FRESH GUACAMOLE About this activity - LessonStream Membership

LESSON PLAN

     FRESH
     GUACAMOLE

About this activity

In this video activity, students predict the missing ingredients from an unusual recipe.

▶ Language level: A2
▶ Main task: Recipe gap fill
▶ Topics: Food & cookery
▶ Language focus: Imperative form verbs; describing a process

 For this activity, you will need the following:
 • An image of a traditional Mexican molcajete (see next page)
 • A short film by animator PES (See below)
 • A worksheet for students (page 5)

 Note: For all materials and discussion, please go to the corresponding
 page in the Resources section:

 https://membership.lessonstream.com/resources/fresh-guacamole/

The short film

Fresh Guacamole is a 2012 short film by animator PES. It was nominated for the Best Animated
Short Film at the 85th Academy Awards.

2

Activity outline

1. Show students a picture of a molcajete (see
image). Ask the following questions:

• Do you know what this is?
• Do you know where it is from?
• Do you know what it is used for?

Image by Tortillovsky: https://bit.ly/3lpphDj

  Note: This is a Mexican molcajete – a stone
  tool which is similar to the mortar and
  pestle. It is used to crush and grind spices
  and to prepare salsas.

2. Tell students that you are going to give them a traditional Mexican recipe that requires a
molcajete for preparation. Can they guess the dish? (Answer = guacamole).

3. In pairs, ask students to predict as many verbs as possible that they expect to find in the
recipe for fresh guacamole. Ask them to consider what form the verbs will appear in. (Answer =
basic form verbs like chop, add, slice, etc.)

4. Invite students to share their answers. Write the most useful verbs on the board or screen. Did
they get the difficult ones – remove, squeeze and mash?

5. Give out copies of the Fresh Guacamole worksheet on page 5. Ask students to underline all of
the basic form verbs (take, cut, remove, etc.). Then ask students to predict the missing
ingredients by filling in the gaps.

  Notes:
  • If anyone asks why there is a baseball at the bottom of the worksheet, act surprised and
    say that you have absolutely no idea.
  • You might want to let students access bilingual dictionaries as they do the gap fill.
  • You can put students into teams for task and turn it into a competition.

6. Go over the worksheet and find out how students have filled in the gaps. Although you should
give language feedback as and when necessary, do not tell students whether or not their
answers are correct at this stage. (Note: they will almost all be wrong in any case!)

7. Tell students that the recipe is based on a short film. When they see the short film, they will be
able to correct their answers. Play Fresh Guacamole by PES.

8. Find out if anyone guessed any of PES’s ingredients. The answers are on the next page. It is
possible that they will have got the last one correct (chips).

FRESH GUACAMOLE                                                                  JAMIE KEDDIE, 2021

3

 Actual guacamole ingredients:

 1.   Take a ripe avocado, cut it in half and remove the stone.
 2.   Scoop out the green flesh with a spoon and put it in a molcajete.
 3.   Peel an onion, chop it and add it to the molcajete.
 4.   Add a chopped tomato.
 5.   Add the juice of a lime.
 6.   Remove the seeds from a chilli pepper. Slice it finely and add it to the molcajete.
 7.   Season the mixture with salt and pepper.
 8.   Mash all the ingredients together in the molcajete.
 9.   Transfer the guacamole to a bowl and serve with chips (or nachos) for dipping.

 PES’s alternative ingredients:

   • A hand grenade
   • A pool ball
   • A baseball
   • White dice
   • A tomato pin cushion
   • Green dice
   • A green golf ball
   • A green Trivial Pursuit playing piece, filled with six green wedges
   • A green light bulb
   • Monopoly houses
   • Sequence from a the King and Queen from a chess board
   • Casino chips

  Notes:
  • The video makes a visual references the verb to dice which means to chop food into small
    cubes.
  • Traditionally, dice is the plural of die. However, in informal contemporary English, dice can
    be both singular or plural.

FRESH GUACAMOLE                                                                 JAMIE KEDDIE, 2021

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Follow up

Introduce students to the following connecting words and phrases which will allow them to
describe a process.

  • First of all …
  • Secondly …
  • After that …
  • Then …
  • The next thing that you have to do is …
  • Once …
  • Once you have …
  • And finally …

On the corresponding Resources page, you will find another video to introduce students to some
of these phrases. The video is by Michèle Besch – one of my ex-trainees – who uses drawings to
bring the recipe to life.

Students now have enough language to create a video to demonstrate how to prepare a simple
recipe or their favourite dish. This can be done as a homework task. Recipes can be serious or
they can make reference to nonsense ingredients in the PES spirit.

FRESH GUACAMOLE                                                            JAMIE KEDDIE, 2021

5

Are you hungry for Fresh Guacamole?

Can you predict the missing ingredients?

  1. Take a ripe …………………………, cut it in half and remove the
     …………………………

  2. Scoop out the green flesh with a spoon and put it in a
     molcajete.

  3. Peel an …………………………, chop it and add it to the molcajete.

  4. Add a chopped ………………………….

  5. Squeeze a ………………………… and add the juice.

  6. Remove the seeds from a …………………………. Slice it finely and
     add it to the molcajete.

  7. Season the mixture with ……………………… and ………………………….

  8. Mash all the ingredients together in the molcajete.

  9. Transfer the guacamole to a bowl and serve with
     ………………………… for dipping.

FRESH GUACAMOLE                                       JAMIE KEDDIE, 2021