Okay, it’s August, folks. I can’t bring myself to say “Happy August” because most of us are either trying not to think about [it-shall-not-be-named] yet, or else we have already regretfully dragged ourselves away from summer mode into lesson planning gear.

So I thought it would be nice to give you a little dose of fun that you can scoop onto an upcoming lesson whenever you need it most, whether that’s the first day of classes, or a hot sticky random Thursday when everyone (including you) is wishing they were back at the pool instead of cooped up in a classroom.

Who doesn’t like ice cream? But as I was planning for this video, I realized how much specialized vocabulary you need to know when you go to an ice cream shop! From scoop to sprinkles, and sugar cone to sundae, there is lots to learn!

So here are just a few ideas of how you can add some delicious ice-cream themed activities into one of your upcoming classes!

Vocabulary

I created a yummy-looking presentation with useful vocabulary words and phrases learners will need to be familiar with before ordering at an ice cream shop. Think of all the questions you need to answer when you go to your favorite ice cream place: Dish or cone? What kind of cone? How many scoops? All this and more is covered in these slides. Feel free to use it as-is in your own classroom!

I also checked in with ChatGPT to see what vocabulary I might have missed and was pleasantly surprised by how helpful the results were! This is the prompt I used: I'm teaching English to adults. What are some common vocabulary words specific to ice cream that they would need to use to order ice cream at an ice cream shop? You can see the results here, nicely arranged into categories of flavors, ordering phrases, etc.

Speaking Practice

At the end of my ChatGPT query, it prompted: If you’d like, I can also make a simple illustrated “ice cream shop menu” your students can practice with so they can role-play customer and cashier. Well, what a wonderful idea!

The actual menu it generated, however, was disappointingly NOT realistic and parts of it were just plain nonsense. (Why would you include a separate category in a menu with description words like sweet, cold, and creamy?) But it’s just another lesson on the usefulness of AI: the actual artifact it generated was useless, but it gave me an idea I otherwise might not have thought of!

So then it was off to find an actually useful menu image! That turned out to be tricker than I thought. . . ideally you would want to use a menu from a local ice cream shop that your students would be familiar with or would potentially visit. In my case, I wasn’t able to find a good image of the menu for any of our local ice cream places.

You might try Facebook or Yelp if your favorite local places don’t have a website, or you can also find plenty of ice cream menu images by doing a Google image search (although many of these are templates and not from real ice cream shops). In my case, I think the easiest thing to do would be just to pop over to the shop itself and snap a few photos of the menu and the ice cream flavors in the case.

Ice cream shop role play

Once you have a menu to work with, you can have students role play customer and employee! Start by brainstorming as a class what questions might be asked based on the vocabulary you’ve covered. A few ideas for the employee role:

• Are you ready to order?

• Would you like it in a dish or a cone?

• What kind of cone would you like?

• How many scoops?

And some ideas for the customer:

• Could I try the __?

• I’ll take the ___ (flavor)

• In a dish/cone please.

• I’ll have a waffle/sugar/regular cone.

Ice cream conversation

Another simple way to practice ice cream vocabulary would be to have students ask each other questions about their ice cream preferences. Here are a few ideas for conversation questions:

• What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

• What is your favorite kind of ice cream cone?

• What are your favorite sundae toppings?

• Where do you usually buy ice cream?

• What is the best ice cream shop in town?

Listening

Just for fun, I thought I would see if there were any ice-cream-themed podcasts out there and. . . well, what do you know?

Podcasts

I didn’t spend too much time perusing all the options, but a quick browse turned up a fun listen for intermediate to advanced level students: Ice Cream Monday from husband-wife team Delaney and Noah Pryor. Each week, the podcast hosts review a different flavor of ice cream from a variety of Nashville ice cream spots. Episodes run about 25 minutes and the conversation is fun to listen to. See what your students think!

Videos

For your beginners, feel free to pass along my Ice Cream Vocabulary video (mentioned above). I provide explanation in Spanish, so it’s best suited to your Spanish-speaking students.

If you’re looking for an all-English recommendation, one of my favorite YouTube channels—Learn English with Bob the Canadian—has a video on Toppings, including ice cream, pizza, and hamburger toppings. The video is 26 minutes long, but the section on ice cream toppings is only around 7 minutes.

Okay, that’s all the ice-cream related goodness I have for you this month! As always, I would love to hear how you use these ideas and adapt them to your own teaching context!

And be sure to make time to enjoy some ice cream before the summer is over!

Bethany