Tasks: to discover the origins of the festival
to tell the difference between facts and hoaxes
to describe a practical joke
Preparation: make copies of the worksheet (1 copy for each student)
Skills: speaking, reading
Language: general grammar and vocabulary
Sources: Task – adapted from en.wikipedia.org – the FREE encyclopaedia
■ Write April Fool’s Day on the board and elicit Prima Aprilis as its Polish equivalent. Elicit the meaning of the phrase and/or some facts about the day, e.g. the fact that we play tricks on people (and we are allowed to do so).
■ Ask whether your Ss know the history behind the festival. Accept any ideas (do not evaluate them).
■ Distribute the worksheets and ask the Ss to read the text in Task . After a while ask a few comprehension questions (see below). Solve any language problems.
questions
[suggested comprehension questions:]
· Do we know when the first April Fool’s Day was celebrated? à NO, the origins are unclear.
· When were the New Year celebrations longer: before or after 1582? à BEFORE, they took eight days.
· People who accepted the new calendar were called fools. True or False? à FALSE. Those who did not accept the calendar became known as fools.
· Do people get a day off on April 1st? à NO. Because it is not a public holiday.
■ Explain the meaning of the word HOAX. Explain that there is a long tradition of newspapers publishing hoaxes (=false information) on April 1st. One of the first and most famous television hoaxes was broadcast in 1957 on BBC. People watching BBC on that day could see that spaghetti grows on trees somewhere in Europe. Explain that in this task Ss are going to have a look at some hoaxes from 2004.
■ Pre-teach some new/difficult words. Point out that ‘SHEF technology’ is pronounced exactly as ‘chef’.
■ Explain that all the statements come from newspapers and magazines which were published on April 1st, 2004. Most of them are hoaxes, i.e. untrue, made up, while 2 of them are facts. Still, people thought that they were hoaxes as well. Your Ss’ task is to choose two statements which they think are true.
Key
Genuine events that had been interpreted as April Fools:
· The National Archives (UK) revealed that during the Cold War, there were British plans to use chickens to regulate the temperature in a nuclear bomb.
· The Associated Press reported that Google would start an e-mail service with 1 GB of storage for each user.
The remaining statements are all hoaxes.
■ Elicit a synonym of the expression ‘practical joke’ (‘trick’). Give one example of a practical joke, e.g. when you say to somebody that his/her shoelaces are undone.
■ Give your Ss a minute to think about a situation when they have played a practical joke on somebody. Divide your Ss into pairs. Make sure that in each pair there is at least one student who has played a practical joke.
■ Go quickly through the questions and answers in this task, solving any problems your Ss may have.
■ Ask them to describe the practical joke they have played. Explain that the questions on the worksheet are to help them, but they don’t have to answer all of them. They can add some extra information.
■ When your Ss are ready, ask a few of them to describe their practical jokes. Next time you meet, again choose a few students to talk about their tricks.
[Students’ own answers]
■ [TASK ] You can discuss the use of tenses in this exercise. Most of the statements are written in the Present Simple tense (the so-called historic present). You can ask your Ss to re-write the statements in the Past Simple tense, and thus practise the Reported Speech.
o e.g. The Sun reported that British Police were fitting hawks with speed cameras…
■ [TASK ] You can ask one student to describe his/her practical joke twice (during two lessons rather than on the same day). The performance of the student describing the trick for the second time will probably be much better.
Designed by Bartosz Michałowski for Pearson Longman 2
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