Lesson Share - "What do you want to be when you grow up?" (Speaking Activity)

In this post, I'll share one of the speaking lessons that I've conducted with my Year 4.

Topic:
Ambitions / Occupations

Target language:
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"I want to be a / an ..."

Focus:
Listening and Speaking

Unit in the Year 4 KSSR textbook:
Unit 2 - Spending Wisely (pp. 11 - 13)

Warm-up

To revise the vocabulary for occupations, I started the lesson by asking the students about their ambitions. I distributed post-its and asked the students to write their ambitions on them. Then, I drew a large circle map on the board. The students put the post-its on the circle map.

Pre-Speaking Activity: Practising the Target Language

I used the circle map to introduce the target language.

To help the students practice the target language, we sang this song:

**No, that wasn't my voice in the recording. I played the guitar while my sister, Sandy lent me her voice. Thank you, sis!

The song lyrics:

Pre-Speaking Activity: Vocabulary Review

These are some of the visual aids that I used to help the students learn and revise the vocabulary for occupations / ambitions:

Speaking Activity: Practising the Target Language

I drew a table like the one in the picture below on the whiteboard. I asked several students about their ambitions. I demonstrated how to use the target language to get the information needed to complete the table. 

I handed out worksheets with a similar table for the students to complete. We did the 'mingling' activity. I asked the students to go around the classroom and ask their friends about their ambitions. They must use the target language to ask at least ten of their classmates what they want to be when they grow up.

Samples of my students' work:

Yeah, it was a bit noisy. There were 40 students in the class and they were really excited about the activity. I think the students were awesome, though.

Here's a short video that I managed to capture if you want to see how the activity went:

Post-Speaking Activity: Wrapping it up

I asked several volunteers to share what they found out about their classmates' ambitions. I guided them to say sentences like "Ambriezal wants to be a businessman" and "Amy wants to be a teacher."

Before we ended the lesson, we sang the 'What do you want to be?' song again.



Follow-up Lesson: Writing Activity

Later during the week, I decided to do a writing activity as a follow-up for the speaking lesson. The students looked at the speaking activity handouts that they had completed in the previous lesson and I let them talk to each other about each other's ambitions to help them revise what they had learned. Then, I drew this table on the whiteboard:

I added the last column for 'boy / girl' and we revised the personal pronouns 'he' and 'she.' Then, we practised the target language:

"Asyraff wants to be a soldier when he grows up."

"Nazwa wants to be a lecturer when she grows up."

To help the students practise, we did the shared writing activity. Several volunteers wrote sentences on the whiteboard based on the information in the table.

Based on the speaking activity handouts that they had completed in the previous lesson, the students wrote sentences about their classmates' ambitions. Here are some samples of my students' work:

Materials

I've uploaded the materials that I used in the lessons on Slideshare. Feel free to download and use them in your class if you like.

Handout for Speaking Activity

Ambitions (Speaking Activity Handout) from Cynthia James

Pictures and Word Cards

Occupations (Pictures & Wordcards from Cynthia James

Worksheets

**You can print these in poster size and turn them into classroom charts just like the ones in the pictures above. Leave me a message in the comment if you need help with that.

Occupations (worksheet) from Cynthia James

If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make the lessons better or more interesting, please share with me! You can leave a comment below this post, or just drop me a line on my Facebook page.

Till the next post! -ccj