In January ETA Blake Lapin returned to school after his break eager to perform his interactive lesson plans. As always, the lesson plans are imagined one way and get edited and curated throughout the week until it stops at another. Blake and his co-teacher, Bu Ety, created an interactive class for the Menu Topic. The objective of the lesson was for students to be able to order food at a restaurant entirely in English. The warm-up included a game of telephone. The class split into groups of four. Each group received a sentence to whisper from the back to the front, with the first person in line writing the sentence on the whiteboard.

To learn new vocabulary, the teachers wrote nine vocabulary words on the board. Instead of telling the students the meanings, the teachers had them use dictionaries and their phones to find the meanings as a pair before sharing the answers as a class. The class practiced these new words with a running dictation activity. Pictures of 12 menu items were taped around the walls with the names of those items covered by sticky notes. In pairs, one writing student penned six categories: Appetizer, snack, dessert, main course, cake, beverage. Another student went to each word and remembered its English spelling before recounting it to the writing student. The explorer goes to each and brings the information back to the writer. Afterward, they write all of the answers down. Finally, the teachers had the students split into groups of four to create a skit in which three students order food at a restaurant or cafe and one student acts as the waiter.

It was a really fun way to begin the semester!

Blake Lapin is currently teaching at SMKN 1 Turen near Malang, East Java.