Learning Objective: Students will be able to identify continents, countries and talk about countries. Ss will form opinions about where they would like to go.

Target language: "I want to go to"

The session began with an introduction by the teacher, including a mention of JESIE's activities in Nanjing. Some of the students may be headed for JESIE in future years, so this was of interest to them for their future. Immediately after this short introduction, the games began! 

All the way through the lesson, students were involved in competitive learning games, earning points for their team. ESL students love competitive games or anything with a random element; it really keeps them engaged and 'learning through playing' is a great excuse to recycle language in the classroom. The session kicked-off with a series of team quizzes (name the country, name the famous place etc.), presented using multi-media. These activities were great to hook the students into the subject and to warm them up for the productive group activity to come, in which they filled-in a graphic-organizer worksheet and then presented their work to the whole class. 

The presentation was not simply a boring reading from the front - oh no! Again, it was turned into a game! The students read-out their descriptive work, but were not allowed to reveal the country they were describing - the rest of the class had to guess this from their description to collect more points for their team. They did a great job of reading from the front; in fact, they liked it so much that they wanted to continue reading even after the country had been correctly guessed! This was great to see, because so often students are too shy to read from the front of the class. 

The students especially enjoyed the last activity, in which they had chance to let out some of that excess energy in a competitive game involving throwing a bean-bag at a target! In this game, they had to successfully make a sentence using the structure 'I want to go to... because...'. For example, 'I want to go to Spain because it is hot.' If they were able to make a sentence, they were allowed to move closer to the target. After 3 tries at making a sentence it was time to test their aim and hit the target for more team points. 

Having enjoyed the games and activities, a final recap with a few questions directed around the class, were given to ensure that the lesson aim had been met wrapped-up a successful JESIE open day session.