Meditation and the brain

This ESl lesson plan is dedicated to the topic of meditation and relaxation. Students learn relevant vocabulary to talk about the way they like to relax and synonyms of the word relax. They watch a short video and practise the new vocabulary with various communicative activities. You can combine it with the following lessons “Cold exposure and resilience: The Wim Hof method“, “Health myths“, “Phrasal verbs: health“.

Vocabulary: After an initial discussion, students learn vocabulary to talk about common ways of relaxing (take a stroll, cuddle, pamper yourself). Then they work on different ways to talk about relaxation (unwind, de-stress, take it easy, chill out). After completing the 2 activities students use their newly-learned vocabulary to talk about the ways they relax.
Listening: Students complete a multiple-choice pre-listening activity with words and expressions from the video and then watch the video “Hack your brain’s default mode with meditation”. In the first activity, students complete the benefits of meditating with the verbs given. Then they watch the video until the end and answer the questions given in their own words. There is an extension activity about prepositions (obsess about, think about, depend on, focus on).
The worksheet concludes with a role-play activity – students take the roles of a person who is keen on meditating and a person who is very stressed out, but sceptical about trying meditation.
Homework: 3 research topics are suggested which aim to develop the topic further. The topics, combined with the additional resources provided on theenglishflows.com provide plenty of extra opportunities for contact with topic-related vocabulary in order to reinforce and enrich it