Who do you see?
Describing people with be and have
60-90 min
Standard
Beginner
Overview
In this beginner-level lesson, students will learn how to give basic descriptions of people’s physical appearance. They will focus on using the verbs be and have to talk about age, height, and physical features like hair and eyes, while learning key vocabulary for everyday descriptions (e.g., tall, short, glasses, beard).
The lesson is based on a series of image-led activities where students identify and describe different characters. Students will develop their descriptive skills through a variety of practice tasks, including sorting vocabulary and completing character identity cards. They will also participate in communicative speaking activities, such as describing family members and playing a game of Twenty Questions. The lesson wraps up with a video-based homework task to reinforce the vocabulary and structures covered in class.
Our standard lessons follow a consistent six-stage flow: warm-up, a presentation based on real content (video, text or images), a contextual language focus stage, controlled practice, a free practice session, and a final homework task.
Each lesson includes a printable student worksheet and teacher’s guide with answer keys. For digital classrooms, we provide an editable Google Slides e-lesson, that is also compatible with PowerPoint.
Warm-up
The purpose of this stage is to activate your students' existing knowledge and prepare them for the lesson's theme.
Activity 1: Students explore and discuss some basic descriptive adjectives.
Presentation
During this part of the lesson, we will introduce the main content, presenting new language and concepts through video, text or images.
Activity 2: Students match physical feature vocabulary to corresponding images to prepare for the main presentation task.
Activity 3: Students listen to the teacher's descriptions of people from a gallery and identify the correct person based on their appearance.
Activity 4: Students work in pairs to take turns describing characters from the image gallery while their partner identifies them.
Language focus
This stage of of the lesson includes a contextual, interactive activity designed for presenting the target language.
Activity 5: Students work in pairs to write three sentences describing the teacher and use their descriptions to identify the patterns of the target language.
Practice
To reinforce their understanding of the new language or concepts introduced in the lesson, the students will work on a couple of controlled practice activities.
Activity 6: Students complete a gap-fill exercise by selecting the correct forms of be or have.
Activity 7: Students practice combining descriptions of height, age, and physical features into a single sentence.
Activity 8: Students work in pairs to provide detailed oral descriptions of different characters based on visual profiles and attribute labels.
Let's talk
We move into free practice for this stage, where the students apply the language in more open-ended, communicative activities.
Activity 9: Students complete a profile for a family member and then describe that person to a partner.
Activity 10: Students work as a class or in groups to guess a secret famous person by asking yes/no questions.
Homework
Finally, we'll encourage students to extend their learning outside of the classroom to reinforce the language and concepts covered during the lesson.
Homework task: Students watch a video to review the language structures and vocabulary from the lesson.
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