Are you a plant lover?
I am a plant lover! When I am not teaching (or preparing classes), I spend a lot of time taking care of my plants and flowers. If you take a look at my instagram you’ll see hundreds of pictures of plants and flowers. Not all of them are from my private “collection” but most of them are.
Actually plants are extremely helpful to deliver a lot of contents in class, grammar or topic discussion under this theme can be adapted to all levels of knowledge.
Starting with the quick questions “Do you like plants and flowers?”, “Are there plants in your house?” and then getting into the numbers, both cardinal and ordinal. “How many flowers do you see in the image?”, “What is the first plant in the line? Can you please describe it.” (when showing a picture).
We can work a wide range of adjectives, calling the attention to the fact that in English the adjectives have an order in a sentence that is: quantity, quality/opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, purpose.
Ex:This is such a beautiful, big, green and white, American, purificatory plant (I don't know if it is American, for the moment I am just a plant lover not a plant expert ;))
Very important and much different from Portuguese and Spanish, the adjectives come before the nouns. In English we say “beautiful, green plant” and in Spanish or Portuguese we would say “plant beautiful and green” and there is not an adjective order to be respected.
And still talking about adjectives, we can also work the adjectives’ degrees: normal, comparative and superlative.
Ex: This is such a tall plat. It's taller than me. In fact, this is the tallest plant that I have.
And adverbs, and verb tenses, and conditionals, basically all contents can be delivered with the help of plants, literally speaking.
It it rains I will spend more time at home with my plants. (1st conditional).
If I had more money I would buy more plants (2nd conditional).
I would have adopted more plants if I had bought a bigger house (3rd conditional).
During the first months of the pandemic, the "plant lover movement" has grown a lot in the social media, specially in Instragram where there are amazing pictures of plants and flowers. All over the world people have started to fill their houses with beautiful plants. URBANJUNGLEBLOG is one of the most amazing pages that collects and posts pictures of plants from all over the world. Not only the plants but also the pictures are awesome. People were requested to stay at home and one of the ways to make it a lighter experience was growing plants and start sharing their pictures in social media. And the love for plants started to grow and grow as well as the plants.
My love from plants is older than this but I confess that its number have increased quite a lot this year. I feel so much better in the morning when I walk through the house and see all the different species there waiting for my “good morning”.
And you, are you plant lover?