The History of Weddings - Lessons in Digital Literacy

Marriage and weddings play a very important and specific role in our lives and societies and yet we often take them for granted.

In this lesson, students explore the role of marriage and the symbolism embedded in the wedding ceremony. They do this by sharing their opinions and exploring an infographic about the history of weddings.

You can see a sample copy of the students' materials here: http://bit.ly/weddings-demo

In the lesson, students will explore their opinions about weddings and marriage and discover some new information about the origins of various customs.

The materials in this plan can be used in different ways. The first six tasks can be used independently as a simple reading, vocabulary and discussion lesson. The final four tasks can then be used selectively depending on the aims of your lesson.

This lesson contains ten tasks:

• A vocabulary task to help prepare students for the lesson.
• An image-based task to get students sharing about the theme of weddings in their own culture.
• A discussion task which gets students sharing their existing opinions about marriage.
• A reading task which develops students’ abilities to scan text for specific information.
• A reading task which encourages students to look more carefully at the information.
• A discussion task which gives students the opportunity to formulate a personal response to the information they have studied.
• A social research task which gets students to create online questionnaires and analyze and formulate the results.
• A research task which gets students to check the validity of the information in the infographic.
• A research task which gets students to look for parallel information about divorce.
• A writing task that helps students synergise what they have learned.

The download files include:

• A complete step by step lesson plan with answer key and links to a digital student and teacher copy for use on digital devices
• Photocopiable worksheets