Winter

Spring is almost here but before it arrives I want to publish the post about Winter. I’m sorry I couldn’t do it earlier, but it will remain in the blog and perhaps you will be able to use it the following year.

As I told you in the past, ‘seasons’ are quite an interesting topic to work at school because they relate to Science, Art and other subjects.

My Winter lesson plan is aimed at my 11/12-year- old Art students, although it can be adapted to any level changing the difficulty of the activities and the goals. At the end of the post, you can see some Winter resources for other levels.

The contents in my lesson plan are:

Art contents: different colouring techniques (paint, wax crayons …), collage, scissor skills, fine motor skills.

ESL contents: all the language dealing with Winter, how to borrow materials, material names, the modal verb can, present simple.

Science contents: winter facts, hibernation and migration, weather.

The unit sketch is rather similar to the autumn one.

The first lesson covers a kind of brainstorming about what we know and what we can add in the English language. I write an outline of the ideas on the board:

• Winter months.
• Start and end dates.
• Weather.
• Winter clothes (scarves, coats, mitten, boots, gloves, hats).
• Sports (ice-skating, skiing, snowboarding, go on a sleigh).
• Colours.
• Special vocabulary: snow, snowflakes, snowman, snowfall, ice.
• Special dates: Christmas, Peace Day, St. Valentine’s Day, Carnival, Pancake Day, St. Patrick’s Day.
• Animals (migration and hibernation).
• Facts: shorter days, longer nights.

The last half of the lesson students start to work on the Winter poster.

The activities for the second lesson are reviewing all the information about the season, watching a video and working on the poster.

The next lessons deal with finishing the poster and writing some essays.

Students write two different compositions, one about Winter and the other about the poster and its description. In order to write the composition about Winter, I give them a list of questions that have to be answered in the form of a text.

The questions are: 

• When does Winter start?
• When does it finish?
• What’s the weather like?
• What clothes do you usually wear in Winter?
• What sports can you practice?
• What happens to some animals?
• What special dates do you commemorate?

As you can see, there are many contents involved and that’s the reason why we spent a long period of time working on it, the unit was about two months long.

The results are:

From this point on, I will share other resources suitable for different levels and ages:

Winter song: lower levels.

Snowy weather: advanced video

Winter websites with worksheets and facts.

Winter Websites