Living With Planes

Lesson overview

This B2 lesson plan takes students inside Air Park, a California neighborhood where pilots live with their planes. Through authentic video interviews, vocabulary about aviation and suburban communities, and speaking activities ranging from comprehension to aircraft presentations, upper-intermediate learners explore what life looks like when flying is more than just a hobby. Students discuss aviation lifestyle choices, practice target vocabulary through expansion and error correction exercises, and even browse real aircraft for sale online. The lesson balances receptive skills (watching and understanding the Air Park documentary) with productive tasks (discussing dream jobs in aviation, presenting aircraft purchases) while building specialized vocabulary about planes, hangars, airstrips, and flying culture.

Level	Vocabulary	Video Length	Lesson Time
B2 / Upper-Intermediate	12 words	3:50 min	60-70 min

Teaching guide

Lead-in, Discussion

This B2 aviation lesson starts with a visual airplane parts activity where students identify components like propeller, fuselage, rudder, cabin, and landing gear. It’s a nice warm-up because it activates topic-specific vocabulary before diving deeper. Then students encounter three hypothetical airplane ownership scenarios—owning a small personal plane, having private jet access, or enjoying lifetime first-class travel. The task asks them to choose one option and explain three reasons why. This aviation-themed lead-in works well for upper-intermediate learners because it combines practical vocabulary building with personal opinion expression, getting everyone thinking about planes and flying from different perspectives. The activity naturally generates discussion about costs, convenience, and lifestyle preferences related to aviation.

Vocabulary

Here students work with 12 essential words for this B2 lesson about planes and aviation communities: suburban, spoiled brat, aerobatics, hangar, to taxi, airstrip, right of way, spectator, to witness, impromptu, downside, and scarcity. Each term comes with a clear definition making the meanings accessible for upper-intermediate students. The definitions are randomized, so learners need to actively match rather than simply reading down a list. This vocabulary set covers both aviation-specific terms (hangar, aerobatics, to taxi) and more general expressions (scarcity, impromptu, downside) that appear frequently in the video. Getting these words sorted before watching helps B2 students follow the Air Park story without getting lost in unfamiliar terminology.

Video preview, Video, Comprehension

Before watching the 3:50 minute video about Air Park, students look at a photo showing planes parked in a residential neighborhood and predict three unusual things about a community where everyone owns aircraft. This prediction stage activates schema and builds anticipation for the aviation content. The video itself features interviews with pilots Julie Clark, Logan Peterson, Carl Gremlick, and realtor Mike Brewer, giving students exposure to authentic English from people discussing their flying lifestyle. After viewing, five comprehension questions check understanding of key details and why residents call themselves “spoiled brats,” what makes Air Park different from other suburban communities, how Julie Clark became an aviation legend, what special features accommodate pilots, and who has right of way on the roads. There’s also space for students to create their own question, encouraging deeper engagement with the B2 lesson content.

Speaking, Discussion

The speaking section asks upper-intermediate students to recall 2-3 facts about each person from the video: Julie Clark, Logan Peterson, Carl Gremlick, and Mike Brewer. Photos accompany each name, helping students remember who said what about flying and living in this unique aviation community. This retrieval practice strengthens memory and gives everyone a chance to speak before moving to deeper discussion. The five discussion questions then explore broader themes: living in hobby-based communities, challenges Julie Clark faced as a female commercial pilot, ideal ages for learning to fly versus drive, what sounds people would pay extra to hear, and how children might be affected growing up around planes. These B2-level discussion prompts require students to analyze, evaluate, and express nuanced opinions about aviation lifestyle topics.

Practice, Mistakes

The practice activity develops fluency with lesson vocabulary through sentence expansion. Students receive eight basic sentences containing target words (witnessed, downside, suburban, spoiled brat, impromptu, spectators, aerobatics, right of way) and must elaborate by adding details, descriptions, or context while keeping the vocabulary word intact. An example shows how “The plane is in the hangar” becomes “The vintage red plane is being repaired in the large hangar at the edge of the airstrip.” This B2 writing task pushes learners to manipulate language creatively. The mistakes section provides ten sentences with vocabulary errors, like using “hangared” incorrectly or confusing “spectator” with “witness.” Upper-intermediate students identify what’s wrong and correct it, which deepens their understanding of precise word usage in aviation and general contexts.

Presentation

For this aviation-focused speaking task, students visit an actual aircraft sales website and choose one plane they’d like to buy. They prepare a two-minute presentation covering specific bullet points: why they selected this aircraft, whether the price seems reasonable, intended uses, storage needs (hangar?), who they’d take flying, and one concern about ownership. This B2 activity combines research skills, decision-making, persuasive speaking, and practical vocabulary about planes and flying. It works beautifully because students engage with real listings featuring actual prices and specifications, making the task feel authentic rather than hypothetical. After presentations, classmates can ask questions or vote on the best purchase, extending the discussion about aviation ownership.

Extra

The extra section introduces four affordable flight-related hobbies for learners who found the Air Park lifestyle interesting but unrealistic: flying drones, paragliding, flight simulation gaming, and plane spotting (aviation photography). Each hobby appears with an accompanying image. Three discussion questions ask students which hobby sounds most appealing, which offers best value for money, and what transferable skills each might develop. This extension works well for B2 classes because it broadens the aviation theme beyond expensive plane ownership while maintaining the flying and aircraft focus. It also provides differentiation—if you finish the main lesson early, this section offers meaningful content that still relates to planes and aviation without requiring preparation of new materials.