A great way to get your students thinking (Step 1: Activate Background Knowledge!) and set yourself up for a lesson is to use step 1 of the lesson flow to have your students create the supplemental materials that you’ll be using later in the lesson. If, for example, you’re teaching a lesson on food, and you’ll be using cards later in the lesson to have students practice vocabulary, asking and answering questions, or conversations, have the students generate the language they know in step 1, fill in the gaps as necessary, and make each student responsible for creating one card, or more if necessary. This way the students start to think about the topic and learning objective of the lesson, and you can be sure that the supplemental materials are relevant to your students.
