My Home

Level: Intermediate to Advanced                                                                                          Time: 30 minutes                                                                                                         Focus: Speculating and speaking about homes.                                                               Materials: Musical excerpts and a photo of where you live.

This is an excellent activity for deepening all participants’ acquaintance with each other. It’s one you can do repeatedly with different presenters each time.

PREPARATION

Choose one or a couple of pieces of music that you associate with your house or flat. A photo can be useful too.

PROCEDURE

If you have brought a photo of your home, show it around the class.

Tell your students that you are going to play some music you associate with your home.

Play your music.

Ask them to make guesses about what your home is like. Perhaps write some sentence starters on the board first, e.g.

     ‘Your home must be…..’

     ‘Your music suggest that…..’

     ‘Your music makes me think of…..’

After the guesses have stopped flowing, tell the students who you felt were right.

EXTENSIONS

a) Ask your students each to bring, one by one on different days, a piece of music they associate with their home or a dwelling (of any kind) that has been important in their lives. In class, their classmates ask ten yes/no questions to learn about the place and the reasons for associating it with their piece of music.

b) The main activity and the extension above prepare the ground well for writings (especially poems) that relate homes to music, for example, ‘My house/flat and music’, ‘My ideal house is like…….’.

VARIATIONS

Play three quite different musical excerpts, only one of which expresses your impressions of where you live. Play them and then ask students to guess which of the three you had in mind, and why. Finish by showing them your photo.

One by one, on different days, your students bring in three different excerpts of music and a photo, elicit guesses, then explain and show.

Do the main activity or a variation with your parents’ house or any other house or building or place (e.g. a workplace) that has played a part in your life.