Celebrity New Year’s Resolutions

It’s Thursday. Christmas is on a Monday. If you have reasonable and sane working conditions, you’ll have next week off. If you’re a reasonable teacher, you’ve already had your special Christmas class and you’re trying to figure out what to do for that very last hour and a half. Games? Absolutely. You could go and print a bunch of games from our library and play them one after another, even. Nobody is going to fault you for that. But don’t forget, there’s one last topical topic left for you to tackle. New Year’s resolutions! Think about using this simple celebrity New Year’s resolutions activity to pass the time while giving your students some new ways to express express intentions, commitments, and actions associated with making plans or setting resolutions for the future.

Think about using this activity in one of the following ways:

1.  Give your students some time to finish each of the sentences on the worksheet. Then, starting from the first box, let the students present their full sentence to the class. If a student has a grammatically correct and original sentence, they earn a point. You could also vote on the best sentence, for an extra bonus point.
2.  If you are in a classroom setting, you could have students write the ends of the sentences on bits of paper. Then, put all the bits of paper in the middle of the table. Choose one at random and read it to the class. The first student to give the correct celebrity earns a point. The original writer must confirm the answer, of course.
3. Give a 30-second or 1-minute time limit for each card. Let students come up with their best end to the sentence. Students present their full sentences to the class and the class votes on their favorite. The winner gets a point.

This is also good practice for some verb + verb combinations – namely which verbs need to be followed with a gerund or to + infinitive.
*Be careful with “commit to” as it actually needs a gerund! (or a noun)