Activities from authentic resources: Future tense

Recently I blogged about using the proficiency target of talking about future goals and dreams to frame your use of future tense, and I mentioned three songs that are good for highlighting this particular tense.  For your intermediate mid/high learners, here are some additional activities I have done with my students to work with future verbs.

All of these activities are in a shared Google Docs folder and include:

•  La Pasión de Iztapalapa: a news article including some future verbs, and a video news clip showing some of the activities that go on during Holy Week in Iztapalapa, one of the largest Holy Week events in the world.  I usually begin our units on talking about goals and dreams somewhere near Easter, so this fits in well.  You could do some really in-depth cultural analysis here but my favorite way to work with it is to diagram the reasons various people are subjecting themselves to the Calvary walk, which is a perfect way to recycle/emphasize por for “because of /due to.”  Ask students to find the future phrases that tell what will happen.  Then, choose an upcoming event in their lives or in your school and follow the pattern to predict what will happen there.
• Pinocho: Forget the Google Doc – I saved it as a web page and it didn’t upload well – and find the article here.  You could go so many directions here: who are these characters mentioned? what do you think the theater looks like? Draw the theater based on the description.  Identify what the man did in the past and what is going to happen with the theater in the future.  Ask for some good main idea/details analysis.  One of the docs in the folder includes some possible quiz questions for the folder.
• Radio ONU listening clozes: The document includes scripts for four Radio ONU broadcasts, the audio for which is there for you as well.  All of the documents talk about something that’s going to happen in the future.  The four selections are on different topics, a great situation for asking for main ideas/some details.  Also, see if students can find the future verbs that weren’t dropped from the script.

Please let me know if you need access to something that isn’t there or anything isn’t working.

Foto credit: Eduardo Sánchez