English with Youtubers – Niga Higa´s Draw Your Life

English with Youtubers? Are you joking!? Youtubers use horrible English and their stories are about nothing! They use F words all the time and they have no ethics! For example, the most popular Youtuber showed some anti-Jew messages on his channel. Simply put, these videos cannot be shown at schools!

A few days ago I believed this too. Then I searched for the most popular youtubers and I was surprised that it is not true. I watched a video by a guy called Niga Higa (his real name is Ryan Higa) and I was stunned. The video had a message, there were no dirty words and his English was great.

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So I decided to create a lesson plan around this video. I piloted the lesson in my classes and I have to say that I enjoyed the lessons very much. And so did the students.

The lesson plan is incredibly simple:

1. Students draw their lives.
2. Students speak about their lives.
3. Watch the video and answer the questions

Play the following video and it stops after a few seconds and the students have to answer the comprehension questions to be able to continue.

You can find the original video without the comprehension questions here

For the following activity, each student needs a piece of paper which is divided into 4 or 6 equal parts (it depends how much time you have). Ask the students to draw some important moments in their lives into each part. It is a good idea to prepare your own drawing before the lesson and demonstrate what you want your students to do.

Give your students about 5 minutes to do this. Give the time limit before they start so that the students do not spend too much time on it.

Students work in pairs and speak about their lives.

After a while, they swap their partners and speak again.

It might be a good idea to do this speaking as a 4-3-2 activity. The first time, each student speaks 4 minutes. The second time they have to say the same things in just 3 minutes and the last time they have to do it in two minutes. In this way, they will become more fluent.

At the end, I ask my students if someone wants to present their life for the whole class. There are always some volunteers who I then reward.