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Lesson Plan
Take a Walk with Idioms
Get your students moving! In this lesson, your students will walk around the classroom as they practice using and interpreting idioms.
Grade
Subject
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Learning Objectives
Students will be able to determine the meaning of an idiom using contextual clues.
The adjustment to the whole group lesson is a modification to differentiate for children who are English learners.
Introduction
(5 minutes)
- Give an example of an idiom in the form of a statement or question (e.g. “Wow! It’s raining cats and dogs out there!” or “I forgot my umbrella today. Is anyone else in the same boat?”)
- On scratch paper, have students interpret what you said by drawing a quick sketch. Invite a few students to share with the class. (Note: Some students might draw the figurative meaning while others will draw a literal interpretation. This exercise will serve as a quick pre-assessment.)
- Tell students that an idiom is not meant to be taken literally and provide the meaning of the idiom you used as a hook (e.g. “When I said it was raining cats and dogs I didn’t really mean that cats and dogs are falling from the sky. That is an idiom, which is a figure of speech that means it is raining really hard.”)
Beginning
- Preteach vocabulary from the example idiom by providing a student-friendly definition and an image (e.g., umbrella, raining, boat).
- Provide other examples of common idioms in English and L1 prior to the lesson.
Intermediate
- Display an example illustration of both the literal and figurative meaning of the idiom after students have brainstormed.
- Ask learners to explain the definition of idiom using a sentence stem, "An idiom is ___________."