyday actions. Display one or two sentences on the board and ask students to read the sentence and then come to the board to circle the subject and the verb. This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you But I do hope that it will be useful and help you with your lesson plans. The main question becomes whether you want to find sources that already have conditionals or make your own. If you're looking for creative ways to teach English, then you'll love using FluentU in your classroom! (2), (5), (8), (11) and (14): Five sensations/emotions. I’ll give you one that you can try right now. FluentU brings English to life with real-world videos. BingoFirst conditional bingo encourages the students to match two parts of a conditional sentence. This fun activity offers practice when the students are introduced to the topic. Students must then work in pairs and negotiate with other students in order to get the best possible situation for themselves. Teaching math concepts is easy if you make it fun! Do you want to teach English while traveling the world? Like many new teachers, I probably fell into the trap of teaching conditionals as dry formulas that students had to regurgitate in exactly the right way. One nice activity is to set up the class like a talk show, and have them give possible solutions to a problem, starting with “If I were you…”. For lower levels, you can also cut it up like a puzzle. Think of more scenarios and ask questions in a “What would you do if…?” format. Contraction words foldable. Limit yourself to will, won’t, might, could, and going to (and their negative counterparts). However, even native English speakers often have a very tenuous grasp of grammatical concepts like conditionals. Ask students to stand up and form a circle. Including many different brands from Timex, Casio, BRUEI, and Shengke. Featuring over 10 different varieties, Suitable for men and women. If you are one of those native speakers, or if you’re just an ESL teacher who could use a refresher on conditionals, then I’d recommend checking out English Grammar Secrets or Englisch-Hilfen for a general overview about how and when to use them. A game to practise the conditional and reported speech. If you want to use that quote, the original is: If I could have just one wish, I would wish to wake up every day to the sound of your breath on my neck, the warmth of your lips on my cheek, the touch of your fingers on my skin, and the feel of your heart beating with mine…knowing that I could never find that feeling with anyone other than you. You can make your cards and have the squares in various colors. PelmanismThe concentration activity is a highly popular warm up activity for ESL first conditional. As the conditionals are complex, it is a good idea to introduce the students to tenses early on so they can start practicing it. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution. In fact, if you have been paying attention, then you’ll have seen that this whole paragraph—including this sentence—is written using conditionals. © 2021 Enux Education Limited. So many of our so-called “kid-friendly” drinks are loaded with extra sugar. In this free first conditional activity, students play a game where they make conditional sentences by matching pairs of picture cards together. But if you’re pressed for time, BusyTeacher.org has literally hundreds of games, and many of them are specifically made for practicing conditionals, including this one for first and second conditionals, and this one for third conditionals. Student A: “If pigs could fly, they would make nests in trees.”, Student B: “If pigs made nests in trees, the birds would get angry.”. While teaching first conditional, it is important to keep it simple. You can also expand this by having them make full conditional sentences based on those wishes or hopes. It goes: Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Pass The PigAsk the students to divide into two teams and get something they can throw. Worst case scenarios can range from outrageous … Any fun activities on giving advice can be used with second conditional phrases like “If I were you,…”, “If I were in your place,…” and “If I was in your shoes,…”. First conditional is the perfect topic to use as warmer for any ESL class.

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