My Family

Setup

Students will need to gather family photos and make a computer presentation with them. If you have a computer room available you could do this at least partly in class time; otherwise they will need to do it as homework.

Instruct students how long their presentations should be according to their level and how many students you have. 5 minutes (1 minute per family member) is usually about right.

Project

1. Ask your students to choose about five members of their family to describe in their presentation.
2. Students write a short description of each person, using the target language (see below). Possible information includes family relationships, appearance and personality adjectives, jobs, hobbies, likes and dislikes, biographical information etc.
3. When they have finished, students swap work and peer-correct (you can also correct yourself, but peer correction is preferable for larger groups).
4. Students gather photos of each person and make a computer presentation (usually one slide per family member). This can be done for homework.
5. Students practise their oral presentations in pairs.
6. The students take turns giving their presentations and descriptions, using spoken target language. Elicit a few questions from the rest of the class after each presentation.
7. After all the presentations, ask students to think about and share which described person they think they are most similar to and why. This works best if presentations contain information about personality, hobbies, likes and dislikes etc. Or, if your target language is the past simple (see below), get students to ask the class a quiz question or two about their family. Tell the students about this step before the presentations to make sure they listen!

Target Language

The My Family ESL project is an excellent way to extend a class on family beyond just vocabulary for family members (which can be somewhat dry on its own!). By talking about the personality or appearance of those family members using relevant adjectives, or the sports or hobbies they enjoy, students can practice these vocabulary topics as well. Indeed, this is much more effective than associating these words with an abstract person.

Another option is to use My Family for a class on the past simple. In this case, ask students to talk about the biographical information of family members, such as where they were born, where they grew up, where they have lived and worked, and major life events (getting married, having children etc.). By preparing a quiz question about each family member, they can also practise past simple questions, e.g., “Where did my uncle Jaime work?”.

Finally, when introducing this project to adult students, make sure you stress the relevance of this activity to work settings. The ability to give a presentation in English is an important skill for many, and practising with a familiar topic such as family is a great way to build confidence for this scenario.