1. We start with a vocabulary activity based on the song “What a wonderful world”.  We give to each student a handout with the lyrics of the song, but we have omitted some words. Students listen to the performance of the song by Louis Armstrong from youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5TwT69i1lU (duration 2:25 minutes) and fill in the missing words. 

2. We present to the students some new vocabulary. We distribute to each student a list of the following idioms with colours and their explanations in English: “black sheep: to be regarded as a failure, black humour: to make jokes about the unpleasant parts of life, once in a blue moon: to happen rarely, feeling blue: feeling depressed, come out of the blue: to happen unexpectedly, green with envy: to be very jealous, red faced: to be very embarrassed, catch someone red-handed: to be discovered doing something, see red: to be very angry, white elephant: to be a waste of time and totally useless”. Then, we ask students in pairs to use every idiom in a different sentence. Alternatively, each idiom could be accompanied by one example of its use in a sentence and the students could be asked to link the idioms with their correct meaning provided in a matching activity. 

3. As the students become familiar with the new idioms, they can use them to create either a short story, a fairy tale or a dialogue including as many of these idioms as possible. Then, the students can exchange their texts with a partner and some students who want to share their literary texts with the rest of the class, can read them.