What would you do if...?

Objective & content

By the end, B1- pupils can say what they would do in a tricky situation and give a reason, with the second conditional: If I found a wallet, I would take it to the police. The bank is 17 projectable slides: a how-to slide, then 16 everyday dilemmas for teenagers (a wallet in the street, too much change in a shop, a friend who wants to copy your homework), each with a picture and five sentence starters.

Pedagogical guide

Use it as a five-minute warm-up that gets the whole class talking. Every dilemma has more than one honest answer, so pupils disagree, and disagreeing is what makes them explain: I wouldn't, because .... The starters on every slide keep the grammar in front of them, so the effort goes into the reason, not the verb form. The slides are interchangeable: show one or two per lesson.

Suggested procedure

1. (1 min) Show the how-to slide and read the example together.
2. (2 min) Show one dilemma and read it together. Pupils think alone, then talk in pairs.
3. (2 min) Some pairs tell the class. Who would do the same? Hands up.

Adaptations

• [S] Give two choices (keep it or give it back) and pupils choose one and say why.
• [A] Change the situation (What would you do if it was your best friend?) or pupils invent a new dilemma for the class.

Materials & prerequisites

A projector or screen; the bank is a 16:9 PDF, one slide per page, with no printing needed. Assumes the past simple and would + verb.