Seminar "Success for Me. Success for you. Success for Everyone"
учебно-методический материал по английскому языку (9 класс)

                                           SEMINAR

Topic: Success for Me. Success for You. Success for Everyone.
Teacher: Valentina lavorciuc
Date: 11.02.2025
Classroom Activities:

I. Warming up Activity: Your Personal Best
Ask students to think back over their lives and identify a moment when everything was great, a moment that they believe they were performing at their personal best.

II. Group work: In groups students think of the definition of success, then they have to decide for the best one.
Success is ...

III. Group work: Students are given other definitions of success. They discuss about them and choose the one that most closely reflect their own opinions. They have to justify their choice.

1. "Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get." (B. R. Hayden)
"Success is a journey, not a destination." (Ben Sweetland)
"Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."(W.Churchill)
2. "All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don't discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others." (Danny Thomas)
"Success does not consist of never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time." (George Bernard Shaw)
3. "A strong, positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success." (Joyce Brothers)
"Failure is success if we learn from it." (Malcolm S. Forbes)
"True success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful." (Paul Sweeney)
4. "The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people."
(Theodore Roosevelt)
"The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price." (Vince Lombardi)

IV. Real-life situations: Students have to reflect about how success is defined in real terms. They are given a list of situations in which people have achieved some success. They have to decide which situations are examples of true success.

Which of these situations is an example of success, in your opinion?
• A man loses his job and sets up a new business which goes on to become a multi-million pound enterprise. But along the way, he becomes so obsessed with his new company that he neglects his family and they leave him.
• A boy loses a leg in a road accident. He goes back to school and passes his exams the same year.
• A sportsman wins Olympic gold in the marathon. Although the tests are all negative, he knows in his heart he was taking performance enhancing drugs.
• Some students pass their exams very easily. They had worked very hard but the teacher had also given them the answers on the morning of the test.
• A single mother with no free time gets a part-time job as a secretary. She loses it within a week and goes back to care for her children full-time.
• A film director wins five Oscars for a film that has shocked his local Scottish city community because it gives a false impression of their history.
• A young scientist discovers something that could become a cure for cancer. At the moment, it is uncertain if his discovery will amount to anything.

V. Pre-watching:
Students are shown some pictures of a person and they have to make predictions about the man in the pictures. What is his occupation, if he has a family, if he is successful.
Continue the statements:
1. I was born...
2. The stairs right in front of me are ...
3. If I fall down ...
4. Is losing failing? ...
Watching: Video - A message of hope from Nick Vujicic
After watching activities:
• Students have to answer the question: Is Nick a successful person? Why?
• Students have to pick up from the video personality traits Nick possesses, challenges Nick has to face

VI. Individual work: My own success: Students think of their own life and recall situations when they had success. They have to rank them in terms of proudest, most difficult to achieve, most useful.
My own success                                        

VII. In this activity students have to define success ...
- for their school
- for themselves for their country for their parents
VIII.
In this activity students have to complete the monologue taken from the movie „Fame". They have to complete the definition of success given by a 16 year-old student. The students' task is to fill in the gaps with words or a whole sentence. Then they check by listening.
Video: Kay Panabaker - Success (from Fame the movie)

IX. Clustering: Students represent success through a picture or scheme.

X. Activity: Students are shown pictures of famous persons and their task is to speak about these people giving information they know about them.

XI. Watching video: Famous People That Failed To Then Succeed. „Failure is the first step to success." Students watch this video about famous persons that failed before becoming famous and they speak about them.
Variations: The teacher gives every group 3 personalities from the video and they have to speak about them.

XII. Group work: Famous people: Students speak about a famous person that
• they admire
• inspires them
• that are important for humanity
• are good role models in life
• they resent

XIII. Creative work: Students have to create their own celebrity. They have to speak about:
- the story of their success;
- difficulties they had to face on their way to success;
- the domain of their activity.

XIV. The Sinking Ship Debate.

Students have to imagine they are a famous person on a sinking ship with a group of other famous people. There is only one very small lifeboat with four places in it. They must decide who should go in the lifeboat. The sea is very cold and there are sharks! They have to tell the other people on the ship who they are and why they should go in the lifeboat. They must give good reasons. For example, they can help entertain people in the boat or they know how to sail the boat and find land.
The name of my famous person is………………………………………………….
They make use of the next expressions:
I should go in the lifeboat because………………………………………………….

I can………………………………………………………………………………….
I am good at………………………………………………………………………….
I can help people by………………………………………………………………….
I know how to………………………………………………………………………..
If we have problems in the lifeboat, I can…………………………………………...

Other activities on this topic:
• Celebrity interviews: The teacher collaborate with his students on a list of famous people, including movie stars, politicians, sportsmen, etc. Every student chooses a famous person and working in pairs they interview each other. To make the activity more competitive students can vote for the best performed interview.
• Write your own caption: Bring students pictures of people from magazine ads. Give a picture to each student, have the student fold up the bottom of the picture and write something the person might be thinking or saying. Put all the pictures up on the board and let everyone come up and take a look.
• Letter to a famous person
• Success Recipe
• Set a goal: students have to figure out steps they need to take to achieve their goal.
• Idioms with Success:
Here is a story about a man who was an accomplished businessman and happily gave advice to young people whom he mentored. Students read the story and use the definitions provided below to help with understanding. They read the story one time to understand the gist without using the idiom definitions. On their second reading, they use the definitions to help them understand the text while learning new idioms.

John's Keys to Success

John is an incredibly accomplished and successful businessman. As such, he is quite popular as a mentor. He enjoys showing young professionals the ropes. The first thing he says is that his career has certainly not always been smooth sailing. In fact, he learned a number of lessons along the way. "First and foremost," John said "don't believe that success is ever mana from heaven." He said that everyone he had met had a similar rags to riches story, and that a lot of hard work had gone into the success.
John believes in hard work, but also in recognizing the right opportunities. "It's absolutely essential to never spread yourself too thin" John advised. "If you have too many irons in the fire, you'll certainly miss out on real opportunity" he continued. "I've seen people as busy as a bee who never really seem to do anything" he pointed out. The more I thought about this advice, the more I understood what he was saying. If you put on your thinking cap, you'll realize that it's impossible to really concentrate if you have to worry about fifty different things. Another important lesson was that it's important to know which side your bread is buttered on and make sure to give that activity your full attention. In other words, you need to ride the gravy train. Don't start looking for new challenges if everything is working out for the best!

John stressed that the most important ability of any successful entrepreneur was to have the presence of mind to not only take advantage of an opportunity, but also to keep your eye on the ball. Some people are quick on the uptake, but then they get bored. It's important to be consistent, but not spread yourself too thin. Finally, make sure to never show your hand to your opponents. In any case, that's how to be successful according to John.

Idioms Used in the Story
smooth sailing = an easy life with no problems
know which side one's bread is buttered on = to understand what is most important for oneself
ride the gravy train = to make money by doing something that is already proven to be successful
keep one's eye on the ball = to concentrate and continue doing well
mana from heaven = surprise riches
from rags to riches = from poor to rich
show someone the ropes = to explain and show by example how something is done properly
as busy as a bee = very busy (also busy as a beaver)
work out for the best = to end with the best possible result
quick on the uptake = to understand very quickly
have the presence of mind to do something = to be aware and able to grasp an opportunity
show one's hand = to show others what advantages you have in a situation
put on one's thinking cap = to concentrate
spread oneself too thin = to do too many things
have too many irons in the fire = to do too many things