Lexis › Programme › Unit 03 › Lesson 01

Four places on a map

A2 Where I'm From
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Draw the places that made you, then try to talk about them in the past tense. Today is a measurement, not a lesson — and the gaps are the useful part.

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01
Warm-up · 5 min

Draw four places

On one sheet of paper, draw four places that matter to you. Badly is fine — stick figures and boxes.

  • Where you were born
  • A place you went every summer as a child
  • A place you left
  • A place you would go back to tomorrow

Two minutes. Then talk about all four for three minutes, with no preparation.

Baseline · Place words

Before you talk, a quick check on what you already have. Match each word to what it describes.

Where the land meets the sea
Land outside towns — fields, farms, few people
The edge of a city, where it stops being the city
High ground, but not high enough to be mountains
Smaller than a town, often one shop
Where one country ends and another starts
Away from the sea, towards the middle
Teacher note A baseline, not a taught set. Note what she does not know — the syllabus gives this unit ~130 word families of geography and journey vocabulary, and this tells you which end of that band to start from.
Teacher note Correct nothing. Log everything. Listen for: present simple used for past events (I go there every summer when I was a child), missing was/were, regular -ed given two syllables, and irregular verbs regularised (goed, taked, thinked).
02
Input & Noticing · 10 min

Two people, two places

Aline · a village on the coast

I was born in a village on the coast, about two hours from the city. There were maybe four hundred people. My grandmother lived there and we stayed with her every summer until I was fourteen.

We walked to the beach every morning. I learned to swim there. My brother broke his arm on those rocks in 1998 and my mother never let us go back to that part.

We moved to the city when I was fifteen. I did not want to go. I cried for about a week, and then I forgot about it, the way you do.

Karim · a city on a border

I grew up on the outskirts of a city right on the border. You could see the other country from the roof of our building. We crossed it twice a year to visit my father's family, and it took four hours because of the queue.

I hated it as a child. It was flat, it was hot, and nothing happened. I left at nineteen and I did not go back for eleven years.

Then I went back last spring, for a funeral, and it was completely different. Or I was. I walked around for two days and I could not decide which.

Discovery Check

Both texts are in the past. Answer from the evidence on the page — nothing has been taught yet.

1. Find walked, stayed, crossed, hated. What do they have in common?

2. Now find was, grew, broke, went, took. What is different about these?

3. Aline writes I did not want to go, not I did not wanted. Where is the past marked?

4. Say walked, stayed and hated aloud. How many different sounds does the -ed have?

Teacher note Question 4 is the unit's phonology target arriving early, as noticing rather than instruction. Do not teach the rule here — Lesson 3 does that, and it lands better if she has already heard the three sounds herself.
03
Focus on Form · 8 min

Was, were, and the shape of a past sentence

The verb you cannot avoid

PositiveNegativeQuestion
I / he / she / itwaswasn'tWas I…?
you / we / theywereweren'tWere you…?
therethere was / there werethere wasn't / weren'tWas there…? / Were there…?

Note the third row. There was and there were are Unit 2's structure moved into the past, and the agreement rule is identical: singular takes was, plural takes were.

There were maybe four hundred people. ✓

Open Cloze

One word per gap — all forms of be in the past. Check singular or plural before you write.

My grandmother born in a village on the coast. There about four hundred people, and there only one shop. Her parents fishermen. It not an easy place to grow up — the winters hard and there no work. you ever there? No, I never went.

04
Controlled Practice · 14 min

When it happened

Time markers for the past

These place a story in time. Without them a past narrative floats. Tap each to hear the stress.

Time markers

Match each time marker to the kind of information it gives. Two of them look similar and do different jobs.

A period of life, no dates
When something stopped
Something repeated, not once
A single year, exactly
Measured from something else already mentioned
How long it lasted
The age it happened
Chronology

Aline's life, scrambled. Put the six events in the order they happened.

1
2
3
4
5
6
05
Communicative Task · 15 min

Talk about your four places

Task card · Speaking · Diagnostic

Your four drawings, three minutes, no preparation.

Talk about all four places in the past. Your teacher does not correct — they write down every past-tense verb you use, right or wrong.

  • Say where each place is, when you were there, and one thing that happened.
  • Use at least four time markers from Phase 04.
  • When you do not know a past form, guess out loud. A guess is data; a silence is not.
Teacher note Write down every past-tense verb, in the form she says it. The list matters more than the errors: it tells you which of the ~30 high-frequency irregulars she already has, and Lesson 4 is built from the ones she does not.
Before you start

Two decisions, made now rather than mid-sentence.

1. You want to say you did not want to leave. Which is right?

2. You want to ask where your teacher grew up. Which is right?

06
Feedback & Reflection · 5 min

The list

Self-assessment

Your teacher has the list of every past verb you used. Answer before you see it.

1. How many past-tense verbs do you think you used in three minutes?

2. What did you do when you did not know a past form?

Teacher note Show her the list. Circle the irregulars she got right — usually more than she expects — and the ones she regularised. Those two sets are Lesson 4's content, and she should see them come from her own three minutes.
07
Wrap-up & Bridge · 3 min

Before Lesson 2

Exit check

One question.

1. Where is the past marked in Did you go?

Informal input, before Lesson 2. Watch one Modern Family episode with English subtitles. Every time someone tells a story about the past, note the very first thing they say — the phrase that opens it.

Three openers is enough. Copy them exactly.