By Kirsty Raphael

Build an eclectic, eccentric family tree using famous people from your country. Teach the students about your weird and wonderful fellow countrymen and women and get them chatting in English! Then let them get imaginative and make their own family trees.

Topic: Family vocabulary/describing people/learning about the ALT’s country

Lesson plan based on p.58 of New Horizon 1 (1st Grade JHS). “Who’s Bob?” “He’s my brother”.

Example Family Tree Worksheet

Family Tree Lesson Plan (no longer available)

Level: JHS
Class Size:  15-20 works best I think, but you could do it with more or less.

Because sometimes it’s nice to base a lesson on the textbook but not actually use it!

I had the idea for this activity during my very first 1st grade class when one of the students asked (in all seriousness) if I’d ever met Daniel Radcliffe or “the girl who plays Hermione”. I decided to play on the misguided idea that all foreigners from a particular country know each other, by making myself an imaginary family tree using famous people from my country. The students really enjoyed showing me how much they knew and learning more about people from my country—the good, the bad and the ugly! Also, they were involved, laughing (and speaking!) the whole way through the lesson, which was nice. One student did think I was being serious, even though one of my ‘family members’ was Wally from Where’s Wally!

1) Introduce the people from your country using pictures. Let the students tell you what they already know then give them some extra information/funny anecdotes about the person.

2) Have the students collect the information they need to build your family tree (can be done in many different ways—I used the worksheet attached, with pictures of the famous people and blanks they had to fill by asking each other using the target structure from the textbook).

3) Have the students help you build a family tree on the board using the pictures from 1. This will help them visualise the ideas and also feel like there was a point to collecting the information, because they actually ‘made something with it’.

4) If you have some spare time at the end or want to run the idea over into a 2nd lesson have the students create their own famous family trees with manga characters, people from history, celebrities etc. Have them teach you about famous Japanese people. If you are doing it in a separate lesson you could ask them to bring in magazine clippings, drawings and so on to make it a bit more fun.

You could easily adapt this idea for other grade levels at JHS and SH (e.g. make the information they need to find more advanced or change the grammar structure used).