Life imitates art

In this Upper-Intermediate ESL lesson, students will review language related to art and fashion, and acquire new skills on how to use adjectives in the correct manner and order. 

Introduction

First, the student reads a description of spring clothes and identifies groups of adjectives.

The Royal Order of Adjectives

Types of descriptive adjectives are introduced in a graph and their correct order is presented (quantity, opinion, size, age, shape, color, proper adjective, quality). In the practice part, the student places adverbs and adjectives in the correct order before the nouns. Then, they sort out adjectives used to describe works of art according to their type (spectacular, microscopic, turquoise, countless, etc.).

Video: The Balloon Dog

The student watches the video about Jeff Koon’s Celebration series of sculptures, with the focus on The Balloon Dog. After watching the video, the student completes sentences from the video with the missing information. Then, the new words are extracted from the video (archetype, spectrum, monumental, beholder, etc.) for the student to match them with the definitions and use them to complete the sentences.

Speaking practice

In the final exercise, the student describes artwork in the pictures using adjectives they learned and placing them in the correct order.