Природные катастрофы.

Class: 8

Time-90 minutes

Topic: Mother nature and natural disasters

Aims:

To review vocabulary related to the weather and natural disasters;

- To practice reading skills;
- To practise question formation
- To develop process writing skills
- To develop speaking skills

- To increase students’ knowledge of subject content

- To provide material and information for further topic and language based studies

Outcomes:

By the end of the lesson students will be able to:

- use set expressions and natural disaster vocabulary to speak about the nasty weather,

- ask questions about weather conditions using past tenses,

- make a poster about natural disasters in different regions,

- understand the recording about natural disasters and find the missing information.

Content

• Geography. Extreme weather and natural disasters.

• The damage done by different
  natural disasters and their influence on people’s life.

Cognition

• make the students aware of the environment and the environmental problems,

• understand the importance of raising awareness about natural disasters.

Communication

• students learn the extreme weather vocabulary and verbs related to the weather,

• students express their own ideas on what they do to cope with natural disasters,

Culture

• create awareness about natural disasters and the problems which occur because of them in different countries,

• learn about the pressing environmental issues,

• increase awareness of students’ role as citizens in dealing with the environmental problems,

• promote good social, cultural and citizenship behavior.

Materials and resources:

1. CLIL lesson worksheet

2. www.onestopclil.com .

3. CLIL, International education
http://www.factworld.info
4. The forum for across-the-curriculum teaching
http://www.ibo.org/myp/curriculum/project

5. Natural disasters student worksheet. Internet links: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4588149.stm - animated guide to extreme weather phenomena.
6. http://www.theguardian.com/world/natural-disasters - The Guardian archive of articles about natural disasters and extreme weather.
7. http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?v2=true&q=natural_disasters#keypoints - key facts about natural disasters.

8.Articles about natural disasters: http://www.theguardian.com/world/natural-disasters

Procedure

1. Lead-in

(10
minutes)

Predicting
content

The teacher tells the students that they are going to listen to and read a text about the natural disasters.

Students predict the geographical content of the text (location, climate, extreme weather).

2. Task 1:
Listening to
confirm
expectations (10-15
minutes)

Students listen to the text and compare what they heard to their predictions. (Task 2 on worksheet)

Students listen to the text for the second time and ‘map’ the text on the basis of the recording.

The teacher provides an example of a framework (Task 1 on worksheet)

T IP: a mind map

Natural

disasters

Students fill in the mind map with the different kinds of the extreme weather and natural disasters. Then they compare their answers with each other in groups.

Teacher does feedback with the whole group.

TIP: The teacher may read the text, make a semi-authentic recording of the text, or use the text as a dictogloss activity, depending on level and time available.

3. Task 3:
Noticing and
analysing
language
(reading)

(10
minutes)

Students are given the text (Task 2 on worksheet) and a chart to record lexis.

After listening task the students do the listening gap fill activity.

I don’t know about you, but I think there are more -------------now than before. Every time I turn on the news there’s some kind of disaster. There are ---------- in Australia and California, ----------in China, --------------in Mexico _______in Africa. I’m sure ---------- is creating more natural disasters. I’m lucky. Where I live, we don’t really have natural disasters. I’ve never experienced anything like the things on TV. Japan has many natural disasters. They have earthquakes, --------, --------, ---------, all kinds of things. They are lucky they have the money to deal with them. There are countries in Africa that aren’t rich. When a natural disaster hits them, everyone suffers terribly.

Students may work in groups on individual categories, in pairs on all categories, or individually and compare answers in pairs or groups.

Teacher does feedback with the whole group.

5.Task 4:

Writing comprehension

(15 minutes)

A game “Stop, go back dictation”

• Draw on the board three symbols as they are on a cassette machine: play, stop and go back (rewind).

• Elicit or pre-teach these terms, telling the class that in a minute you will be their 'cassette machine'. Explain to students that you will be playing a short text that they should write down word for word. Read at normal speed but at any time they can ask you to stop and go back to a particular point in the text by saying, for example, stop, go back to ‘some kind of disaster’.

• Once students are ready to write you stand at the front of the class, without speaking. Students normally look at each other for a few seconds, then somebody thinks to shout out play and you start reading!

• Read at a slow-normal speed, trying to read the sentences with natural intonation and linking between words, rather than uttering each word separately.

• Let the class take complete control, stopping only when they ask you to using the stop, go back formula. It may take them a few goes before they understand how to successfully stop their 'cassette machine'.

• The dictation goes on until all the students feel satisfied with their text. Once everybody has the full text, students can then ask their 'cassette machine' to read it through one more time.

• Give students a few minutes to compare their texts in pairs, and then hand out copies of the original for them to check against.

• (A paragraph from the text about natural disasters from the listening task)

6. Task 5:
Vocabulary
extension (5
minutes)

Pictionary.

The teacher elicits / teaches key vocabulary of natural disasters.

Copy and cut up a set of the word cards. Divide the board in two and the students into two teams. Ask one volunteer from each team to come up to the board and show both
students one of the word cards. Ask them to draw the word on the board and their team must guess what it is. The first team to guess the word wins a point. Two more students
come up to draw the next word, and so on.
If your students aren’t up for drawing, use the word cards for them to simply take and describe the word to the group. The student who guesses the word correctly wins the card. The student with the most cards wins.
Suggested words to use:

Task 6 :

A vocabulary game

“Same as the teacher”

(5 minutes)

Make a list of 12 different words from a topic depending on your learners' level.

Prepare your answer sheet with the chosen words.

Explain to the learners that they have one minute to write down as many words as they can think of that relate to the topic that you give them. They will receive one point for every word that is the same as yours and a bonus of five if they get all twelve.

• After the time is up tell them to stop.

• Read out your answers. Learners listen and check each other's answers.

• Ask students to tell you the scores and keep a record of these on the board.

• (Task 3 on worksheet)

7. Task 8.

Speaking activities

(10-15 minutes)

• A game “Revising text”

• Tell the students to read the text we did for exactly one minute (tell them not to read the whole text, just to scan the main points). When the time is up, tell them to close their books, but they may open their notebooks. 

• On the board, you have already written five questions they need to answer:

  • What is the text about?

  • What the kinds of natural disaster can you find?

  • What can we learn from the text?

  • What are the new words or expressions?

  • What are three important verbs (or adjectives, prepositions, etc.)?

Prompt their answers by writing sentence starters next to the questions:

• The text is about …

• We can find…

• We can learn that …

• Then for each question call for three different answers from three different students. That way, each student tries to give a better answer, or someone combines two previous answers, or someone gives a whole new idea of the context, etc.

Assessment:

(15 minutes)

Students work in groups or pairs, choose one of the natural disasters, make a poster about how to behave in the situation of a natural disaster and present it to class.

Homework

Find information about natural disasters in different regions of Russia.