What should they have done?

Objective & content

By the end, B1+ pupils can comment on past mistakes and give advice with should have, shouldn't have and could have + past participle, and say what they would do with If I were him, I'd ...: He shouldn't have left his phone on the seat. He should have put it in his pocket. The bank is 15 projectable slides: a how-to slide, then 14 everyday mistakes (a phone left on the bus, a burnt pizza, a forgotten birthday, a dog that ran out of an open gate...), each with a picture, one sentence saying what went wrong and the useful phrases.

Pedagogical guide

Use it as a five-minute warm-up on a structure pupils find hard to use spontaneously. Each slide is a situation every teenager recognises, so pupils have real advice to give and often disagree about whose fault it was. Finding two pieces of advice per picture makes pairs use the form more than once, and choosing the best advice as a class gives a reason to listen. It works well after What happened here?, its partner deck, which practises guessing what happened. The slides are interchangeable: show one per lesson.

Suggested procedure

1. (1 min) Show the how-to slide and read the example together.
2. (3 min) Show one picture and read what went wrong. In pairs, pupils find two things the person should or shouldn't have done.
3. (1 min) Pairs share their advice and the class chooses the best one.

Adaptations

• [S] Give pupils the verb for each piece of advice (check, put, set an alarm), so they only need to build should have + past participle.
• [A] Pupils decide whose fault it was and say why (It wasn't her fault, because ...), or tell a partner about a mistake they made themselves and what they should have done.

Materials & prerequisites

A projector or screen; the bank is a 16:9 PDF, one slide per page, with no printing needed. Assumes the past participles of common verbs and should for advice.