Happy New Year Everyone,
These holidays, unfortunately, have not been the happiest times for me as I have been trying to cope with being the only child of an aging parent who lives in another country, which is taxing at the best of times. I only mention this because it makes me feel all the more how the years turn round and each stage brings with it a new learning experience for all of us.
Getting Back to Normal
Now it’s time to get back to normal to some extent so I thought I’d share my New Year’s activity with you. I was tired of asking my learners to make New Year’s Resolutions, because this is often met with howls of protest from some. This is despite the fact that I , personally, like taking the time at the beginning of a new year to sit down and think about what my goals are. So, when a friend of mine posted some lovely “cat photos” on Facebook (Thank you Jeremy Nicoll) I decided to make them into a simple New Year activity:
New Year’s Resolutions
1) Ask students what they think the top 10 resolutions are in their country, and give them some time to discuss this in pairs or small groups;
2) Ask them if they think this will be the same or different in the USA;
3) Show them the Powerpoint Presentation (one click at a time) This starts the countdown from the tenth most popular resolution and goes down to number one. (In each case students should look at picture and decide what resolution they think the image illustrates and then clicking on the third element will show them if they are right or not;
4) A discussion of why we make these resolutions and how hard it is to keep to them may be interesting.
Happy New Year Resolutions lesson 2012[1]
I’m doing this tonight so I’ll let you know how it goes:
English learning in Our World 
Oh, this is lovely! And I think it doesn’t have to be used just for New Years Resolutions – could be used in quite a few contexts!
SO keep us posted!
Naomi
Thnx for the enthusiastic response :-). I used it this evening and my students loved the photos and all wanted me to send them the Powerpoint straight away!!
Lovely – going to be trying something kinda similar (though minus the images) in class tomorrow. It’s nice to tune in to similar wavelengths across the ELT world 🙂 Will blog about mine too and we maybe we can compare notes.
Happy new year!
Wonderful! Such a shame I didn’t see this before. But I’m still going to use it in class. One of the cats could be mine.