Gangsters and the Gold Rush

On Tuesday afternoon we should have started working on Chicago, but instead, as I already mentioned, I brought my laptop and made my students watch the US cities PowerPoint presentation that should have seen in the first session. They really liked it! They paid attention and were very concentrated on the projection (even made me questions like Why it’s called Golden Gate Bridge if it is red? or But the Chinatown is located in New York, isn’t it?). In the last part of the presentation, there were all the photographs mixed, and they had to recognize them according to what I had just explained, and they did it! All of them! That showed me that they had been paying attention to what I had showed and explained... Wonderful!
Then we kept on working on Chicago, the Windy City. I had prepared an activity about gangsters to work in groups of 4 students. It was a communicative activity in which they had to speak and compare their answers with other classmates, but the main problem was that because of having to play them the PowerPoint about US Cities, we had less time than planned and they didn’t have time to write the final summary agreed with the group.

On Friday we talked about San Francisco. The main activity that I had prepared was an exercise based on a audio story about the Gold Rush. I was a bit surprised, because I was sure that they would know what the gold rush was (I mean, in Catalan, la febre de l’or), but most of them didn’t know it. So I think that it was even more interesting for them because they could also learn something about history or general culture.