What/Where in the living room

Theme 3: My Neighborhood
Topic 3: Around Town
Lesson: Living Room Info Gap
Author: Mandy

Information Gap

Living Room at Christmas

This activity is used to help students practice asking and answering "What" and "Where" questions. The interrogatives are easy enough by themselves for students to grasp, but this activity brings them both together. This is done so students learn to differentiate the two when heard so they can answer appropriately as well as identify what the missing information so they can ask appropriately.
This activity is situated in a living during Christmas with Christmas related vocabulary. The concept of this activity can be used and adapted for any room in the house, outdoors, in a classroom, an office, etc. The vocabulary can also be changed to fit into the theme of the location.

For this activity students are working in pairs. One student gets a card with numbered circles in the living room and a box with vocabulary on the bottom. The other student gets a card with Christmas objects placed in the living room. The student that has the card with the circles and box will be asking the questions while the other will be answering. The circles in the box represent "what" because they know where that thing is but they don't know what it is. So their question would be as so, "What is on the sofa?" The words in the box will represent "where" because they know what it is, but don't know where. So their question would be, "Where is the candy?" After each question is asked the other student will look at their card and answer appropriately. Then the "asker" will write down the answer on their card.

Assessing Understanding

As the students are doing the activity, the teacher can walk around the classroom assessing their speaking and listening comprehension. A common mistake is forgetting the "The" and the beginning. (The candy is...) Also, "the" in the prepositional phrase can be missed.
For the follow up worksheet, the students first need to write four questions based on the picture on their worksheet: 2 "what" and 2 "where." After they are finished the teacher has checked, they are given the complete picture and they must write the appropriate answers according to it.