Creativity is at the heart of any fun and worthwhile English class.

To practice bringing this quality into a

class, I will design a lesson on “English Conditionals” using four principles: the random principle,
divergent thinking principle, the association principle, and the heuristics principle. There will be three
main “creative” activities in this lesson. There will be eight young adult learners taking part in this B1-
level lesson.

In the first activity, which acts as a warm-up, the students will work in four groups. The game will be in
two parts. In the first part, each group will list as many tenses as they can remember. In the second part,
they will try to guess which tense is the topic of the class. There will be a hint every 30 seconds. These
hints will be: “It has four forms.”; “It talks about regrets.”; and “ It predicts the future.”. The first group
to guess the correct “conditionals” wins. This activity uses the divergent thinking principle to not only
give students a mild reminder about the tenses they have learned, but also start the class with
enthusiasm.

The second activity applies the random principle and the heuristics principle. In groups of four, students
are shown 16 pieces of paper with 16 sentence fragments from eight complete conditional sentences.
Each of the eight fragments containing the “if” clause can easily fit with any of the remaining eight. Thus,
students will have to guess based on verb forms as well. For each group, there will be four “boxes”
drawn on the board. Each box has the name of one conditional type. Learners can only put two
complete sentences in each box. The fastest group to form all eight correct sentences and put them in
the correct boxes wins. Next, the two groups will be asked to write the sentence structure for each
conditional type for additional bonuses. Finally, the teacher will elaborate more on each form and its
usage. This activity allows the students to freely experiment and subconsciously recognize the pattern of
each conditional type. In addition, the teacher’s explanation becomes much easier thanks to the built-up
curiosity and intuition.

After the forms and their meanings have been taught, students will again work in pairs. This time, they
will prepare two conditional sentences that they think one of their peers most likely say daily, for
example, “Had I had 30 more minutes, I wouldn’t’ve missed this reflection’s deadline”. There will be two
pieces of paper for each group. They have to write the sentence on one side. The name of the person
described and group name will be on the other side. The teacher will aid each group to ensure they are
writing the correct target language. After all the groups have finished writing, the teacher will pick up
each piece to read. During this, the whole class, apart from the group that wrote the paper, will guess
the person, then give a score of 1-10 based on how funny they found the sentence. This activity is based
on the association principle. When students associate the forms they have just learned with their peers’
quirks and funny habits, they will remember longer because of the impression.