Materials: Guidelines

Decide whether to preteach / elicit vocabulary or whether to ask students to use dictionaries. Once they are conversant with the bold words in the initial sentences, they can ask each other the questions in pairs or small groups. Before they start, you might want to insist that they ask additional "follow-on" questions using the list of wh-question words listed in bold writing below. As well as introducing the general topic and some of the words, this activity helps to warm up the class.

After discussion has gone on long enough, you can draw attention to the second group of sentences. Here students will see a list of possibly dangerous items on the left, and a series of "1st conditional warnings" on the right. You might need to explain the meaning of the word "Warning" but it souldn't really be necessary to explain the grammar at this stage. Of course, if you really want to you can.

Students should match the items to the warnings fairly quickly and then compare answers until eventually everybody has the same answer. At this stage, you may want to just point out the key features of a first conditional sentence before they settle down to writing their own examples of dangerous items and the danger they pose. It's a good idea to monitor the writing and iron out any major errors as they occur.

Once everybody has two or three examples of their own they can try reading out their warnings and see if other class members can guess the items that they are connected with. You may want to demonstrate this with the help of one of the stronger students.

You may want to combine this worksheet with another worksheet on a similar theme, dangerous, also available on this site.

You have a choice of two different methods of getting this handout to your printer. It all depends on whether your computer has "Adobe Acrobat Reader" installed. If it has, then this would be the recommended method for printing out the worksheet. Try selecting the "PDF (Adobe Acrobat)" link below. If all goes well, a new application window should appear including a print button, which when selected will print out one copy.

If, on the other hand you do not have "Adobe Acrobat" select the "HTML (web page)" link below. (Also, this method is recommended for users of Netscape Navigator, which seems to have trouble interacting with the Acrobat program like this.) If all goes well, a new browser window will open, from which you can either click the "print button" on the toolbar or open the "File" menu, select "Print" and then adjust the "Print Dialog Box" to your own preferences.

The final link below is to enable you to print this "instruction page" if you want to. Click on the link, and when the page appears on a new screen you will be able to print it using the browser's "print button" or "file menu". After printing, close the window again so that you can continue to navigate around the site.

For teacher training courses, English courses in Bristol UK and free interactive exercises, visit The Language Project Website.