Mindfulness and stress management

The main goals of this ESL lesson plan are to:

• – Study stress management vocabulary including “overwhelmed,” “cope,” and “dead-end” while discussing workplace pressure and job-related stress in this advanced ESL lesson.
• – Master the subjunctive mood including base and were-subjunctive forms through dialogue identification and advice-giving exercises for adult English lessons.
• – Explore hypothetical situations by watching videos about stress management, giving advice using subjunctive structures, and engaging in conversations about mindful stress-relief activities using these English teaching materials.

In this Advanced ESL lesson, the student will talk about hypothetical situations related to stress using the subjunctive mood.

Warm-up discussion

The lesson starts with a discussion about stress and what causes it. This is followed by an exercise in which the student decides which jobs on the list are the most stressful ones and explains why.

Vocabulary: stress management

The student learns some useful words and expressions to talk about stress management by matching them with their synonyms (e.g. pressure, dead-end, cope, overwhelmed). Then, they use these words to fill in the gaps.

Grammar: the subjunctive mood

In the grammar part, the student learns what the subjunctive is, what types of subjunctive there are (base subjunctive and were-subjunctive), and how it’s used.

The student then identifies subjunctive forms in a dialogue.

Next, they pick a card with a problem explained and try to give advice/tips using the subjunctive mood.

Video: Understanding stress and how to manage it

The student watches the video Stress 101: Understanding stress and how to manage it  and tries to remember the three main causes of stress according to the video, as well as ways to overcome it.

The lesson ends with a discussion about which stress-causing and stress-releasing activities are mindful/mindless.