This lesson is based on an award-winning short film by John Kelly called Procrastination which explores the universal problem of procrastination. The lesson practises listening and reading, and using the gerund. The lesson also looks at how avoiding procrastination can make you happier.
Step 1
Write Procrastination on the board and ask your students if they know what it means. Give this definition:
Procrastination is avoiding doing something.
Show this Facebook procrastination log, and ask them if they think using Facebook is an example of procrastination.
Step 2
Ask students to say what Procrastination is for them using this structure:
Procrastination is checking my email account in the morning.
Put students into small groups and ask them to explain how they procrastinate.
After 5 minutes get feedback from the groups.
Step 3
Tell your students they are going to watch a short film called Procrastination in which a man explains how he procrastinates. Show them this image from the film and tell them that it represents ways in which the man puts things off. Put your students in pairs and ask them to speculate about what the activities may be.
Step 4
Show the film and ask students to check if any of the activities they do to put of doing something which they talked about Step 2. Also ask them to check what activities are presented by the image in Step 3.
Step 5
Ask students the following questions:
What advice would you give to a person to help them procrastinate less?
Put students in pairs and give them 5 minutes to come up with their Top 7 tips for beating procrastination using should and shouldn’t.
After 5 minutes get feedback from your students.
Step 6
Put your students in pairs and tell them them are both going to read half of an 7 Tips for Avoiding Procrastination. Give student A Tips 1-3 and Student B Tips 4-7. Give them 5 minutes to read their text and then get to explain their tips to their partner. Here are the texts in a Word document. Student A and Student B reading texts
You can read the 2 parts of the article in the Scribd document below.
Go can ask them to compare their tips with those in the article. Discuss the article with your students.
Step 7
Explain to your students that the article comes from a website called The Happiness Project which promotes a book of the same name in which Gretchen Rubin describes the year she spent test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier. In her book and on her website she shares her insights to help people create their own happiness project. One her insights is that avoiding procrastinations helps people become happier.
Write happiness is on the board, then complete it using the gerund, for example,
Happiness is being with people I love.
Happiness is having a lie-in at the weekend.
Happiness is listening to my favourite songs.
Happiness is helping another person.
Ask your students to write 10 true sentences about what happiness is for them.
Next they should explain what makes them happy to a partner.
Follow up
You might like to show them Things To Be Happy About a site which has 14,000 reasons to be happy
Homework
Give students the address of the The Happiness Project video page and ask them to watch some of the videos about how to become happier. In the following class they should report back on the videos they watched.
I hope you enjoy the lesson.
I would like to download the films. Is this possible? We do not have Internet accsess in the classrooms.
Your site and ideas are excellent!!
Viera
Hi Viera,
Thanks for your commnets. It’s great to know that you find the site useful.
It’s possible to download the videos using programmes such as Clipnabber:
http://clipnabber.com/
Just put the donloaded video on a pendrive and you can show them in class without an internet connection.
All the best,
Kieran
congratulations! even though the video is a bit scary, the idea of working on happiness is fantastic, I love it
Hi Stefania,
I’m really happy you like the lesson. A lot of research seems to show that avoiding procrastination is a good way to become happier. I like to include positivity building actvities in my classes. If you use the lesson, please let me know how it works.
All the best,
Kieran
I like this lesson and I like your new logo too!
Hi Steve,
I’m really happy you like the lesson and the logo which was designed by Mark Bain who designed Jamie Keddie’s site, Lessonstreams. He’s a really talented designer, I wanted something with a Saul bass influence and Mark came up with this design which I love.
All the best,
Kieran
Used the video today with a group of pre-ints and it worked really well. Got them to write some tweets defining procrastination and got a good discussion points. Very practical in terms of motivating them to begin assignments and be proactive.
Hi Luan,
Thanks a lot for letting me know how the lesson went. The way you’ve adapted it using tweets sounds fantastic. I’m really happy you found the lesson useful.
All the best,
Kieran
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Very good and useful.
Hi Adriana,
I’m really happy you like the lesson, thanks for your nice comments.
All the best,
Kieran
Thank you !
hello
i google images for procrastination and end up being here
i’d like to use the top picture (http://filmenglish.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/procrastination.png)
as a cover for my essay. i’ll put the link there!
thanks in advance. great blog anyway
Hi,
You can certainly use the image, it’s screenshot from the short film. I always credit the directors of the films I use and put a link to their site, so I’d just suggest putting a link to the director’s, Johnny Kelly, site.
All the best,
Kieran
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Hi,
Just wanted to recommend Lev Yilmaz’s Tales of Mere Existence too, there’s a great one on procrastination below, that would work well in tandem with the short film:
Thanks for the lesson by the way, got the students talking!
Hi Peter,
Thanks a lot for the recommendation, I know the video, but I didn’t want to use it as Jamie Keddie already has a great lessson using it. Here’s a link: http://lessonstream.org/2008/04/01/procrastination/
All the best,
Kieran