Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson plan for English teachers helps B2 students discuss hustle culture versus the simple joy of hobbies. This ESL class material uses a video and engaging activities to explore themes of productivity, work-life balance, and leisure.
This complete English lesson is centered around a video discussing the pressure to monetize free time. Activities include a warm-up discussion, vocabulary matching and gap-fill exercises, and video comprehension questions. The lesson also features a grammar focus on gerunds as subjects, a study of useful phrases for expressing opinions, a creative role-play, and a final writing task, encouraging students to reflect on their own relationship with hobbies and work.
Activities
- Students begin with a warm-up discussion about their own hobbies and feelings about productivity culture, activating their existing vocabulary and personal experiences on the topic.
- Learners watch a short, engaging video about the changing nature of hobbies and answer comprehension questions to ensure they grasp the main arguments and details.
- The grammar focus introduces the use of gerunds as subjects (e.g., "Painting is relaxing"), followed by a sentence transformation exercise for practical application.
- The lesson culminates in a fun role-play where students present a "pointless" hobby, and a reflective writing task where they create a "hobby manifesto," applying the lesson's language.
Vocabulary focus
This lesson focuses on vocabulary related to productivity, work, and leisure. Students will learn and practice terms such as 'side hustle,' 'downtime,' 'niche,' 'trajectory,' 'antidote,' 'frivolous,' and 'hustling.' The exercises help learners use these words in context to discuss modern work-life balance and the value of recreation.
Grammar focus
The main grammar point is the use of gerunds (-ing verb forms) as the subject of a sentence. Students will learn how this structure is used to talk about activities in a general way (e.g., "Learning a new skill is fun"). A guided practice exercise helps them transform sentences to use this form confidently in their own speaking and writing.
