Create a Country

Level – Elementary and Up

Objective – Depending on the level: Vocab. Building (Demographic Country Terms)

Describing a Country

Basic question formation

Procedure – Begin the class by drawing a big map of your country on the board.  Put some cities in, roads, mountains, etc (This should take less than a minute).  Ask the class what the country is called and what the thing you drew is (a map).  Write Country Name and Map at the top right corner of your board.  Now draw a really bad outline of your students’ country.  They should laugh.  Make a 2nd attempt.  It can be better, but should still be very flawed.  If a student hasn’t already taken the marker from you, give it to a student and have them draw the outline.

Now the lesson begins.  You want to elicit the words Capital City, Population, Language, Religion, Geography, and Climate.  Do this by giving examples.  For example, in America we have Washingting D.C.; in Turkey it’s Ankara.  What is this?  İn America we speak English, in Turkey you speak Turkish.  This is the…?  It should take less than 5 minutes to elicit all the words.  If you have a higher level class you can include things like Type of Government, Major Industries, etc.

Now tell the class that they are going to create their own country.  Demo this on the board.  I usually draw a big beer bottle and then label it Beeristan.  My capital city is Barsville.  My language is Beerish.  The religion is Alcoholism.  It’s a magical country where beer rains from the sky every weekend.  You get the point.

Put the students in groups of two and have each make their own country.  As an initial task give them 2 minutes to write a name and draw a map then stop.  This allows you to check for certain that they understand.  You wouldn’t believe how many students, especially at lower levels, even after the demo and CCQ’s will still start to draw their own country.  You can ensure they are making a new country.

After about 8 minutes come back together as a class.  With lower levels you will have to elicit the questions as a class and put the structures on the board.  With higher levels you can dive right in.  Have each group show their country and have the other groups ask questions about it.  With lower levels this will be rather formulaic although you should encourage extra questions.  With higher levels they will often run with it.  If they don’t, ask a few questions as examples such as, Where do alcoholics go to pray?  How do people get to work if everyone’s drunk all the time?  Is there a lot of tourism to Beeristan? Etc.

If this somehow doesn’t last an hour you can make some groups tourists and they have to go from group to group to hear about each country’s virtues and then decide on which one to go to for vacation.

You can also follow this up with a lesson on modals of permission and obligation by having them create the laws for their country.

- stolen lesson from Steal This Lesson post. Read about it HERE.

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.