Electing a US President in Plain English

Hey Teachers!

With the US elections coming up soon, I created this ESL lesson plan full of activities and exercises about the US elections and how the election system works, all based on a short informational video. The "Electoral College" can be a difficult concept to grasp, so this lessons aims to help students understand it.

The full lesson plan is free to download on Fluentize via the link below:

https://app.fluentize.com/lesson/electing-US-president

In the worksheets I posted here, you get the first half of the lesson. You can find the video as well as all the post-viewing activities on the actual Fluentize page for the lesson. It’s free to download until October 15, 2020, and when you register, you'll get the whole thing for free - including the post-viewing sections that feature activities on a video quote, prepositions, numbers, grammar, additional conversational material, the quiz & review, and the teacher's guide.

The lesson plan is geared towards intermediate (B1) to upper intermediate (B2) level students. It's probably more suitable for upper intermediate level students, although you could probably adapt it to or make it work for an intermediate level as a challenge. In the video and lesson plan, students learn about the electoral college, what "electors" are, and how a presidential candidate actually comes to be the US president. They'll also learn when the president is "sworn in" as president (this is one of the featured vocabulary terms in the lesson). After watching the video and completing the first post-viewing section, there is a second and third post-viewing part that focuses on some grammar focusing and then additional discussion material based on questions about...

- Students' opinion on the Electoral College
- Politics
- Voting
- Impact of COVID-19 on the elections
- Immigrants and voting

From the creator’s standpoint, my favorite part of the lesson is the section on numbers in the post-viewing section and quiz and review activity. Having the students recall full sentences using those numbers I found to be great language practice. I think this should be another great way for students to practice some of the vocabulary terms they heard or learned in the video. This specific activity is available when you download it directly from the Fluentize page.

Again, you can find these post-viewing activities on the video quote, prepositions, numbers, and then the post-viewing conversation, along with the quiz / review activities when you download the lesson directly from the Fluentize page.

I also realize that many English language teachers are teaching in an online environment. For those of you who have done this, I recommend trying out our interactive lesson plan, which are pretty much digital lesson plans that contain interactive fields for your students to write answers within.

Also, when you do a Fluentize lesson online, we highly recommend using the platform Zoom and their remote control feature. The remote control feature allows students to take control of your screen during the lesson. You can do this by having your student request remote control of your screen, or you could also give control to the student. The reason this is so great is because it enables students to type answers in the interactive fields (download the 'Interactive Lesson' on the lesson page) of the lesson while you watch and help them with spelling and punctuation.

I wish all you good health and hope you have a meaningful lesson exploring the US elections in detail with your students.

Happy Fluentizing!

- Jake from Fluentize

Upload date: 2020-10-08 14:58:53