How it works
The four questions the lesson leaves them with
Is the person it is about laughing?
Not smiling. Laughing.
Would you say it to them with nobody else there?
A line that needs an audience was aimed at the audience.
Could they say the same thing back to you?
If the same words about you would not be funny, it was not an even swap.
Did it stop the first time they asked?
Everything before the first ask can be a mistake. Everything after it is a choice.
A joke passes all four. The questions come out of the starter rather than being handed down.
Six short moments go on the board and pairs put each one under joke, not a joke, or cannot tell. Nobody is told what to look for.
Inside each pair the words barely change. What changes is who was laughing, who the nickname belonged to, and whether it stopped. Everything the form sorted them by was somewhere other than the words, and that is where the four questions come from.
It says two things at once: I did not mean to hurt you, and now stop talking about it. The first half is usually true and would be an apology on its own. Students then write what they would really say instead, for the person who said it and for the person it was about, and the sheets get marked by somebody else against three questions.
This one can sit close to something already going on in your form. Do not use a real incident or a real name, and do not run it the day after one. One slide lists the subjects students in the research put over the line, and one of them is somebody who has died, so the guide says to check who that would land on first. Nothing students write is collected or read out, and the deck says so before anybody writes anything.
Get the lesson
Four pages to print: two for you, the sheet they write on, and one set of eight moment cards. Nothing on the cards names anybody, so they can go out as they are.
The lesson slides
Eighteen slides: the six moments to sort, the three pairs, the four questions, what the sentence is doing, the words to use instead, the marking round and the exit ticket.
Download PDFTeacher resource pack
Five pages: the hour with timings against the slides, the answer key in two parts, the sheet they write on, and eight moment cards.
DownloadNew resources go up as they are made, and Volume Two is on the way for the activities that have one. Leave your email and you will get one message when it lands, and nothing else.
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