ESL Lesson 5

Cities and Population Movement

Lesson Objective: Have your students talk about the movement of people from the countryside into the cities and how lifestyles changed worldwide.

Open Discussion Topic:

Start by asking students if their grandparents lived in the countryside or in a city. Most will answer that their grandparents and possibly even their parents lived in the country-side. Ask for ideas as to why they think people moved from the country-side into cities? The usual answers include some type of job they were taking, or machines took jobs from farmers that once used buffalo to plough rice fields etc…. Each country may be different so ask your students for a history of the transition (change and shift) from the countryside to the city. Again, talk about the modern opportunities (chances) of work and lifestyle that a city offers rather than the countryside. One question I like to ask is "Would you like to live in the rural countryside?" 99% say no it's too boring and nothing to do after dark.

Discussion Activity 1:

The warm up was strictly about the country that you are in. Now ask them what they know about immigration during the last few centuries around the planet. Is there anything they can think as to why people would move from country Q to country Z? Opportunities for a better life and more money, marriage, new job, overpopulation, famine, war, droughts, have all forced people to leave their homes through history. Can your students come up with some other reasons for migrations of people? Religious persecution etc…

Unit 5 Focus:

Talk about the modern large cities on the earth now, try to get them to talk about their feelings and ideas about worldwide urbanization.
Are modern cities too big?
How many people live in these cities?
What countries are these cities in?
Which cities worldwide are the best to live in?
Which are the most polluted?
What countries are the world’s largest cities?
What makes a city 'good' or 'bad' to live in?

Ask your students what their dreams are and which cities they plan to move to or live in. Since you already traced the migration into the cities, ask what would make people return (move back) to the countryside? Unemployment is the number one reason I have heard so far. Secondly, ask if everyone emptied out (left) the cities because there were no more jobs would there be enough housing or space for everyone to return to the countryside? What would people do when they got there?

Discussion Activity 2:

Change the subject just a little and start asking how suddenly in the last 150 years the population has gone from seven hundred fifty million (750,000,000) to six and a half billion (6,500,000,000) people. What has allowed this population explosion? The answer, fossil fuel. (Coal, Oil and Natural Gas) From this point just ask the general question; How has fossil fuel made our lives easier over the last 150 years? Some answers to expect: We can get to places easier by car or motorbike. Machines do the work that 100 men would do ten times faster ploughing fields. We can buy different and fresher foods because they are delivered to a market faster by truck etc… There are many examples to brainstorm on this topic.

Extension Activity:

Lastly to spin your students heads, ask them this question. As oil production declines, without the same amount of oil available year upon year will world population continue to grow, level off, or decline?
Explain that since 1950 we have consumed more resources than in all of mankind’s previous history combined.

Population Growth

Graph source: http://www.smalltownproject.org/
wp-content/my-images/populationgrowth.JPG

Continue to: Possible Alternatives to Replace Crude Oil

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ESL Lesson 5

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Cities and Population Movement
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Possible Alternatives to Replace Crude Oil
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Extraction Process
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Environmental Impacts
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