Language Resident Name:  Katherine Pérez Gutiérrez

Class theme/topic discussed: People’s physical appearance.

Goal of the class: Learn vocabulary to describe someone’s physical appearance.

Class’ structure

  • Attendance (2 min)
  • Warm up: In small groups, students brainstorm words related to physical description. They also answer: What do you think about when talking about physical appearance? How would you describe your closest friend? How would you describe yourself? (3-5 min)
  • Input: I show students a picture of my friends and I give a mini description of almost each one of them. Students have to give a mini description of 2 people in the picture, who I haven’t described yet. (5-7 min)
  • Activity 1:  “Una mujer fantástica” trailer: Students watch the trailer of the movie and describe the main character’s appearance (height, hair, age, etc) in small groups. Then, they whole class comment on the description and add more traits to have a more detailed description of the  movie characters’ (5-7 min)  
  • Activity 2: In pairs, students describe each other. One by one, students get a paper with a classmate’s name written on it. They have to give a description of that classmate so that the rest of the class guess who are they taking about (emphasize that the descriptions have to be hard enough for the class to not guess immediately right after) (5-7 min)
  • Activity 3: Detective role play: Each student get a picture of someone who “has gone missing”. One of the student is a detective and the other one has to tell how does the person missing looks like. The “detective” draws the person who is being described. Both students get to be a “detective” using one different picture each. After having done this, each group describes their partners’ picture and we all get to compare and see how accurate the description was (15-20 min)

Resources used

Reflection: What worked/did not work? How can it be improved?

  • The activities worked okay. Activity Nº2 worked fine because the class was small, but it could also be done with smaller groups in a larger class. The topic could have been developed in a bit more depth with a more complex activity to make it a bit more challenging.