Plans For The Weekend

Setup

Draw or project on the board (or a large piece of paper) a picture of a diary with spaces for Friday evening, Saturday morning, afternoon and evening, and Sunday morning, afternoon and evening. The students copy this empty diary in their notebooks.

Model the activity by inviting a student to do something (elicit an affirmative answer!). Optionally, you can also confirm a time. Write that plan in your diary on the board, e.g. ‘Cycling, Julia, 3pm’. Explain that you can only write one plan per space by modelling/eliciting an invitation from another student for the same time and declining it. Also explain you can only make one plan with each student.

Activity

1. Students stand up and mingle, making invitations and completing their diaries. As they do this, check for correct target language.
2. Depending on your time constraints/class size, you can either stop when one student has completed their diary or when most of them have.
3. The students then sit down and compare their plans with their partner or those around them by asking and answering questions (e.g. What are you doing on Saturday evening? I’m going to a BBQ with Erica.)

Target Language

The Plans For The Weekend ESL activity is perfect for practising invitations of the form ‘Would you like to…’ and ‘Do you want to…’ as well as stating/querying near future plans in the present continuous.

With beginner students, you may need to slowly step them through the target language and write it on the board for them to read. With intermediate students you could introduce different ways of accepting/declining invitations, like ‘I’d love to, but…’.

It’s also a very useful way of reviewing hobbies, leisure activities and sports vocabulary, including the use of ‘play’, ‘do’ or ‘go’ before certain activities.

For a similar activity (without the invitations element) in which students plan their ideal weekend, see Perfect Weekend.