Why are ESL environment lesson plans environment important?
ESL lesson plans focusing on the environment are important for a variety of reasons. Allow us to cover some of these below.
Topics your students can relate to
Environmental issues are all over the news and are a big part of our future. Therefore, ESL lesson plans that focus on the environment can equip students with the language skills and vocabulary they need in real-life situations, such as discussing climate change, pollution, nature conservation, or other important issues that are relevant in their own lives or affect them in some way.
Promote global awareness and active participation
ESL environment lessons can promote global awareness and encourage students to think about their role in addressing environmental challenges. Lessons may even encourage students to improve their behaviors or motivate them to advocate for environmental activism of some kind. For example, they may inspire students to become involved in local environmental initiatives or community service projects. For these types of purposes, students can develop the language they need for advocacy and participate in discussions about environmental policies and solutions.
Overall, ESL lessons on the environment can promote a sense of responsibility toward the planet and its sustainability, as well as encourage students to become more involved citizens.
Empower your students for the future
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, students can also learn a lot of practical skills through environment ESL lessons. These skills can lead learners to find job opportunities that require them to understand environmental laws and regulations, conduct field research, or manage waste and recycling. Learning about these kinds of environment topics in their lessons can help them develop skills for a variety of other educational, professional, and personal purposes.
Overall, ESL lesson plans can empower learners by preparing them for future job prospects. Proficiency in environment-related language and concepts can pave the way to various career opportunities in fields such as ecological or scientific research, biology, environmental law, urban planning, climate science, or renewable energy.
What is included in each of your environment ESL lesson plans for adults and teens?
Whenever you unlock the lesson materials for any of our environment ESL lessons, you will gain access to the printable version, interactive PDF version, teacher's guide, and the Google Slide E-Lesson, if available. We currently have the Google Slide version of our ESL lesson materials available for over 100 lessons, and we're gradually working backwards in the lesson library to create the Google Slide lesson format for the lessons that don't have them yet. However, any new lesson that is released will come with the Google Slide version!
Regardless of the lesson format, each of our ESL environment lesson plans comes with the following structural parts:
Preview Activities
Our preview activities consist of engaging lesson introductions and discussion questions or conversation topics about the environment. The overall goal of this section is to engage students on the topic of the lesson and prepare them for the video.
Our preview sections also come with vocabulary activities or prediction-based exercises to contextualize the theme of the lesson. This also helps prepare students for the upcoming parts of the lesson.
Listening & Viewing Comprehension Activities
Our listening and viewing comprehension activities are based on an online video, and designed to train students’ listening skills. We implement a wide range of listening-for-gist and listening-for-detail activities in this section, including short answers, true/false statements, event sequencing, multiple choice, among many other activity types. The goal in this part of the lesson is to ensure that students understand the content they watched.
Viewing Follow-Up Activities
Our viewing follow-up activities come right after the video viewing phase of the lesson, and are designed to engage students in discussion about the video they watched. This could include their opinion about the video, how useful it was, or any other relevant questions about the topic.
In addition, the main goal of this section is to prepare students for the final activation phase of the lesson. These often include activities on vocabulary, grammar, or pronunciation.
You’ll find that this section often includes quotes from speakers in the video, which we build upon and use as the base for a variety of useful activities for your students. As mentioned, the skills they practice in this part prepare them for the activation phase of the lesson as described below.
Communicative Activations
An “activation” is simply an activity that is developed a bit more in detail and has students put certain skills into practice in some kind of real-world, communicative, and contextualized scenario. We do our best to make our activations engaging and realistic, as well as fun, for both teacher and students.
Some example types of activations you’ll see are role plays, interviews, creative writing, planning, presenting, researching, among many others.
An example of a communicative activation in one of our ESL environment lesson plans is described as follows:
In this free lesson plan on living off the grid, students use some advanced environment vocabulary that they learned from the video and in the viewing follow-up to describe their dream “paradise” location to live. There is a role-play-task for students to imagine that they actually live in this location, and then they use some of these adjectives below to describe this place during a phone call with a friend:
pristine - lush - snow-capped - vast - crystal-clear - idyllic - majestic
Since there is also a lifestyle-related theme tied into this particular lesson, there are a handful of adjectives describing lifestyle they can use in the activation, including:
exhilarating - laid-back - alluring - bustling - gratifying
While we use a wide range of activation styles, this is just an example of one you might expect to find in one of our lesson plans.
Quiz & Review
In each lesson plan, there is a quiz and review section at the end that repeats and covers some of the most important material, activities, and skills in the lesson plan. As of 2022, all of our lessons also include a section at the end of the quiz & review section for “lesson reflection”. This means that students can discuss a few questions mostly focusing on their experience with the lesson — what they learned, found difficult, or enjoyed about the lesson.
Teacher Guide
We also provide teachers with a guide, which includes answers to each activity and exercise in the lesson plan. Sometimes it also offers some ideas they can work with as they conduct the lesson.
Most of our environment ESL lesson plans will come in this type of lesson structure and format, with some variations depending on the lesson.
What are some hot or trendy topics for ESL lesson plans about the environment?
We'd say that some of the hottest ESL topics in the environment sector include the following:
- Climate Change
- Waste Reduction
- Conservation Efforts
- Environmental Activism
- Plastic Pollution
- Sustainable Living
- Eco-Tourism
- Green Technology
You'll find lesson plans based on all of the above-mentioned topics in this section. These are all hot and trendy environment topics that can help engage students in discussions about pressing global issues. In addition, the media and the growing environmental concerns about our planet can drive student interest in these topics.
Keep in mind that teaching about the environment in ESL classes, and covering topics like climate change, waste reduction, conservation, and more, has many benefits. It helps students connect with real-life issues, making learning more relevant. These topics also broaden students' global perspective and improve critical thinking. Teaching responsibility and civic engagement can also encourage empathy toward the environment.
Overall, the topics listed above represent the future of the environment. This contributes to the growing demand for expertise and rising interest in these areas in the ESL classroom. Using ESL lesson plans that focus on the above-mentioned environment topics can lead to engaging and meaningful learning experiences for students.
Does Fluentize take recommendations for environment ESL lesson plans and videos?
We'd be glad to take recommendations for any ESL environment topics or lesson plans. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any videos that would suit your students. While we can't guarantee that we can create a lesson plan for your requested topic, we will certainly consider it and put it in the production queue. Users can also request custom lesson requests for a fee and their requested topic will be moved to the top of the production queue.