Shopping In The Classroom (Activity)
This activity can be inserted into any shopping unit.
You will need to prepare lots of props for this activity. The props should come from things you, as well as the students bring into class. I’ve found that it works best if you surround the shopping activity around clothing items. There is a lot of versatility and choices that way.
One class before:
One class before you do the activity you should introduce what you will be doing. Ask the students to bring in as many clothing items as they can; shirts, pants, jackets, socks, shoes, gloves, hats, underwear, etc. Also have them bring accessories like watches, rings, scarves, necklaces, and hair-ties. You should also bring in a healthy array of things as well. The more choices you have the better.
Teach all of the clothing vocabulary and a healthy list of shopping phrases to use. Most shopping units in textbooks give lots of these (e.g. too expensive, let’s make a deal, that doesn’t match, too small, etc.).
The activity:
This is the fun and simple part. You put students in pairs or groups no larger than four. You put all of the clothing items on tables in front of the room (hang some clothes if you can). The students will take 15 minutes to discuss and plan a dialogue using the words and phrases they learned last class (have the words and phrases up on the board or on a ppt). Then the students will come and do a role-play that the other students will give a grade to. The role-play should involve at least one buyer and one seller. At the end every group will have a grade from all of the other students in the class as well as you. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what to do with the grades.