“I want” can be a popular request from students, but when teaching it there are a couple of important points to keep in mind. First of all, depending on the students’ native language “I want” can sometimes have two very different meanings depending on what follows it. For example in Japanese “I want something” is “…. ga hoshii” but “I want to do something” is “,,,tai”. So it pays to have a good solid explanation practised so the kids know exactly what is going on.

The second thing to consider is the “I want never gets” effect. For example if you are teaching in Europe, the classroom teacher may go out of their way to make sure students always say “I’d like to” instead of “I want” in their native language. Usually they are pretty unsuccessful at this, but the last thing they may want is an English teacher teaching “I want” as normal usage if they’ve been trying to get their kids off it all year! So it probably pays to check with them first. This difference is of particular notice with regards US-Europe uses of the word, for example when researching the second Christmas theme most American teachers favoured (favored?) “What do you want for for Christmas?” but many Commonwealth teachers were horrified by this and were 100% in favour of “What would you like for Christmas?”.

But anyway, “What do you want?” is still a hugely popular question for parents to ask younger kids and “What do you want to do?” is something that people of all ages often use. I think I must hear it dozens of times a day! So let’s have a look at “What do you want to do?” as a classroom theme.

My first piece of advice would be to introduce and practise all the verbs you’ll need in a previous lesson. A couple of ways to do this are commands as in the TPR Warm Up, or my favourite using the “What are you doing?” song with the Harry Potter game.

Then it is really simple in the next lesson to introduce “I want to…” and re-use all the verbs from the previous lesson e.g. “I want to sleep.” The kids are amazed to find out they can chop and change the English and it makes the lesson really easy as the only new thing is the grammar point, but they have enlarged their communication abilities immensely.

This week there was a request on the forum for an “I want ” theme, so I’ve just put up a demo song along with some picture cards for “I want…” plus the “What are you doing?” verbs. It’s still in the demo stage, but let me know if you like it and I’ll clean it up and hopefully get it on the main site. Hopefully it’ll make it a lot of fun to introduce this theme in your lessons:“What do you want to do?” song & A4 cards.

Oh, and if anyone has any great “I want” games then please send them in!